GoDaddy Hosting seems to be the Coca-Cola of the web industry as it serves over 17 million customers for various services, including hosting and domain registration. They are the leading and largest domain register in the entire world. Everyone in the web industry should know who they are and what they do, so I’m sure you have probably heard of them before.
From 17 million customers, GoDaddy has registered over 73 million new domain names worldwide, with many facilities dotted on almost every continent except Africa. Let’s put the 17 million into perspective. 17 million is the population of the Netherlands (Holland). Since GoDaddy was formed in 1997, it now has an annual revenue of almost two billion dollars, which is money we can only dream of.
(Since the time of writing, GoDaddy have updated their site and brand. They have changed from the Green and Orange colour theme to a more modern-looking Blue and Green colour scheme. They have also dropped the GoDaddy head logo as part of this rebrand. This made it the perfect time to update their WordPress Hosting Plans).
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What’s so great about GoDaddy’s hosting?
With so many customers, they must be doing something right. So, let’s dive into what’s great about GoDaddy and their Hosting. GoDaddy supports five different kinds of hosting, ranging from £2.99/$4.15* a month for standard web hosting and managed WordPress to £55.99/$77.76* for dedicated servers. For the main purpose of this article, we will be focusing on WordPress hosting.
GoDaddy has four different packages for WordPress hosting. These packages are called the Basic, Deluxe, Ultimate and Pro 5+ packages, previously known as the Developer packages. The basic package starts from £2.99/$4.15* a month, and the largest package starts from £19.99/$15.26*. The largest package was once £10.99 a month. (See images below).
Price is great about their hosting, but are there other positives of GoDaddy? Well, yes, of course, there is. Unlike many other hosts, such as WP Engine and SiteGround, Go Daddy allows more traffic to your sites hosted by them. This is great as websites can fulfil their full potential and reach out to as many people as possible without crashing. Other areas in which GoDaddy excel are its customer support, the uptime they provide, and always working on and updating to the latest technology.
(Packages at time of writing)
(Packages at time of article update – 20 November 2023)
Plan 1: The Basic package
The first package is called the basic package. This package costs from £2.99/$3.73 a month and £6.99/$8.73 after you renew with them. People purchasing this package would be using it for smaller blogs and websites as you only get one website installed.
GoDaddy is also quite generous with the number of monthly visits as many other sites, such as SiteGround don’t offer this amount of visits for their most basic plan. Also, with this plan, you get one free domain, which isn’t a premium domain. Users of this plan get 10GB of web storage, 25 thousand monthly visitors, free daily backups plus more.
Plan 2: The Deluxe Package
The next plan that GoDaddy offer is the Deluxe plan. This plan starts from £3.99/$4.98 a month. After the initial contract is over, the renewal cost of this package is £9.99/$12.47. With this package, you only get one website installed, like the previous basic package. The difference between this package and the basic package is the amount of storage and visits you’re allowed. The amount of web space you get with this package is 15GB compared to the 10GB you get with the basic package. You also get up to 100,000 visits per month compared to the 25,000 with the basic package.
Like the basic package, you will also get a free domain and the plan. Other perks of this plan include all the additional add-ons, such as a one-click staging and an SEO plugin, which were not part of the basic plan. The SEO plugin gives you step-by-step instructions to optimise your site to get your site onto major search engines. This can generate more traffic to your website.
This plan would be great for bloggers and freelancers, as the package only has one website. If you’re already well known, this plan would greatly help as the storage and monthly visitors are increased from the basic plan, which would be ideal for smaller bloggers and freelancers.
Plan 3: The Ultimate Package
As with every other hosting site, there is always a middle package, and GoDaddy is no exception. Although GoDaddy has four packages, I would consider using the first two for the same purpose. The middle package is called the Ultimate Package. This package would be perfect for freelancers who have several clients. This package gives the option to add more sites by calling an expert, as it only gives you 2 websites for the price of £6.99/$8.73. No doubt that the price would go up in price if you require more websites.
After the initial contract has ended, the package price is £13.99/$17.47 a month when you renew.
You get 30GB of web storage and 400,000 monthly visitors along with the two sites. So your websites with GoDaddy can maximize their traffic without extra charges or your websites going down for a while. For the two websites, you also get SEO for both to increase their optimization. One-click staging is also included along with a year SSL certificate for free.
One big plus of this package would be the Ongoing Malware Scan for the two sites. This scans and removes malicious malware that can harm both of your sites.
Plan 4: Pro 5+ (The Developer Package)
The final package GoDaddy offers is the Pro5 + package, known before as the developer package. This package would be great for people looking to host multiple sites, similar to the ultimate package. This package allows between five and 50 sites, with 50-200GB of storage and 800,000 monthly visitors. Like every other package GoDaddy offers, you also get a free domain with the developer package.
This package costs £19.99/$24.96 as you get the 1 SSL certificate and the multi-site management tool. You can also get more websites with this package by calling an expert before the package costs £10.99/$13.72 as it only allows for up to five websites. Renewal monthly price stays at the same £19.99.
GoDaddy hosting review:
Uptime Stats:
- 99.97% uptime over past year (UptimeRobot)
- Under 15 total minutes of downtime per month typically (StatusCake)
- Failed to meet 99.9% uptime SLA as per monitoring reports (Pingdom)
Speed Tests:
- 680ms average load time on Bitcatcha speed test
- Scored 75/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile
- 1.5s+ average fully loaded time on GTMetrix
- 1250ms+ average TTFB (Time To First Byte) based on WebPageTest
Customer Ratings:
- 3.8 out of 5 stars across over 6,500 reviews on Trustpilot
- 63% would recommend based on satisfaction ratings (ConsumerAffairs)
- 7.2/10 average customer rating on hosting review sites
Market Share:
- Over 20 million websites hosted by GoDaddy
- #1 domain registrar with over 30% market share
- Accounts for ~5% share of hosting marketspace
Does GoDaddy Hosting provide good performance for your site?
One thing I would like to note about GoDaddy would be their performance. They say they will guarantee 99.9% uptime for your sites, a similar statistic I keep finding with all these hosting sites. They also say they provide “Superior performance and load times”. This is what you would like to see when you are searching for hosting.
GoDaddy also performs all the hard and technical stuff, such as updates and backups. This is great for people who don’t know much about hosting, so it causes less hassle for them.
By having the best technology possible for servers and their community. The performance GoDaddy offers should be great. With Solid State Drives (SSDs) and load-balancing servers, performance should always be one of the best hosting qualities with GoDaddy.
Comparison table I can add with key criteria comparisons between GoDaddy Hosting and other top hosts:
| Hosting Provider | Speed | Uptime | Support | Managed WP | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy | 680ms avg | 99.97% | Phone, chat, tickets | Limited | $6/mo |
| Bluehost | 660ms avg | 99.94% | Phone, chat | Basic | $3/mo |
| HostGator | 550ms avg | 99.95% | Chat, tickets | Backups | $3/mo |
| SiteGround | 480ms avg | 99.99% | Chat, phone, tickets | Staging, caching | $4/mo |
GoDaddy Hosting signup process and getting started for beginners:
How to Sign Up for GoDaddy Hosting
- Go to godaddy.com and click “Get Started”
- Choose your plan – we recommend the Basic plan for new users.
- Pick a domain name – you can register a new one or use an existing domain.
- Select the term length – longer terms of 12-36 months are cheaper.
- Add hosting features as desired – email, SSL certificate, marketing tools.
- Complete signup with your account and payment information.
- Verify your email to finish activating the account.
- Login and go to Web Hosting section of My Products.
- Launch cPanel and click “WordPress Toolkit” to auto-install WordPress.
- Choose a site name, create admin credentials and install.
- Once installed, access and customize your new WordPress site!
- Contact support via live chat or phone if you need assistance.
What is GoDaddy Hosting’s support like?
GoDaddy seems like it has good customer support. Their support includes a 24/7/365 telephone line and a community forum. This is a great improvement from what they used to be known for. This kind of support is needed, considering the size of their customer base.
Users can also chat online with a staff member instead of calling GoDaddy. This is a great alternative because people like myself sometimes hate phone calls. You should expect a response in a reasonable amount of time, but when it is busy, there is sometimes problems.
One other way users of GoDaddy can get support is from the GoDaddy community themselves. GoDaddy has a forum in a place called community. In this forum, you can ask any question about GoDaddy, and a person should answer the question for you, giving you help. This forum has many different topics, such as managing WordPress and domains. If you need anything to do with GoDaddy, I highly recommend diving headfirst into the forum before the chat and the telephone.
What security measures do GoDaddy Hosting offer?
GoDaddy offers many security measures. One of these measures is malware scan and removal. Although not all plans come with this, adding this to your plan with a monthly fee of £3.99/$5.53* with any two-year plan is possible. I believe this should be part of the developer plan, but unfortunately, it’s not.
Staff is also used to monitor sites. They are looking for malicious and suspicious activity, such as DDoS attacks that could take down your websites. They are also looking for spam to keep away from your sites so that they stay helpful to users and fresh. Bots also are kept away from your site, and they don’t count towards your monthly number of visits per month.
GoDaddy also uses automatic updates to keep your site fresh too. Automatically updating saves everyone time from manually updating your sites and keeps your sites safe.
Does GoDaddy Hosting offer any other features?
GoDaddy uses a site migration feature to migrate your site to their hosting automatically. It can sometimes be a problem if you have custom login pages, but with the help of their support, it can be easily fixed.
Just like many other hostings, there is an overage plan by GoDaddy. You should expect small extra charges to your plan if your site(s) exceeds the maximum number of monthly visitors. This only comes into play if you go over your plan by 10,000 visitors in one month.
Staging is also another feature that GoDaddy use. This feature is part of each plan, and it allows its users to preview their changes before publishing them. This is great for blogs, for when people are updating.
Positives of GoDaddy Hosting;
With so many customers worldwide, GoDaddy can offer great deals on hosting. Therefore, a positive of GoDaddy would be that it is quite cheap if you get good deals on plans. (Although many of their plans are inconsistent, which I talk about more in the negatives). GoDaddy also offers a lot more web space and visits per month in their plans than other hosting; this would be good for customers with a larger following.
The technology GoDaddy uses for its customers is most certainly the best. They are constantly updating their servers and other technology to provide the best service for their customers.
Negatives of GoDaddy Hosting;
For me, one big negative of GoDaddy is that their packages are not consistent. What I mean by this is in the middle-priced package, you get a malware scanner included and then in the more expensive package, there is no sign of this type of security. To me, this seems very pointless as the customer might be looking for this type of security with the more expensive package, meaning they would have to purchase this add-on themselves. This would make their hosting even dearer.
Another point about their packages would be in the two lower-end packages with the one site. They both come with a multi-site management tool for a package that offers one website. In both of these plans, there seems to be no option to add more sites, unlike the two more expensive plans. So the multi-site tool seems pointless to me.
To me, the inconsistency of the packages they offer would not be ideal for a customer whose sites grow and, therefore would need a different plan in the future. This is because the packages don’t have similar features from one to another.
Another negative of GoDaddy would be customer reviews. Many people would give GoDaddy reviews of under 2 stars out of five. In fact, on a hosting review site (web hosting geeks), where customers can leave reviews on products, only 29 reviews for GoDaddy have been five stars out of 861 reviews. This to me, shows the level of customer care and support GoDaddy has and dish out. That’s three percent rating GoDaddy five stars and an incredible 20% scoring GoDaddy three or more stars.
Another negative about GoDaddy that you’ve probably heard about before is that they use their own custom hosting panel. This may sound great, but it means plugins and themes word differently so any many tutorials on these would have a separate tutorial for GoDaddy.
My Thoughts;
I wouldn’t use GoDaddy. I feel that the negatives outweigh the positives when it comes to them. I don’t understand why they have to be so different from other hosts by having their custom hosting panel. The packages they offer don’t scream at me I’m worth it. You don’t get one feature with one package, but in a cheaper package, you do. The thinking behind it all doesn’t make sense to me.
GoDaddy Hosting FAQ
Q: Is GoDaddy good for beginners?
A: Yes, GoDaddy is easy to use for new website owners due to its intuitive interface.
Q: Does GoDaddy offer a free domain?
A: Yes, you can get a free domain for the first year with eligible shared hosting plans.
Q: What is GoDaddy’s renewal pricing?
A: Renewal prices are inflated considerably compared to initial signup pricing.
Q: Does GoDaddy offer dedicated hosting plans?
A: Yes, GoDaddy has dedicated server options for large businesses and resellers.
Q: Is there a money-back guarantee?
A: GoDaddy provides a 30-day money-back guarantee on hosting.
GoDaddy Hosting Conclusion:
GoDaddy Hosting is a well-known option millions use for domain registration and basic shared hosting needs. While performance lags behind some competitors, the low pricing and free domain are attractive for new sites.
We recommend GoDaddy primarily for beginners on a tight budget or as an introductory host to get started before upgrading. Other hosts may offer better speed, features, and support for more advanced users.
This article was last updated on 20 November 2023
*ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE WERE ACCURATE AT THE TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S CONVERTER.
*ALL PLANS AND PACKAGES MADE BY GODADDY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE BY GODADDY THEMSELVES.
Check out other hosting reviews;WP Engine | SiteGround | GoDaddy | HostGator | iPage | Flywheel | DigitalOcean | Bluehost | DreamHost | InMotion | NameCheap | 1&1| Site5 | 123Reg | A2 | Liquid Web
To find out more about GoDaddy and what they offer, check out GoDaddy
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