GoDaddy Reviews, Ratings, Top Features & More (Jan 2017)
Founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1997 by Bob Parsons, an entrepreneur who came out of retirement to start it, GoDaddy was actually named so because it made people smile. Initially called Jomax Technologies, employees decided to hold a brainstorming session to change the name and ended up with GoDaddy.
GoDaddy is arguably one of the biggest but definitely one of the oldest hosting providers we have in the market right now. Twenty years in the making and with one of web hosting’s impeccable reputations, GoDaddy easily comes off as web hosting’s VIP.
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Parson’s desire to make people smile has actually worked as in 2005 GoDaddy became the principal ICANN –accredited registrar on the internet. Not only that, they exceeded the domain names registered by Network solutions.
In web hosting, they offer you a range of hosting packages to choose from ranging from shared hosting, WordPress hosting to Dedicated IP hosting and Premium DNS hosting. With a simple process of signing up done, you can expect a free domain name, unlimited bandwidth, free webmail services, a website builder (free one month trial), MySQL databases, free marketing tools, a 30-day money back guarantee, amongst other cool features.
In this detailed GoDaddy web hosting review, we take a look at why GoDaddy is ranked amongst the best hosting providers worldwide.
Ratings
- Features 4.5/5.0
- Reliability 4.0/5.0
- Ease Of Use 3.8/5.0
- Pricing 5.0/5.0
- Customer Support 3.5/5.0
Overall Rating:
GoDaddy Hosting Review
GoDaddy services well over 45 million domains which is a reason enough to trust in their services. It’s recommended for all types of businesses - small to medium to big - intending to set up websites. Under shared hosting, GoDaddy offers 3 plans for its clients (both Linux and windows-based). The choice is between the Economy, Deluxe, and Ultimate packages.
As other web hosts pack site building tools in their plans, GoDaddy sells you a feature rich website builder separately. It comes with a lot of good features including dozens of templates divided according to industries. So users are given a myriad of options to choose from and probably identify what suits their hosting needs best.
As a leader in the domain name providers world, GoDaddy’s has an outstanding reputation for great discounts on the prices they offer their users. They also offer a large domain auction in which you can get awesome domain names. Web hosting and domain name services go hand in hand for this site. Later on, we’ll carry out a detailed GoDaddy website builder review.
The editor is not just simple but easy to understand. But more could be done to make dashboard well-structured as opposed to being divided into two pages. Also more needs to be done to make their customer service excellent as suggested in many GoDaddy reviews by disgruntled users.
Pros
Great Prices
GoDaddy is a well-known player in the industry for, among other things, routinely offering discounts that make it affordable to launch and maintain a website. For as little as $ 0.99, you can find yourself having a registered domain. This is in addition to the coupons that are also regularly offered. When it comes to web hosting, you can get the economy plan for as little as $ 3.99. These are rare figures in the world of web hosting as industry players will tell you.
Unlimited Bandwidth
With GoDaddy, even on the shared plan, you can expect your bandwidth to accommodate a huge influx of traffic (bandwidth is how many people can visit your website at the same time). In some cases a web host may claim to offer unlimited bandwidth only to crash your site should the traffic increase. However, that is not the case with GoDaddy. In fact, you will receive an email alerting you of your over stretching bandwidth and requesting you to limit your traffic.
Quick WordPress Installation
GoDaddy has considered users new to content uploading or web design by offering the one-click installation for WordPress. Having a professional set up WordPress for you as opposed to manually struggling to do it is inestimable. It saves you time and the stress of getting it wrong and phoning customer support every other time. The best part is that the process of auto installing always gives you the perfect WordPress site with security already in place. The process is the same for Joomla and Drupal as well.
Supports Numerous Payment Methods
GoDaddy accepts all major currencies. And it’s not just that, even their website itself supports dozens of languages and so this summed up together, makes transactions with the site very easy and manageable wherever you are in the world. You can use current processors for payment or the digital buttons from PayPal.
Cons
No Live Chat Support
For a company as big and reputable as GoDaddy, excellent customer support should be an integral part of its offering. While phone support is incredible, the impact of live chat can make the difference between losing customers and retaining them. In the case of GoDaddy, the absence of live chat is very limiting to its clients as they have a huge percentage that can’t reach out and have their issues resolved. In most GoDaddy com reviews, there’s mounting criticism about this.
Poor Internal Speeds
Because of the size of the web host and the magnitude of customers it services, the loading speeds are not the best. Since everyone is competing for an online presence, the users are on the websites more often than not. This slows down the speed. In addition, as everyone rushes to get the regular discounts and coupons offered there is a lot of traffic that slows all the processes down.
Restoration Fees
Unfortunately, if you have to restore your website for specific reasons, GoDaddy will restore it at a hefty cost. This is a service that other web hosting providers offer for free. The fee can be as high as $300. Users are therefore very keen to look after their sites lest they end up needing this costly service.
Top features of GoDaddy Hosting
Website Builder
If you are a small business looking to set up a website, you are definitely going to appreciate this website builder a lot. It may be separately as opposed to being included with the hosting plans but before you start to moan the features included will change your perception.
Besides the dozens of customizable designs sectioned into industry-specific categories, there’s also the generous bandwidth and storage that comes included with each plan. All the three plan levels: personal, business and business plus include domain registration and responsive mobile design.
Most expert GoDaddy website builder reviews admit this feature truly lives up to the competition. There’s so much more about this website builder and you can watch on overview of it below:
Outstanding Platform
With GoDaddy, not only are you able to access incredible web hosting services, you also have the biggest domain provider at your doorstep. The registration is easy and once done you can easily access your account through a user-friendly online dashboard. Over the years, GoDaddy has been adding more features to attract more businesses.
cPanel
While the cPanel is a common enough feature in other web host services, it is a recent acquisition for GoDaddy. That is why it is a top feature on GoDaddy. GoDaddy was well known for its custom made hosting panel.
From a technical standpoint, it may have seemed harmless, however, once you began to blog and got more detailed with WordPress, you found yourself having to use separate tutorials for GoDaddy just to use themes or plugins like thesis style. It was a huge, time-consuming affair that detracted a person from the reliability of GoDaddy.
Great Uptime+
GoDaddy has fulfilled the fundamental requirement of a web hosting service; upheld 99.9% server uptimes. Although other web host have 99.99% uptimes (and in some cases 2-3 times more 9’s), which means more guaranteed times, GoDaddy have kept up with their uptime guarantee of 99.9% without fail. Most of the other web hosts flaunting 99.99% uptimes have failed considerably to keep this industry standard and have registered many downtimes.
Conclusion
GoDaddy is undoubtedly one of the very few web hosts with a very interesting approach to their business. The company is closely linked with high octane events like the Super Bowl, College football, and other celebrity-studded events. Danica Patrick, one of the company’s pitch woman, claims the web host has two sides: the sexy side and the smart side that does killer web hosting for you. Bear in mind they are still an amazing web hosting company with great features, packages, and accolades to prove it.
A quick rundown of what you can expect from GoDaddy include great prices peppered with regular discounts and coupons, a solid platform built on a reliable reputation, many payment options, ease of use, among others. But with a wanting customer support service as evident in many GoDaddy reviews, questionable speeds, and hefty restoration fees, you may be discouraged from using their services and if you will want a great alternative, you will never go wrong with HostGator.
Overall, the company is intent on bringing accessibility to the internet to everyone by emulating a one stop solution. As a web host provider, they have made it affordable to maintain a website while as a domain registrar, they have made it possible to get the best at an affordable price. Both are no mean feats by any standards.
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