GoDaddy Editorial Review & Aggregated Reddit Reviews

Ok, so boobs weigh more than great hosting. I have had my share, and whatever is running those GoDaddy servers ain’t whut it used to be.
At this point, any client of mine that has 250 visitors a day (deemed unique), has to upgrade to the MAXIMUM plan at godaddy for enterprise level servers, to be in compliance with their services. It’s just way extreme.
Yes I can migrate easily, but it’s a PIA to deal with it and explain to the client why this is needed.
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AVOID GODADDY! they are junk. They are only good for domains and sometimes not even that.
I had a very very bad experience. Try being charged for 3 years of hosting when you signed up for one year and then fighting to get the issue fixed. Ended up sending a lawyer.
So yeah, godaddy is bad.
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I have done migrations from godaddy, and their phpmyadmin from managed wordpress was so broken I couldn’t do a backup. Plugins were not working as expected for migration. I can say at least their support actually got me the backup.
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It’s a push to get customers off shared hosting and onto unmanaged VPS services, which lack any supervision, but also free GoDaddy (or any provider that practices this) of sysadmin burdens thus lowering their costs. Once an unmanaged VPS gets hacked, it’s easy to upsell the client on a managed VPS service at a premium. This subterfuge has been in play for at least a year, because shared hosting drove itself to unprofitability by promising “unlimited” resources.
“Well our shared hosting can only provide so many resources! May we recommend a VPS? You’ll get better performance out of it!”
When in reality you’re reducing the amount of RAM and processing ability available to your site dollar for dollar as those system services take a chunk away of available RAM. On the hypervisor side of it too that RAM, I can guarantee, is being compressed, same pages duplicated, and distributed across several hundred VMs.
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Anyone notice godaddy has throttled down all of the hosting to a point of ridiculousness?
Why? To increase revenue by saying your using too many resources and need to upgrade. Its pathetic, I can run diagnostic software and prove my wordpress site is at very BEST tops out at 24% usage. (Memory, I/O, page processes, etc).
Godaddy says the site is using 80%. Such bullshit.
My other LAMP servers on other hosts USING THE SAME FRAMEWORK/theme and approximate same content is far less. Around 15% overhead to run required scripts.
I guess im the only anal ass that tells clients: Do not host on godaddy! They are in bottom tier…. falls on def ears. I guess models w big boobs is deafening.
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I CONSTANTLY tell people to avoid GoDaddy. They suck balls.
GoDaddy is the dumpster behind McDonalds of hosting.
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You might want to transfer the domain to a better name host. Godaddy really sucks. They charge a lot more, provide a very confusing interface crowded with efforts to try get you to purchase things others already include. They are a really horrible company in general.
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Just transferred two domains and my webhosting from GoDaddy and had relatively few problems. Just make sure to look at the manage tab on your domain if you don’t get an email requesting permission to transfer. I noticed my two experiences were inconsistent.
Congratulations on kicking GoDaddy to the curb by the way!
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I don’t know what it means, but certainly do not buy anything from Godaddy.
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The vast majority of shared hosting only supports PHP. I’m not going to defend GoDaddy but just to be clear, whatever you’re written is probably a good reason that shared hosting won’t cut it.
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“GoDaddy Deluxe hosting” isn’t a product. Is it cPanel? If so memcached is running, and you can turn on php opcache. If it’s Managed WordPress there are a ton of caching layers running.
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GoDaddy sells hot garbage, so I ask of you, what is a “good price” for hot garbage?
You should keep shopping and researching hosts, don’t be lured by low prices alone.
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I use GoDaddy for domains, but I would just never use them for hosting. I manage a few sites on there (it’s just what those clients want), but performance is just horrible.
Everything is throttled to hell, where even just making a Duplicator package will time out unless you slow the build rate to ridiculously low speeds.
Oddly, time to first byte seems usually quite fast across these accounts, but then static assets like featured images take 6-10 seconds to load 200kb.
Everything is an Upsell Opportunity. Oh, you want to see basic stats on throughput and basic metrics that are freely available on any cpanel host? Yeah, pay us.
Then there is the SSL factor: No LE SSL’s here. You gotta pay annually for no good reason.
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I knew godaddy was shit but I didn’t know someone made a website about it LOL
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Never use godaddy for anything.
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GoDaddy also has cPanel email, but you’ll never hear anyone there recommend it. At smaller companies using cPanel email might be fine. But the reputation of GoDaddy’s outbound mail relay for hosting is shit and they know better than to tell people it’s okay to use for business.
You’re sharing your email reputation with all the other customers that haven’t been blocked for having hacked sites or spamming yet on cPanel email.
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Godaddy also had customer hostile practices, such as making it very difficult to cancel privacy guard (or whatever Godaddy’s version of it is).
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GoDaddy employee posting on his own time here.
I’m hoping the new Pro Managed Wordpress will be good enough to win people back once it’s out of beta.
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Your mileage may vary, but the consensus around here seems to be avoid any companies owned by EIG and avoid GoDaddy.
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GoDaddy is not a suitable anything.
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Sounds like you may have some oddities caused by potential outside attack, i.e. a hacker has gained access to your cPanel account and is removing files and other nonsense… these ‘kiddie coders’ love to deface and just cause issues, because they can… some will even post all over your site that it was hacked, just to brag.
The first thing I would look at is your site security, use a plugin like WordFence or similar and check the security of your WordPress web application and all plugins.
GoDaddy and other companies like them that are publicly traded companies, in my opinion, focus on their bottom line and not on providing true services to their clients, they are too focused on making their share holders happy and not the clients they serve. This is why they will flip you over to their ‘experts’ for $100-$200 or more charges, even when there is no need to do so.
If Godaddy provided daily backups on there services you could easily roll back your plugins, files or your entire cPanel installation to a period prior to your files going missing or database information losses, etc., but they don’t to my knowledge.
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I once had to pay Godaddy $200 to gain access to my domain registered with them, they ‘suspended’ the domain because one of the affiliates for the website had entered the domain name in an email he sent to his subscriber list, 1 person… ONE complained about it to Godaddy.
Even though we did not send the email AND the email was sent to a double opt-in subscriber of the affiliate, we had to pay Godaddy a ‘ransom’ to get access to our domain and turn it on so we could continue doing business. BTW, the business domain was not related to hosting, it was a marketing system I had programmed and was selling via an affiliate program.
I have never had a good experience with Godaddy, no idea why people still go to them other than all their advertising… which makes me angry that I can’t compete with them in the same markets… no where near their advertising budget! 🙂
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godaddy literally stole domains I paid for, they are TRASH
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Advice – Don’t use GoDaddy for anything.
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I used GoDaddy about 6 years ago and helped number of companies manage their accounts on GoDaddy. I’m not a big fan and I think they’re not offering quality service for the prices their charging with some of their services. I think they’re overcharging because they can thanks to their name.
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Never use GoDaddy.
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Funny after 20 second load times at bluehost i ran as fast as i could back to godaddy.
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Did you even google godaddy? They are a shady, shitty, terrible, scammy company, and have been for well over a decade. All this is well known.
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Godaddy will often put up domain names listed for auction when the site is getting a decent amount of views. If somone is interested in that domain at a decent price, godaddy will then notify the current owner that someone is interested in their domain and offer a buy out.
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They are a scummy company, it’s well known in the industry. If North Korea and Russia got together and started a hosting company it would still be a better bet then GoDaddy.
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Agreed, GoDaddy is a shit. If you have domains on godaddy, migrate them asap.
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Yes. Stay the hell away from GoDaddy. Terrible, terrible organization.
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Just to reiterate here, do NOT use GoDaddy.
Let the daddy go…
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I use godaddy for all of my domains. That’s all I use them for.
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I use GoDaddy for domains since I think they are the best at this, and I use SiteGround for hosting (best performance imo)
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Anything beyond hosting a CMS site with base functionality is locked down to the point of absurdity. Want to set up a form on your WordPress site that sends an employment application or a contact email? Have fun. GoDaddy blocks outgoing smtp, so you have to use a GoDaddy email account to send it. Oh, and their email service is terrible, by the way. The web interface randomly stops working and connecting it to outlook or thunderbird is hit or miss.
For our handful of WordPress sites we host at work, we use WPEngine, which is not without its own flaws, but still better than GoDaddy.
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Godaddy. Their servers are severely overloaded. Often times their VPS plans are just as bad as the shared. Their registration service is fairly good compared to many others (except price) however and I have been using them for that for years.
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Godaddy techs lie.
Last time I called them it was because their DNS zone file import wasn’t working and has never worked for as far as I can remember. The tech said “send me your file and I’ll do it” so I sent a test file with a single entry that would produce an error. “Works for me, please restart/use a different browser/clear cache etc.” which I obliged despite knowing this wasn’t the problem. So then on a hunch I removed the entry and sent him the actual file, this one with 60-80 entries. After a minute or so he says “This one doesn’t work”.
HE MANUALLY ADDED THE SINGLE ENTRY!
Of course, he couldn’t manually enter 80 entries. So I ask that he escalate to a higher tier. 10 minutes later the answer is “that feature is known to have a bug and is currently completely unusable, we apologize but we have no estimate for when it will be fixed”. I say “but it just worked for you a minute ago” Tech: “…” Me: “Well? Does it work or not?” Tech: “I guess I just got lucky, need anything else?” I kept on asking him for solutions for a few minutes and if I didn’t have to leave I’d have kept going with him for a while. He knew he was busted and only gave short answers and tried to get rid of me after that.
Godaddy sucks for many reasons, but this most recent interaction really clarified just how much they suck so perfectly for me.
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I don’t do any domains with GoDaddy but I use their hosting and have never had any problems with them.
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Client left GoDaddy after reinstalling WP but leaving a clean site with files there. She pointed DNS elsewhere. Not 3 months later GoDaddy is telling her her site is infected.
There was no way to get to those files from the outside…
Never use GoDaddy.
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I manage a handful of GoDaddy sites for clients at my job, as well as web development, and other service / database work.
GoDaddy can be a PAIN when they are limited, and when issues arise. Their managed wordpress option is good 99% of the time, but when it messes up, it’s very annoying to fix.
Had a bad case where one server wasn’t working well to distribute assets (and using a CDN can be complicated with GoDaddy), and we tried a lot of things to PROVE it wasn’t GoDaddy (using GTMetrix) but found out it actually was THEIR infrastructure failing to serve 17kb css files (12 seconds to fetch them, EACH). Had to instruct them to move the site to another server cluster, which took a few hours, and did lead to some down-time.
I can understand technical issues are hard to handle for a large company, but some of the issues are baffling.
For most people, they will be more than good enough, especially for personal sites.
They have gotten better, and keep WordPress updated, as well as offering PHP7.2 for WordPress now, which is much faster and safer than PHP5.4.
In the end, GoDaddy is DECENT, but not perfect. They try to cater to the “general” use cases, so if you need specific things, it can be tricky.
There might be better hosts, but form my experience, GoDaddy, for most people, will work just fine.
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DNS response time slowest or some of the slowest in the industry. Lagging is never bad.
They throttle back the basic shared hosting to the point the site doesnt serve if its WP and has too many ajax calls. Seriously, really GoDaddy?
The tech support is sketchy if you’re calling in… sometimes you get smart, other times you get stupid. NO chat support. I don’t recall if you can start your own ticket anymore..
Here is a positive: I had a buddy sign up to a server plan like 15 years ago and he has a WAY faster server at Godaddy with very few shared sites on it. I don’t know what that plan was, but you can’t buy it now. So, if you started with GoDaddy years ago, you might have a good set up. Nowdays your paying through the nose and there is better alternatives.
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OP said he/she is using GoDaddy for hosting. Not site builder. I transfered out my last domain from GoDaddy a few years back and never looked back since.
They never charged my card without my consent and I didn’t have to contact customer support. The only reason why I moved away is their horrible SSO system (they have many domain names for each country) and attempts to deceive me with dark patterns. For example web hosting and email hosting features are automatically added to the cart unless you check them off.
Their prices are expensive too, and other than the 1 dollar .com offer, they never could beat the prices of other registrars.
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There are countless reasons why your business should not use GoDaddy. Here are the 3 biggest problems with GoDaddy websites:
GoDaddy Problem #1: Zero Flexibility
GoDaddy’s website builder might have a lot of pre-made designer templates that seem great for your business’s website, but there’s a major downside: you have zero flexibility. Once you pick a theme to use, you can’t switch to another without losing all of your content.
GoDaddy Problem #2: Reliance on Third-Party Tools
GoDaddy’s website development isn’t its bread and butter. As a result, their website building tool is missing a lot of common functionalities that help make a small business website successful. This includes traffic driving aspects such as newsletters, maps, and more. However, GoDaddy does allow you to incorporate them into your website, but there’s a catch: you have to use third-party apps. This means that you will be responsible for properly using them. As a result, GoDaddy essentially doesn’t really do the time-consuming and challenging design work, you do.
GoDaddy Problem #3: Poor Mobile Display
Nowadays, having a mobile responsive website that can be viewed on desktops, smartphones, tablets, etc. is essential for success. While GoDaddy’s website builder automatically converts your business’s website into a mobile-friendly interface, the mobile display is basic at best. And having a poor mobile display is a major issue for any and all websites. Consumers expect businesses’ mobile sites to look just as high quality as they do on a computer, and GoDaddy’s does not. As a result, GoDaddy’s basic mobile version of your website can actually harm your brand.
This GoDaddy website review is not the only one to unmask serious problems with GoDaddy. In fact, according to consumeraffairs.com , there are hundreds more. Each of these reviews come from businesses working first-hand with GoDaddy and explain all their trials and tribulations of doing so. Out of 5-stars, GoDaddy receives only 1 for overall customer satisfaction.
The customer complaints are long and frightening. In addition to the problems with GoDaddy covered above, their issues range from jacking up prices and charging credit cards without consent to horrible customer service and holding domain names hostage, as well as everything in between. Many people warn others from using GoDaddy’s services, and we advise you listen so one day you don’t have to give out warning of your own.
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If you have a simple website and don’t require a lot of technical assistance, they are fine. You have to remember that nobody writes positive reviews for companies but when you’re angry, you always write a negative review.
They have 17 million customers, let’s say 5% of them hate the service, that’s 850,000 customers, most of them being vocal.
They are good for cookie-cuter sites, but when you start getting into advanced web hosting, there are better options, especially if you need support. Big companies like godaddy, hostgator, etc, all have the same problem with poor support and this is mostly due to the price of shared hosting. People want everything for pennies on the dollar. Well, when you pay $5/month, that’s 10 cents a day. If you contact their support once, they have now received no profit from your account for that month. So, support is usually outsourced or very low level, cheapest possible…
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