GoDaddy Editorial Review & Aggregated Reddit Reviews

Who doesn’t know Daddy?

Not only is it the biggest hosting provider, but it’s also the most famous. Its goal is to offer excellent and always improving performance along with overall user satisfaction.

GoDaddy currently specializes in a wide range of services that include Shared, WordPress, VPS, Reseller, and dedicated hosting for both Linux and Windows, as well as email, marketing, and web security services. GoDaddy also acts as a domain registrar and website developer.

That is quite a lot to process. So what is the Emperor of Hosting?

GoDaddy Review: Pros

Obviously, GoDaddy wouldn’t be the most popular hosting provider if it wasn’t really good. So it benefits from continuous performance improvements, multiple servers, a wide variety of plans, ease of use, choice of domain names, and excellent support.

1. GoDaddy is constantly improving its performance

After we bought a hosting account with GoDaddy, the performance did not promise anything good. It was, on average, over 500ms with some higher spikes. However, the industry average was 553 ms, but not impressive.

So why the performance of a professional?

GoDaddy has managed to impress us by continually improving its performance. After a month or so, we got results averaging about 400 ms. Pretty good – two blinks of the eye, to be exact (one blink – 200 ms). 

But we pushed the GoDaddy further.

We decided to contact the GoDaddy support about the server speed. Google recommends a response time of no more than 200ms, so that’s what we want.

After we contacted you, the response time has dropped even further – on average; it was 300ms.

This way, GoDaddy impressed us with its continually improving performance. Even when the response time wasn’t bad, he was proactive in making it even better.

A quick tip: If you are not satisfied with the server speed, try contacting the host. In most cases, they will respond quickly and solve your problems. And if the host reacts, you know that you are in good hands.

2. Global data centers

GoDaddy has over 37,000 servers scattered around the world in nine different locations. The provider owns one data center, which is located in Phoenix, Arizona.

Other data centers are located in Mesa, Los Angeles, Chicago, Ashburn, Virginia, Scottsdale, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

It means that you can choose where to host your site, i.e., if your audience is in Asia, it is better to host a website from Singapore. 

The closer the server is to the user, the faster the pages can load.

3. A wide range of flexible plans

GoDaddy brilliantly offers services for all kinds of users. Probably everyone will find a suitable option – from those who are looking for hosting for small businesses to enterprises looking for expanded resources. GoDaddy covers all of this.

Co-hosting and business hosting plans will provide you with sufficient resources to run any project. And affordable prices, domain name, and choice of hosting for Windows/Linux.

GoDaddy promises to launch your website in minutes with slightly more expensive WordPress plans. It includes hosting on WP-optimized servers for better performance, daily backups, and WP expert support.

You can also take advantage of VPS plans. At some point, sites grow, and shared hosting becomes too weak. VPS plans include dedicated IP addresses, SSL certificates, and root access for full control.

For those who have grown up, GoDaddy manages dedicated hosting plans. They include extensive resources, dedicated IP addresses, SSL Certificates, and proactive monitoring.

In general, GoDaddy has everything from start to finish – so you can upgrade at any time according to your needs.

4. Straightforward control panel

GoDaddy has a handy control panel to make it easy, even for beginners.

You can see the data you used on the sidebar; the icons also illustrate each menu item – quite understandable.

And although it doesn’t look exactly like your traditional cPanel, it does – GoDaddy just put a unique shell on it. So if you’re used to cPanel, the GoDaddy Control Panel will not disappoint you.

5. Choosing available domain names

GoDaddy functions as a single store – you can get hosting, website creation, security, marketing, and domain hosting services.

Not only it’s possible to buy a new domain name there, but you can also buy a domain name already installed.

GoDaddy is one of the biggest domain name registrars out there, and not without reason.

This provider probably has the largest selection of top-level domains at an affordable price. It has about 500 TLDs, including unique extensions such as .rock, .art, or .earth. That’s pretty rad.

With a discount, it’s possible to get your domain name for just $1. The most popular .com TLD costs about $11.99 per year.

6. 24/7 customer support

GoDaddy has a variety of support options, from self-help like-what, community, and blog to 24/7 live chat and phone support.

Email support is also available, but will only be available if your problem requires a more complex solution. Your chat or phone support agent will simply forward your problem to the email support team – you won’t have to write long letters.

Speaking of self-help, GoDaddy has a vast community, and most problems can be solved in the community forum. Just find an answer to your question or create a new thread – you’ll get a quick answer from either the community or one of the administrators.

Live chat is only available when the agent can answer instantly. That means that at some point, you will see that the chat is busy.

That does not look good. But only when you are not used to the strange GoDaddy support strategy.

The waiting time for status change is so insignificant that you won’t feel the difference in waiting time with open chat. At the same time, you can look for an answer in the community forum.

So, we contacted the agent after a few minutes of searching in the community forum.

The agent was friendly and helpful. He knew his job well, offering us the right advice.

For this GoDaddy overview, we also tried phone support. And it was a pleasant surprise.

The agents were very good at compensating for the average wait time of about 5 minutes.

I asked for “FTP hosting,” and the agent did not try to offer an expensive VPS plan (which is a logical solution). Instead, he advised me to contact Dropbox or a similar online storage company.

I checked, and GoDaddy does not seem to have anything to do with Dropbox. That meant that the agent offered me a solution that was best for me, not for his company.

This personal contact is very friendly – especially when you think that GoDaddy was trying to sell me things all the time while waiting to connect to the agent.

GoDaddy Cons

As good as GoDaddy is, it has some problems (doesn’t it?).

GoDaddy is aggressive with its prices, and its performance has not been the best lately.

The details are below.

1. Aggressive pricing strategy

GoDaddy offers affordable prices, starting at $5.99 per month. For the first time. Then prices go up – for example, a shared hosting plan at $5.99 per month becomes $7.99 per month.

Pricing isn’t surprising. But not just that.

You also have to choose the most extended subscription to get the advertised price.

For example, to get $5.99 a month, you need to subscribe for 36 months. If you want to pay annually, the price will jump to $6.99 per month.

GoDaddy’s also upsell strong.

First of all, GoDaddy doesn’t include SSL-certificate – an integral part of every site. You need to buy it for $6.67 a month. It is not so cheap, given that others include it for free or as a one-time installation fee.

Besides, automatic backup costs $2.99 per month, and Essential Website Security for website monitoring and protection against hackers and malware costs $5.59 per month.

While the prices that rise after the first term are not so significant, takeoffs can raise the prices dramatically. So the table below compares each shared hosting plan and see what’s included:

2. Below average failure time

Daddy promises 99.9% performance.

Unfortunately, the reality is a little different. During the test, GoDaddy scored 99.46%. That means it was more than 7 minutes, every day (more like a couple of more prolonged blackouts in a few months, but still). And that’s not good.

None of the hosts manage to score 100% of the time all the time – the servers aren’t that reliable. However, this number must be close to 100% – you do not want to lose visitors during the next regular blackout.

We hope that GoDaddy will improve the uptime of its servers precisely as it has improved response time.

GoDaddy Review Summary

As we understand from this GoDaddy review, this is not the most accessible host. But it certainly offers reliable services – server performance is continuously growing, support is excellent, and the control panel is easy to use.

On the other hand, there are shortcomings.

Many features and services, such as automatic backup or SSL certificate, require either a separate payment or a costly plan.

In general, it is quite a reliable hosting provider, offering competent services. If you are willing to pay a little extra, you will not be mistaken.

Pros

• Free domain names included
• Excellent performance
• User-friendly interface
• High scalability

Cons

• High prices for resumption and growth of prices
• Poor performance