Godaddy Hosting Review (2020)

The year 2020 has already begun and I’ve completed 7 years with Godaddy. It is the time to share my personal experience with you guys about Godaddy Hosting. I am writing a detailed Godaddy review about Godaddy Hosting services that will include everything from their services, coupons, up time, performance, page speed and more.

Godaddy is one of the top and most widely available web hosting company that provides nearly all kinds of hosting and web related resources. Its huge presence in nearly all major countries and vast array of services has made it one of the giants of web hosting.

With millions of domain names registered under its name it is also a major domain name registrar. Its plans are also suitable for most business and personal web development applications. The web hosting company has grown steadily from a garage into one of the major companies that handled millions of websites in every corner of the world. Despite the huge array of services and features along with millions of clients, it has maintained a consistent service and support across all geographies.

After frantically browsing through online forums and benchmark reports for days on end, I ended up with Godaddy. The company looked promising but its prices were almost half the amount charged by other hosting companies. Fortunately, the benchmark tests also revealed better functionality and support as compared to its competitors. Here is my complete review of the host after hosting my site for almost 3 months. Let’s dive deeper into the giant to find what makes it tick and how you can leverage the best features out of it.

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Godaddy ReviewDomain Name Services

Godaddy is one of the major domain name registrars in all over the world. Along with the registrations of popular and regional domains, the company now allows users to easily register premium domains that end with preset custom TLD’s. It doesn’t just allow its uses to buy domain names but it also allows them to backorder them from existing owners. It allows its users to transfer their domains from existing registrars and also cash park them for an extended period of time.

Along with the above, the company provides a domain broker service that allows users to determine the value of a domain name even if it’s taken by someone. If the price suits your requirements and budget, you can easily buy the domain name through a verified broking service that facilitates the transfer of ownership. In case you feel that the price is higher than your budget, you can easily negotiate with the parties to get a better deal.

Godaddy also allows users to backorder any domain name without any unnecessary hassles. You can backorder any domain name and it can be available to you the moment it becomes available. However if there are more than one backorder requests for the same domain, you will be put on a queue where you can easily bid on the price allotted by other members.

Along with the above, there is also a domain auction section on Godaddy that allows users to sell their domain names without any technical hassles on an auction market. People from all over the world can bid on your domain name and the higher bidder wins. Some of its other features include domain privacy and whois information database that can be easily processed from its website. If you don’t want users to know about your personal details, you can make it private for a nominal price every month. Else anyone can find its information from its whois records.

Hosting

Since its early beginnings, Godaddy has remained as one of the major hosting giants with quality services suited for all kinds of personal and business users. Its plans are divided into separate segments depending on the amount of resources consumed and required by each users. Therefore users won’t have to pay for more than they consume. Along with shared hosting accounts that host multiple websites on a single web host, the company also provides virtual private servers that are ideal for most business purposes. Developers and high resource consuming websites require VPS hosting for their development and business needs. Along with that the company also provides powerful dedicated servers that can be managed by the company or by the users. The dedicated servers are meant for more powerful business applications that have to support and process heavy applications. Let’s look at the different types of hosting accounts provided by Godaddy in more depth.

Shared

The shared hosting plans in Godaddy is divided into 4 distinct plans. Each plan is ideal for users from beginners to advanced websites. You can easily start with the starter plan and upgrade your way up to the ultimate plan as your number of visitors and resource consumption increases over time. You can also directly buy the ultimate or any of the other plans if you already know your requirements. The various plans provided by Godaddy are: starter priced at $2.24 per month and comes with 30GB storage, economy priced at $4.99 per month that comes with 100GB storage and 100 email addresses, deluxe prices at $5.99 per month and comes with unlimited websites and unlimited storage with 500 email addresses and the most powerful plan is the ultimate plan that comes with 1000 email addresses plus one year SSL certificate along with all the features of the deluxe plan but is priced at only $7.99 per month.

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WordPress

Godaddy also provides Managed Wordpress hosting that has recently remained one of the major content management systems since its release. Therefore, Godaddy has also divided the wordpress plans into multiple sections to depending on the user’s resource consumption. The wordpress plans are divided into basic priced at $3.99 per month and comes with 10GB SSD while allowing up to 25000 monthly visitors, deluxe priced at $5.99 per month that comes with 15GB SSD storage and allows up to 100000 visitors per month, ultimate that comes with 30GB SSD storage and 400000 monthly visitors and allows you to host up to 2 websites on the same account and the most powerful developer account that costs $14.99 per month and comes with 50GB SSD storage and allows 800000 users with the additional benefit of hosting 5 websites on the same plan. All the above plans come with a free domain name when bought for a whole year. The SSD storage disks make the website even more powerful while the already installed plugins on the wordpress installations allow users to easily migrate from their existing CMS or Hosting Company. You also have access to thousands of free themes and plugins that you can easily install to modify the design and features of the much loved content management system.

VPS and Dedicated

Like most web hosting companies, Godaddy also provides some of the best options for VPS and Dedicated servers. Their array of servers located all across the world have awesome configurations for a marginal cost. Their prices are also competitive and therefore are ideal for any use case involving high resource consumption.

Also Read: Godaddy VPS Review

Offers and Coupons

Godaddy is famous for its numerous offers and coupons across all of its products. You can find deals that get you domains, websites and email just at $1. Nearly all its plans have discounts and offers related to nearly all services across the domain, hosting and other services. Godaddy also offers website builders for only $1 a month. Email marketing packages start from $4.99 a month. It also offers Microsoft office 365 subscriptions for only $5.99 per month. Moreover, you also get domain based email address for only 3.99 per month. In case you want a SSL certificate, you can now get is at only $99 a year.

Also Read: Godaddy Hosting Coupons & Godaddy Domain Name Coupons

Performance and Reliability

Over the last ten years, Godaddy has grown exponentially to become one of the top hosting providers competing directly with the likes of Endurance International due to its award winning customer service and ease of deployment. With its highly appreciated coupons and offers that competes head on with DreamHost and Arvixe, it runs a highly successful marketing campaign while providing a competing service that makes it one of the most recommended web hosting companies on the web. Unlike other companies who focus on all kinds of customers, Godaddy focuses only on small and medium sized businesses and its plans reflect the necessary technologies expected by small business owners.

Since its inception, Godaddy has always remained among the top performance oriented web hosting companies with security measures that far outweighed its competitors. Its inbuilt security layer allows users to deploy ecommerce website without the need for any additional SSL certificates. Except for select instances, the hosting company has maintained its reputation for continuous server uptime and increased page speed over the years. Let’s explore each of the parameters to understand the performance optimization offered by the company as compared to its customers.

PageSpeed

Page speed tests carried out over a span of 6-7 months reveal average performance as compared to its competitors. The average result was 3.33 seconds over the period while the best page speed was offered by BlueHost with average PageSpeed at 3.08s. Although the difference is minuscule, the effect often compounds when high volume web pages are requested by hundreds of users at the same time. The page speed remains stable without any spikes like HostGator or StableHost and therefore it is ideal for websites that have negligible or very less high volume pages. The below statistics reveal the stats from benchmarks.

Godaddy Hosting Response Time

Server Uptime and Downtime

In comparison with DreamHost and HostGator, Godaddy performs average in terms of server uptime. Although the downtime is only for a minute or two, the frequency in downtime has significantly increased in recent times. The rising number of customers and limited server equipment must be a major challenge for the organization but nevertheless, server uptime often affects customer experience. Its average uptime during the benchmarking period was 99.2% which is still pretty impressive in comparison to other major hosting solutions like Endurance, BlueHost and Yahoo who fared even worse. Glance on the below stats to better understand its up time to downtime ratio.

Godaddy Uptime

User Experience And Customer Service

Godaddy has always been popular for its excellent customer service and offers provided on nearly all its services but the hosting service definitely needs to redesign its cpanel to make it easier for beginners. Although the cPanel is deployed in its standard form, beginners can hardly understand the difference between the file system and the DNS server. Instead the company can turn it into a blog like service like WordPress where the app handled everything and the user is left only with the content that he has to manage.

Also Read: Godaddy Windows Hosting Review

Personal Experience

I’m a user of Godaddy since past 5 years. I started with their power plan and had transferred my domain name from Hostgator. Although the plan offered a free domain name, I skipped the offer as I already had one. The setup was quick and the presale support was definitely better than Hostgator. It took around 4 days to transfer the domain name to Godaddy but I have had worse with other companies (which took more than 9 days to transfer). After the transfer, I installed wordpress from the 1-Click apps and the site was deployed within seconds. I went onto install plugins and one of the plugins damaged the wordpress database. I filed a support ticket just then and waited for any possible backup that I may be able to retrieve. Fortunately the support team got back within 7 mins and guided me through the whole process of restoring the database. The problem was resolved within the next 20 mins and without any expense whatsoever unlike in Godaddy and other hosting companies. Therefore I am pretty satisfied with the company and the server is definitely faster than any shared hosting plan I have ever used due to the SSD drives that push data 65% faster than traditional magnetic drives.

Godaddy Web Hosting Comparison With Other Hosting Providers

  1. Godaddy Vs Bluehost
  2. Godaddy Vs Hostpapa Vs Hostgator
  3. Godaddy Vs Bluehost Vs Hostgator

Conclusion

Godaddy is ideal for business users who want anytime support and uptime along with faster websites to improve their user experience. Although the prices are a bit higher than its competitors, the improved performance and support compensate for the extra dime. If you are an experience web administrator and want a perfect hosting company within your budget, Godaddy must be your first choice.