GoDaddy to me seem to be the Coca-Cola of the web industry as they serve over 17 million customers for various different 
service including hosting and domain registering. In fact 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 have registered over 73 million new domain names around the world, with many facilities dotted on almost every continent except Africa. Lets put the 17 million into perspective. 17 million is the population of the Netherlands (Holland). Since GoDaddy formed in 1997, they now have annual revenue of almost two billion dollars, which is money we can only dream of.
(Since the time of writing, GoDaddy have since updated their site along with their brand. They have changed from the Green and Orange colour theme to a now 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).
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, all the way up to £55.99/$77.76* for dedicated servers. For the main purpose of this article, we will be focusing on the WordPress hosting
GoDaddy has four different packages for WordPress hosting. These packages are called the Basic, Deluxe, Ultimate and the Pro 5+ package prevously knwon as the Developer packages. The basic package start 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 certainly great about their hosting, but is there any other positives of GoDaddy? Well yes, of course, there is. Unlike many other hosts, such as WP Engine and SiteGround, Go Daddy allows a larger amount of traffic to your sites hosted by them. This, of course, is great as websites can then fulfil their full potential and reach out to as many people as possible without crashing. Other areas GoDaddy excel in, is their 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 – 24th September 2019)
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 install.
GoDaddy is also quite generous with the number of visits per month 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 thousands 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 renew cost of this package is £9.99/$12.47. With this package, you only get the one website install 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.
Just like the basic package, you will also get a free domain along with the plan. Other perks of this plan include all the additional add on’s, such as a one-click staging and an SEO plugin, which were not part of the basic plan. The SEO plugin gives you 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 the likes of bloggers and freelancers, as the package only comes with one website. If you’re already well known, having this plan would help greatly as the storage and the monthly visitors are increased from the basic plan, which would be ideal for the 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 though GoDaddy has four packages the first two I would consider being used for the same purpose. The middle package is called the Ultimate Package. This package would be perfect for freelancers who have a number of 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 price of the package is £13.99/$17.47 a month when you renew.
Along with the two sites, you also get 30GB web storage and 400,000 monthly visitors. So the websites you have 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 be harmful to both your sites.
Plan 4; Pro 5+ (The Developer Package)
The final package GoDaddy offer is the Pro5 + package, known from before as the developer package. This package would be great for people looking to host multiple sites, similar to the ultimate package. With this package, you’re allowed between five sites to 50 sites, with 50-200GB of storage and 800,000 visitors per month. Just like every other package GoDaddy offer you also get a free domain with the developer package.
This package costs £19.99/$24.96 as you do also get the 1 SSL certificate and the multi-site management tool. You can also get more websites with this package if needed by calling an expert. Before the package cost £10.99/$13.72 as it only allowed for up to five websites then. Renewal monthly price stays at the same £19.99.
Does GoDaddy 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 very 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 for you. This is great for people who don’t know a lot about hosting, so it causes less hassle for them.
By having the best technology possible for servers and their community. The performance GoDaddy offer should be great. With the likes of Solid State Drive (SSD’s) and load balancing servers, performance should always be one of the best qualities about hosting with GoDaddy.
What is GoDaddy’s support like?
GoDaddy seems like that have 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 definitely needed considering the size of their customer base.
Users can also chat online to a member of staff 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 you would like about GoDaddy, and s person should answer the question for you giving you help. There are many different topics within this forum such as managing WordPress and managing domains. If you even need anything to do with GoDaddy I would highly recommend diving headfirst into the forum before the chat and the telephone.
What security measures do GoDaddy offer?
GoDaddy offers many security measures. One of these measures is the malware scan and removal. Although not all plans come with this it is possible to add this to your plan with a monthly fee of £3.99/$5.53* with any two-year plan. I do personally 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 any 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. By automatically updating it saves everyone time from having to manually update your sites and it keeps your sites safe.
Do GoDaddy offer any other features?
GoDaddy uses a site migration feature to automatically migrate your site to their hosting. It can sometimes be a bit of 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 put into place by GoDaddy. You should expect small extra charges to your plan if your site(s) go over the max number of visitors per month. 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;
With having 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 not consistent with one another, which I talk about more in the negatives). GoDaddy also offers a lot more webspace and visits per month in their plans compared to another hosting, this would be good for customers who have 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;
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 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 that 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 who 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 themselves 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 have and dish out. That’s three percent rating GoDaddy five stars and an incredible 20% scores GoDaddy three or more stars.
Another negative about GoDaddy that you’ve probably heard about before is the fact 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;
Personally, 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 own custom hosting panel. The packages they offer don’t scream at me I’m worth it. With one package you don’t get one feature but in a cheaper package, you do. The thinking behind it all doesn’t make sense to me.
This article was last updated on 24th September 2019
*ALL PRICING WITHIN THIS ARTICLE WERE ACCURATE AT TIME OF WRITING. ALL STERLING (GBP) AND EURO (EUR) WERE CONVERTED FROM DOLLARS (USD) USING GOOGLE’S OWN 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
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