If you are on a search for a hosting provider, the GoDaddy services are the first thing you see anywhere online. This is not only because GoDaddy is one of the world’s most popular domain registrar and web hosting company but also because they spend thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing. GoDaddy has been in the industry for over 25 years, claiming to offer a wide range of first-class services, including Web hosting, WordPress hosting, Domain registration, eCommerce solutions, Website builders, SSL certificates, Professional email, and Microsoft 365. The company today hosts more than 5 million websites on 35,000 servers, more than 23 petabytes of data housed on its storage systems, and processes more than 350 million emails every day. The low prices and the great features make them stand out from the competition and make them an understandably popular choice in the web hosting world. However, the customer’s reviews and feedbacks have mixed opinions about their experience with GoDaddy. So if you want to see if GoDaddy is all it’s cracked up to be this article will help you get the whole picture.
We will give you a deeper look at all the GoDaddy features and terms and see how it performed based on multiple tests and results from its users. After you go over this article, you can also read this Godaddy review to get additional information about this hosting provider.
Average Uptime
GoDaddy throughout the last couple of years has shown consistently decent uptime. In the past 6 months of 2022, GoDaddy has shown an uptime rate of 99.97%. This means in a one-year period your total downtime will be about an hour and a half. Which is satisfactory compared to the other hosting providers on the market. GoDaddy also offers an activate uptime monitoring for your website in the GoDaddy Pro plan, where you can track if your websites are up and running at all times and get alerted if something is wrong. Even if you are not using the GoDaddy Pro plan you get the tool for $1/mounth per website.
Load Time and Speed
When it comes to speed you will not have to worry with GoDaddy. GoDaddy has shown a great average page loading time as low as 295 ms over the past 6 months of 2022. Which is a great score for such an affordable web hosting provider. The more data centers a website hosting provider has, the faster its speeds are. Because GoDaddy has three data centers in Europe, the U.S., and Asia the load speed is fast almost anywhere in the world. Still, there are some places further away from those data centers that do cause the speed to drop a little but it is nothing to worry about.
Customer Service
GoDaddy has amazingly responsive customer service available through multiple support channels such as live chat, call center, social media support, forum support, and self-service support. Their customer service via phone is available 24/7 and it only takes 20-30 minutes to get a response. The same goes for their live chats, based on people’s reviews it typically takes less than 2 minutes to talk to a real person on their live chats. They also have a wide selection of playlists of video guides to help you through things such as how to plan your online presence, how to set up your email, and marketing basics.
Storage and Bandwidth
The bandwidth on GoDaddy is unlimited for all hosting plans, however, the storage is limited to 25 GB with the Economy plan, 50 GB for Deluxe, 75 GB for Unlimited, and 100 GB with the Maximum plans. The maximum number of files hosted cannot be over 250,000, which is more than enough for any kind of website. GoDaddy does not meter the traffic of the website with any of their plans. With the Economy plan, you get 1 domain name, 10 with Deluxe, 25 with Ultimate, and 50 sites with Maximum. You also get 100 email accounts with the Economy plan, 500 with the Deluxe, and unlimited with the others. With the Economy plan, you can have up to 10 databases, 25 with the Deluxe package, 50 Ultimate, and 100 databases with the Maximum plan.
Interface
GoDaddy has a great easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, with 100s of modern, professional templates that can help you create your site without any technical skills required. All templates are responsive and mobile-friendly with built-in tools for SEO, social media, and email marketing. The interface is great for beginners, the setup is fast and easy you can create a website in just minutes. GoDaddy is also great for growing businesses since it allows you to expand your website as you grow. GoDaddy’s interface has an extensive list of free plugins with its own information and support pages to help you activate them.
Pricing
The main concern with GoDaddy is the pricing, Godaddy does not offer the cheapest deals out there. They become even more expensive when you add on the basic add-on. Plus, all plans have sites limitation with a maximum of websites you can have. The SSL certificate is not included in the first two plans. If you want an SSL certificate you will need to pay for it or get one of the 2 more expensive plans. Some advanced features and plugins are also not included in any of the plans.
Migration
GoDaddy does not offer free managed migration, if you want to migrate your site you will need to pay for the feature that costs $99.99 per site or per database, and in 7–10 business days you will have your site transferred.
Security
When it comes to security GoDaddy is very disappointing. The standard plans come only with basic security features like fraud, virus, and spam protection. The 2 security features that are included in all web hosting plans are 24/7 network security and DDoS protection monitoring and email privacy with encryption. And for all additional security features, you will have to pay. The price for the GoDaddy bundle with SSL certificate, Web Application Firewall (WAF), malware scans and cleanup will cost you $171 for 3 years.
To conclude
All things considered, GoDaddy is still one of the best web hosting providers currently available online. GoDaddy has shown massive growth in the last couple of years and improved many of its previous issues so we are hopeful it will continue with that pace. Now that you have an idea of what GoDaddy has to offer hopefully you will be able to figure out if GoDaddy is the web host for you and if you want to use their services.