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GoDaddy Review – Is GoDaddy a Good Hosting Choice For You?

by Patrick on May 19, 2011

If you are somehow slightly familiar with the web hosting industry, then chances are high that you have heard of GoDaddy. GoDaddy is definitely one of the largest and most popular web hosting and domain registration company in existence with about more than 45 million domains under their management. They are so large that the domains that they manage are about 4 times larger than their closest competitor. GoDaddy is also known for their aggressive marketing, with advertisements and sponsorships in the Super Bowl since the year 2005. So is GoDaddy a good web hosting option for you? Read this review to find out.

Tabel Of Contents:

- Introduction
- GoDaddy Rating
- The PROS of GoDaddy
- The CONS of GoDaddy
- Customer Support
- Coupons
- Packages
- Customer Reviews
- GoDaddy Uptime
- Conclusion

GoDaddy Overall Rating

Support Quality :
Reliability & Uptime :
Features :
Accessibility :
Price Value :
Overall Rating :


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The PROS of GoDaddy

FREE Website Marketing Credits
Site Scanner
GoDaddy Hosting Connection
  • Unlimited Bandwidth
  • Unlimited Monthly Data Transfer
  • FREE Website Marketing Credits
  • Features for Advanced Webmasters such as SSH Access (Secure Shell)
  • Extensive support for many languages and CMS
  • FREE SSL Certificate (Only with Ultimate Plan)
  • Host of Website Addons
  • GoDaddy Hosting Connection
  • Fotolia® Photo Credits
  • 24/7 FTP access
  • FREE Website Stats
  • 24×7 monitoring
  • Host of Email Account Features
  • Unlimited Websites (Deluxe and Ultimate Only)
  • 24/7 Phone/Email Support
  • Offers Virtual Dedicated Server

Over $200 Value of FREE Marketing Credits

Signing up with GoDaddy also nets you marketing credits from Google, Bing / Yahoo and Facebook, and they are yours for no additional cost. This is a good selling point especially for those who are still starting out with their website and needs all the help they can get in terms of site promotion.

Host of Features for the Advanced Webmaster

If you are a webmaster who loves tinkering under the hood, then you will surely like what GoDaddy has to offer. It supports a wide range of languages such as PHP5, Perl, Python CGI, Ruby and so on. And it also features support for Content Management systems such as Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, Moodle, MODx and many more. There is plenty of options here for the advanced users. But be sure that you choose Linux hosting, because the Window hosting is stripped down when it comes to these advanced features.

Offers Virtual Dedicated and Full Dedicated Servers

If you need more power in your web hosting requirements, then GoDaddy offers virtual dedicated and dedicated servers. Both offers state of the art equipment for the enterprise level of reliability that you require. This is a good thing because it gives the customers room for growth and expansion in case a time will come when shared hosting will not be enough anymore.

Reliable Servers with 99.9% Uptime

One of the most important quality of a good web hosting company. Downtimes can be very costly especially for those who operates a high traffic website or an online store. So if you want more reliability in terms of server uptime, then you can’t go wrong with GoDaddy.


The CONS of GoDaddy

One of the most glaring flaws of GoDaddy is their crippled hosting plans. Take for example their Economy hosting plan, which is priced at $4.99 a month, which is a pretty competitive price for this type of hosting plan. This is of course before you take a good look at the features that it offers. Limited space, limited MySQL databases, limited email accounts and storage, limited subdomains are just some of stripped down features that I could find with GoDaddy’s basic economy plan. Where areas, at the same price range, other hosting service can offer unlimited hosting. For me, there are simply way too many limitations.

Customer Support:

For some reason, GoDaddy doesn’t seem to have a live chat support feature so I was left with no choice but to send them an email instead. Upon sending the email, they immediately sent a response that they’ve received my inquiries. And after less than 12 hours, I’ve received this response from the support staff:

Support Staff Response
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for contacting Online Support.
I will answer each of your questions individually:
Question # 1 =================
You asked: Will there be a setup fee when I sign up?
Answer: You will have to purchase hosting, but there is no setup fee.
Question # 2 =================
You asked: Do you offer secure server and ecommerce capabilities?
Answer: You can setup ecommerce applications on hosting, such as Pinnacle Cart, Zen Cart, and osCommerce. You can add an SSL to hosting with an added cost.
Question # 3 =================
You asked: Do you offer an affiliate program or referrer bonuses?
Answer: We have an affiliate account and a reseller program.

GoDaddy Coupons

Coupon Discount
promo10 10% off your entire order
promo15 Save 15% on your order of $75 or more
promo530 Save $5 off any order of $30 or more
promossl $12.99 standard SSL certificates (normally $29.95)
cjcdoe20 20% off shared hosting
cjc199hstg $1.99 / mo. hosting first 3 months. Eligible on new Economy plans
promoeco Get Deluxe Hosting for the price of Economy

GoDaddy Package Details

Shared Hosting Plans

Plans ECONOMY DELUXE ULTIMATE
Disk Space 10 GB 150 GB Unlimited
Bandwidth Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
Email Accounts 100 500 1000
MySQL Databases 10 25 Unlimited
SSL Certificate $49.99 / yr. $49.99 / yr. YES
Price $4.99
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$7.99
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$14.99
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Virtual Dedicated Server Packages

Plans ECONOMY VALUE DELUXE PREMIUM ULTIMATE
RAM 1 GB 2 GB 3 GB 4 GB 8 GB
Storage 15 GB 30 GB 45 GB 60 GB 120 GB
Disk Space 10GB 22GB 30GB 59GB 80GB
Bandwidth 500 GB 1000 GB 1,500 GB 2,000 GB 4,000 GB
Price $29.99/mo
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$39.99/mo
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$59.99/mo
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$79.99/mo
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$149.99/mo
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Dedicated Server Packages

Plans ECONOMY DELUXE PREMIUM VALUE DEAL POWER PLAYER STORAGE MONSTER
CPU Intel® Pentium 4 – 3.0 GHz Intel Core™ 2 Duo – 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad – 2.50 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo – 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad – 2.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo – 2.13 GHz
RAM 2 GB 4 GB 4 GB 2 GB 4 GB 4 GB
Disk Space 2 x 120 GB 2 x 300 GB 2 x 1,000 GB 2 x 300 GB 2 x 300 GB 2 x 1,000 GB
Bandwidth 500 GB 1,500 GB 3,000 GB 1,000 GB 1,500 GB 1,500 GB
Price $69.99
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$149.99
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$299.99
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$99.99
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$199.99
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$199.99
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Customer Reviews

Godaddy Hosting – Windows Deluxe.
” I’ve hosted several data-driven websites with GoDaddy over the past few years and it has been a decent service. Pros: customer service, dependability, plenty of technology choices. Cons: low SQL Server space quota, mediocre on-line documentation, uncertainty about service in the future.” ” – Anonymous
Rating :

Godaddy – there are much better options out there.
” I have fallen into the trap of constantly using Godaddy because its what I am most familiar with. Enough is enough. If you are relying on there services for eCommerce, beware because you will experience a lot of latency and constant downtime. Call in and expect the following answer, “Sorry after looking into the problem, our server support team has indicated that there is a problem with the database server and they are actively working on getting this resolved.” ” – John from Dublin, CA
Rating :

Go Daddy Economy Hosting.
” Go Daddy’s service is great, but their hosting is lousy. If you get the economy plan, your site is shared on a slow server with 5 other websites. I regularly can’t browse to my own site because of spikes in response time. When I ping my server, I average a latency of 120-140ms, with spikes up to over two seconds. This is simply unacceptable for serious webhosting. If a customer were to see this, they’d just assume we were either out of business or some shady fly-by-night operation. I called them and they recommended that I upgrade to a dedicated server, which is simply not an option for me. “ – Ben Julian
Rating :

Outstanding Customer Service and Support.
” We moved our small business website to Godaddy three years ago and could not be more pleased. Our site is integrated with merchant services for the shopping cart and credit card settlement as well as QuickBooks. We get timely access to and response from technical support with problem resolution in one call. No hassles, just results and follow-thru. From our perspective, all customer contact operations should be so professional.” – Gailforcewatersports.com
Rating :

GoDaddy Uptime

Monitored since: 29 December 2005
Monitored sites: 4
Total days of monitoring: 1967
Overall uptime: 99.963 %

GoDaddy Uptime Chart

Year Outages Approx. Downtime Average Uptime
2009 14 1.83 hours 99.979 %
2010 17 2.22 hours 99.974 %
2011 35 4.55 hours 99.853 %

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that GoDaddy is probably one of the most popular hosting company that is operating to this day. What I like about them is the number of tools and applications that an advanced webmaster can play with, providing it with more freedom and flexibility. GoDaddy is a solid and reliable hosting service but there are some significant flaws with them that are worth mentioning. First is the price, their most basic economy package is kind of stripped down when compared to other service with similar pricing. It is far too limited in my opinion. Another thing that bothers me is that, GoDaddy is not the most user friendly web hosting company out there. From their main website to their control panel, they seem to be needlessly complicated to navigate. With that said, GoDaddy is indeed a very solid web hosting choice, but they’re certainly not the best in the industry.

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