GoDaddy Review
Features: Free domain name
GoDaddy has to be one of the most popular web hosts and one of the most recognizable web hosts on the market.
Before the new sleek logo, I believe we all remember cartoon style, messy hair guy with sunglasses.
This web host features strong uptime, lightning load speed, and fast responding Customer Service, certainly one of the giants in the industry.
Here is our GoDaddy review:
Meet GoDaddy
GoDaddy was founded in 1997 in Baltimore by Bob Parsons, under the name of Jomax Technologies.
In 1999, they started searching for a catchier name, and one employee suggested the name Big Daddy, using a movie starring Adam Sandler as inspiration. That domain name was not available, but GoDaddy was, and that is the story behind the name.
In April 2005, GoDaddy became the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the Internet.
As of 2018, GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host by market share, with over 62 million registered domains.
Advantages of GoDaddy
1. Reliability
Pretty strong uptime from GoDaddy, with 99.97%.
Why is this important, you might ask? Well, the goal is to make your website available for your visitors at all times, and this metric shows the average time that a website hosted by a certain web host is available.
So, GoDaddy is almost perfect.
GoDaddy also features an uptime guarantee of 99.9%, and if they go below this you may request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month.
2. Customer Service
If you are starting your online entrepreneurship, you will need good support from your web host. If something happens with your website, you are going to contact your web host and you will demand answers and solutions.
Luckily, GoDaddy has no problems supporting their customers.
We have contacted them, and from the beginning, we were assured that we are communicating with professionals.
Mahaveer was responding quickly and was there for additional questions as well.
3. One-click Install Apps
If you don’t want to use their website builder, GoDaddy will help you find the best option.
With one click, you can install more than 125 most popular apps and content management systems.
Plenty of options for you, to use the platform you want with the apps you want.
4. Load Speed
While you were reading this, GoDaddy hosted website already loaded your page. Yup, that fast.
On average, GoDaddy will load your pages in 325ms.
Add that to excellent uptime, and that is a strong duo, capable of presenting your website in the best way possible.
5. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
GoDaddy features a 30-day money-back guarantee, meaning that you can test their services for a month and ask for a refund if you don’t like them. This applies if you purchase a yearly plan.
However, if you are testing out their monthly plans, you have 48h to ask for a refund if you don’t like what they have to offer.
6. Website Builder
Like we already mentioned, GoDaddy has its own website builder named GoCentral, which makes it pretty easy to set up a visually attractive website and start creating content.
There are hundreds of templates to choose from, and you should be able to find a suitable theme and create a customized website in no time.
Disadvantages of GoDaddy
1. Renewal Price
When you start searching for a web host, you will see a lot of attractive deals with great initial pricing models. Of course, that pricing model is usually tied to a three year period.
GoDaddy uses that model, and for the cheapest plan, you will initially pay $5.49 a month, for a three year period. When the renewal comes, the price goes to $8.99 per month.
2. No SSL Certificate With the Starting Plan
SSL certificate is there to encrypt and protect information such as IP address or your credit number. It prevents the third party from stealing this information, and it is practically a badge for a secure website.
For Google Chrome especially, as when you are visiting a website without an SSL certificate, Chrome will warn you about an insecure connection.
Most of the web hosts will provide an SSL certificate with every plan. Not GoDaddy.
If you want to still use the cheapest plan available, but have an SSL certificate, you will need to pay an additional $6.67 per month!
Ease of use
GoDaddy uses cPanel, a preferred choice of experienced users, and also the ones who are just starting.
Everything is easy with cPanel, from managing your account, checking domains, billing information, and email accounts.
You can find hosting and domain information easily on their website, and you can also use their help center.
Pricing plans
There are four options for shared hosting with GoDaddy and they are all on sale at the moment.
Prices presented below are for 3-year plans, so if you want to take a shorter period, rates go up.
These are the plans:
– Economy: Starter plan, $2.99 per month, one website, 100GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth, free Office 365 email, and a free domain for the first year.
– Deluxe: This plan comes at $5.49, and offers much more than Economy. You are looking at unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and subdomains. Still no SSL certificate. That comes with the next plan.
– Ultimate: Recommended plan by GoDaddy, comes at $6.99. It offers everything from the Deluxe plan, plus SSL certificate, 2x processing power, and a free premium DNS.
– Maximum: This maxed out plan will set you back $13.99 every month, but it will give you everything from Ultimate plan, plus 2x processing power and speed, and a free SSL for the full term of your hosting plan.
Conclusion
Should you go with GoDaddy? Yes, and here is why.
Great uptime with amazing load speed is a perfect combination to start. All the needed apps are one click away, and if that is confusing, there is excellent customer support to guide you. There is a lot of experience behind this web host, and they know how to provide a good user experience.
However, they do not have an SSL certificate included in their cheapest plans, and there are some upsells waiting as soon as you add a plan to the cart, and to avoid these, you can check some of the higher-ranked web hosts on our list.
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