GoDaddy Web Hosting – Things you need to consider

GoDaddy Web Hosting – Things you need to consider

"GoDaddy is remarkably popular in the hosting space, typically serving as site proprietors' introduction to the hosting world. The organization makes it extremely simple yet affordable for people to choose a domain name, sign up for hosting, and start building their online business or personal as well as business use. While popular for their domain, email, and shared hosting, it offers selections for virtual and devoted servers too. GoDaddy makes the updating process as continuous as possible, so you be afraid from scaling your site as your business grows. GoDaddy is a hosting home that will grow together with you.

Pros of Using GoDaddy Hosting

As promised, GoDaddy has given top-quality uptime and page load speed from the last couple of months. They integrate with over 125 popular web applications, so there's a little something for everyone. Their basic plan has some amazing value for its price. Below we have given the things that you will like about GoDaddy hosting:

1. Good Uptime of 99.97%

GoDaddy is a popular domain registrar but they are providing some top-notch uptime on their shared hosting plan.

There was a dodgy month in October 2019 with 99.84% uptime. But then they followed that up with a consistent 99.99% – 100% streak to bring the 24-month average up to 99.97%. When compared to other hosting platforms, GoDaddy is giving good competition to them.

• Last 12-month average uptime:

• January 2020 average uptime: 99.99%

• December 2019 average uptime: 99.96%

• November 2019 average uptime: 100%

• October 2019 average uptime: 99.84%

• September 2019 average uptime: 100%

• August 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

• July 2019 average uptime: 99.95%

• June 2019 average uptime: 100%

• May 2019 average uptime: 100%

• April 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

• March 2019 average uptime: 99.97%

• February 2019 average uptime: 99.99%

2. Great Page Loading Speed

You might be wondering that is this even possible a couple of years ago, you wouldn't connect cheap web host like GoDaddy to provide you great performance. Yet, that's exactly what they've done. Fast loading times aren't just a vanity metric. Studies have shown that they can force visitors to leave your site faster, hurt your search engine rankings (especially on mobile), and even negatively impact your conversion rates.

The speed of your web host is also important because you can't do anything to control it.

Here's what we mean:

If you have an image-heavy site, you can compress them or use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to take the burden off your servers and make your site faster. In other words, you can control things to speed up your site directly.

But if your web host is consistently slow, to begin with? Your hands are tied. You'll be fighting a losing battle.

3. Over 125+ One-Click Install Applications

GoDaddy has its website builder if you're looking for just a simple, drag-and-drop experience.

However, if you want something with a little more power under the hood, GoDaddy also has one-click installations with over 125 of the most popular applications on the Internet. That includes content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

Well, it also includes tools like MySQL, Python, cPanel, CloudLinux and multiple versions of PHP. So, they have a good variety of options that suit everyone from beginning bloggers to savvy webmasters.

4. Good Customer Support

GoDaddy offers customer support 24/7. They have a knowledge base, phone support, and live chat.

The live chat support bot starts you off by letting you choose from a selection of departments for your problem. After doing so, you are connected to the support agent, which took about a minute.

We asked them a few basic questions about their plans and services. The responses were straight forward and easy to understand and on average, it took them about 2 minutes to answer.

GoDaddy has made big improvements this past year with their live chat support. It used to be very unreliable and often felt like they were always trying to sell you something instead of helping you figure out a solution. Very glad to see that they have listened to user reviews and completely reworked their live chat.

Cons of Using GoDaddy Hosting

GoDaddy's performance was pretty solid across the board. The value for the initial price is pretty good, too. However, that's also part of the problem. There are a lot of upsells throughout the checkout process. And the renewal pricing will also come back to haunt you, too. We didn't like the confusing, vague money-back guarantee, either. Here are the biggest cons:

1. Lots of Upsells

GoDaddy has become relatively infamous for the number of upsells used to increase the price you're ultimately going to pay. The first one you'll run into is the hosting plan cost based on the amount of time that you're prepaying. You'll have to sign up for three years if you want to get that less than $5 month price. A shorter, three-month plan will cost you significantly around $11 month.

GoDaddy will also try to sell you a lot of extra services at checkout, too. For example, they will automatically opt you in for website backups that will cost just under $3 /month for three years. Just that one upsells alone will already double your price.

They don't stop there, either. You'll also see upsells for Office 365 access, SSL certificates, and "essential website security" which refers to malware scans and updates.

GoDaddy's checkout process can feel like a minefield, where you need to carefully watch each step before accidentally paying two or three times the initial price.

2. Base Plans Lack Critical Features (No SSL Certificate, Backups, Security, or Site Migrations)

The top hosts we've reviewed will throw in features like an SSL certificate on every plan. These have become commonplace and are required to run a site today. Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn't offer any of these in their base plans, which leads to a lot of the upsells along the way. Take their SSL certificates for example. Unless you're already paying for their top plan, this feature will cost you:

• $63.99/year for a single site ($79.99/year renew)

• $159.99/year multiple sites ($199.99/year renew)

• $295.99/year all subdomains ($369.99/year renew)

Those prices are outrageous to be honest because most hosts today will give you a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate for every site. Other hosts will give you backups and website security, too. But both of those will cost you another $3 /mo. and $6 /mo. respectively.

Let's also look at migration fees.

Again, many hosts will move at least one existing site over to their servers for free. Many of them can even do this within a few hours of asking so you don't have to wait around. Not GoDaddy, though. They don't offer any free site migrations. And if you want them to do it for you, the cost is $99.99/site, and it takes 7-10 days. So it's not just expensive but also slow. Add all of these extra costs up over the course of a few years and GoDaddy hosting doesn't look that cheap anymore.

3. Renewal Rates are Higher, Too

The economy plan for GoDaddy hosting starts with less than 5$ for three years. Well, just like any other hosting company, they just hike up their price at the time of renewal. Then the same plan will be around $9 at the time of renewal. You don't get any extra features or better performance. But you will have to pay more.

4. Confusing Money-Back Guarantee

Most web hosts we've reviewed will give you a no-questions-asked refund if you cancel within 30 days. On the surface, GoDaddy's money-back guarantee looks similar. Annual plans can get a refund within a month of buying.

However, here's where all of the issues start popping up.

If you pay for a "Monthly Plan" (anything less than an annual plan — three, six, or nine months), you have to ask for a refund within 48 hours. That only gives you two days to try them out.

To get either of these refunds, you have to make a phone call to their customer service (so they can try to talk you out of it).

And almost each plan GoDaddy offers has some strange terms that could jeopardize your chances of actually receiving that refund.

Here is what their terms say about hosting refunds: "If a Hosting Service has already been performed, then it is non-refundable (if not yet performed, eligible for a refund within 30 days of the date of the transaction). "

That's not very clear, is it? Essentially, what we think it means is that if you try to use the hosting plan and set up a WordPress site, for example, you might be violating this term. And so they could, in theory, deny your refund request.