GoDaddy Honest Review - pro and cons
With quite a thousand website hosting services out there, it’s pretty difficult to seek out a number that’s perfect for your needs.
At first glance, GoDaddy is great, having low prices and a few great features.
But if you check out customer reviews and feedback, you will see some polarized opinions, too.
So what’s the case exactly with GoDaddy? do you have to check in with them, or not?
Well, we would like to assist make the choice easier for you. So, we’ve signed up with GoDaddy to check their performance. We took a deep check out all their features and terms and wrote this definitive review to form it easier for you to understand if GoDaddy meets your needs.
Let’s take a better look.
Pros of Using GoDaddy Hosting
GoDaddy could be best known as a website registrar, but they need also found out the way to provide an honest hosting service.
Namely, they need to deliver solid uptime and page speed over a previous couple of years. additionally, they provide quite 125+ free integrations for your website, also as helpful customer support.
And all things considered, their cheapest Economy plan has good value for money, too.
Here are the highest things we liked about GoDaddy’s hosting.
1. Decent Uptime at 99.94%
GoDaddy delivers satisfactory uptime on their shared hosting plans. As mentioned, their 12-month average uptime is 99.94%.
GoDaddy average uptime
Is that any good?
Well, yes. An uptime rate of 99.94% means about 5.2 hours of total downtime per annum, which isn’t regrettable.
After testing many other website hosting services, we will say that GoDaddy is well above average. Their average monthly downtime is merely around 22 minutes, which is certainly not enough to derail your business during an enormous sale or launch.
So, even with a couple of big shifts in May, September, November 2020, you’ll still believe GoDaddy to stay your site live and running.
2. Great Page Load Time at 531 ms
This might come as a touch of a surprise:
Our GoDaddy test site has shown an excellent average page loading time as low as 531 ms over the past 12 months.
This is somewhat surprising because years ago you would not associate cheaper web hosts like GoDaddy with performance as great as this.
And fast loading times aren’t only for vanity.
As a matter of fact, studies have shown that slow loading times can cause your visitors to go away the location faster. In turn, this hurts your program rankings (especially on mobile) and, of course, negatively impacts your conversion rates.
Unfortunately, as you will not be ready to change your web host’s server speed, it is vital to think about it before signing up with a hosting provider. If your web host is slow on the server level then, sadly, your hands are tied.
Luckily, though, supported our tests, you will not need to worry about page speed with GoDaddy hosting.
3. Over 125+ One-Click Install Applications
GoDaddy will allow you to install some powerful third-party integrations to your website. In fact, you’ll add over 125 of the foremost popular applications on the web — with only one click. that have content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
GoDaddy also includes developer-friendly tools like cPanel, MySQL, CloudLinux, Python, and multiple versions of PHP.
So, they need an honest sort of options that suit everyone from beginning bloggers to experienced web developers. What’s useful for a few beginners, is that they even have a drag-and-drop website builder, which comes with a separate pricing plan (starting from $9.99/mo), though.
4. Basic Cheap Plan is sweet Value (for one Basic Website)
their cheapest shared hosting plan was too expensive, and therefore the features were really limited. a minimum of compared to the competition.
Now, though, it seems they’ve done a 180-degree turn. Currently, the Economy plan pricing is a mere $1.00/month with a 12-month contract. That’s as cheap because it gets.
But for such a coffee price, does one actually get any value?
Well, yes. You get one website, up to 100 GB of storage, and unmetered bandwidth. Also, you will get a free domain with any annual plan, and free Office 365 Email for the primary year. of these features are really useful and not every host offers them as a part of their cheapest plan.
The overall value you’re getting from GoDaddy’s Economy Plan for one basic website is sweet, considering that it’s insanely cheap.
However, despite some remarkable features and an excellent price, you’ll need to make a couple of compromises with GoDaddy, too. It’s only you dig a touch deeper that you simply realize it isn’t nearly as good because it might sound. We’ll discuss this more intimately within the next section.
Cons of Using GoDaddy Hosting
Although the worth for GoDaddy’s cheapest plan seems good initially, you will find some problems once you look closer.
In fact, their low prices somewhat contribute to the issues. Namely, the most cost-effective plan lacks a couple of important features and there are tons of upsells throughout the checkout process. Also, the renewal pricing is going to be much above the first-term discount.
In addition, thereto, we didn’t exactly enjoy GoDaddy’s slightly confusing and vague money-back guarantee, either.
So, here are the most important cons we found, discussed in additional detail.
1. Base Plan Lacks Critical Features (No SSL Certificate, Backups, Security, or Site Migrations)
The top hosts we’ve reviewed will contribute features like an SSL certificate or backups on every plan. In fact, these became commonplace and are just about required to run a site today.
Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn’t offer any of the mentioned features in their base plans.
Let’s take a glance at SSL certificates for instance. Unless you’re already paying for
These prices are a touch an excessive amount of. Especially as most hosts today will offer you a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for every one among your sites.
Some hosts also will offer you backups and website security free of charge.
But with GoDaddy, backups will cost you $2.99/month and website security $5.59/month (renews at $6.99/month).
In addition to all or any that, there’s another common feature that GoDaddy doesn’t offer for free:
Site migrations.
Again, many hosts will move a minimum of one existing site over to their servers for free of charge. Many of them can even do that within a couple of hours of asking so you do not need to wait around.
Not GoDaddy, though. they do not offer any free managed migrations. This feature will cost $99.99 per site and per database, and it takes 7–10 business days. So it isn’t just expensive but also slow.
If you add all of those extra costs up over the course of a couple of years then GoDaddy hosting doesn’t look that cheap anymore.
2. Recent Downward Shifts in Uptime
Measured data for our test site with GoDaddy shows that in May, September, and November 2020, GoDaddy’s uptime took a downturn. We measured uptimes of only 99.89%, 99.84%, and 99.82%, respectively.
Now, this does not necessarily mean that GoDaddy cannot be trusted anymore. confine mind that throughout several years, their uptime has been consistently decent. However, the downward spikes within a previous couple of months could be reoccurring, if the causes aren’t taken care of soon.
3. many Upsells
All the lacking features that we discussed above, cause tons of upsells during the signup process. In fact, GoDaddy has become somewhat infamous for upselling. the rationale for offering numerous upsells is to extend the ultimate price that you are going to pay because the initial plan prices are absurdly low.
The first upsell that you’re going to run into possesses to try to to with the monthly cost for the hosting plan. supported the duration of your chosen plan, the quantity that you simply will prepay can vary greatly.
A short, three-month plan features a significant monthly cost: $10.99/month. So, for the simplest value, you would possibly need to check-in for 12, 24, or 36 months instead, getting a monthly price of$1.00, $3.50, or $4.33, respectively.
With such offers, you would possibly be tempted to urge an extended plan directly. But this suggests you will have to take a position with a bigger sum of cash upfront, making a way longer commitment.
And this is often just the primary of the many upsells.
And it doesn’t stop there, either. As discussed above, you will see upsells for SSL certificates, backups, and “essential website security” which refers to malware scans and updates.
GoDaddy’s checkout process can desire a minefield, where you would like to carefully watch each step before accidentally paying two or 3 times the initial price.
And as if that wasn’t enough.
4. Inconsistent Customer Support
One feature that we’re always happy to ascertain is 24/7/365 customer support. GoDaddy offers exactly that. they need a live chat, an excellent network of international phone support in some languages, and an honest knowledge domain.
So, to check out their live chat support, we asked them a couple of basic questions about on-site migration.
The outcome?
None. Because the estimated waiting time for us was 47 minutes thanks to the above-normal volume.
In the past, we’ve had also an honest customer support experience where we got connected to the customer support rep during a jiffy and got knowledgeable replies.
Overall, however, GoDaddy’s customer support may be a bit inconsistent (you’ll never know if you will get a fast response or need to wait almost an hour).
GoDaddy Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts
Do We Recommend GoDaddy?
Yes, we do.
GoDaddy has strong uptime and fast page loading speeds. They work well with the foremost popular web apps you’d want. and therefore the initial pricing for the most cost-effective plans remains good value despite lacking several important features.
Here’s a fast overview of GoDaddy’s hosting plans:
GoDaddy offers many upsells for basic features that you’d assume were just included for free of charge (SSL, backups, etc.). Adding anybody of those might double the value of your plan. But together, they might easily find yourself costing you significantly quite another web hosting provider.
Money-Back: a rather confusing 30-day money-back guarantee.
Website Migration: No free transfers. Cost for managed migration $99.99 per site. The migration will take 7–10 business days.
Free domain: Free for the duration of the initial annual plan (12, 24, 36 months, etc.).
Ease of Signup: Very easy signup.
Payment Methods: All major credit cards and PayPal are accepted.
Hidden Fees and Clauses: Somewhat confusing refund policy & terms like “If a Hosting Service has already been performed, then it’s non-refundable (if not yet performed, eligible for a refund within 30 days of the date of the transaction).”
Upsells: tons of upsells. Price variation for the initial term length, site migrations, backups, SSL certificates, security, and more.
Account Activation: Fast account activation.
Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): many 1-click installation options with the foremost popular open-source apps.
So while GoDaddy’s overall performance is sweet, they are doing have some drawbacks. , they’re still a reliable host.
Visit GoDaddy does one have any personal experience with GoDaddy — positive or negative? If so, please leave us an honest, transparent review below!
