GoDaddy Review | Who is GoDaddy?

GoDaddy is one of the oldest Internet shared hosting providers and it is also known as the most competitive.

GoDaddy being one of the oldest web hosting companies, has been providing shared hosting since 1997. It is also well known as a domain name registrar and sells a variety of other e-Commerce services as well as some software. It is now operating in excess of 45 million domain names since 2010 and is the largest ICANN recognized internet registrar across the globe.

Features of GoDaddy’s Services

Support for multiple operating systems — Use GoDaddy’s shared hosting with both Linux and Windows operating systems.

Emails, disk space and more — Starting at 10GB up to unlimited disk space; 100-1,000 email addresses; webmail, autoresponder and catch all email addresses; fraud, virus and spam protection; and, lastly, sender ID, email privacy and protection with high-grade encryption.

Databases — MySQL starts at 10GB and goes up to unlimited storage. You can access your website’s databases at any point, easily backup, and restore any lost files.

Domains — Domains purchased through GoDaddy include DNS management, access with or without a “www” prefix, and the ability to use external domains, subdomains and multiple websites on a single account.

50 concurrent FTP users — GoDaddy provides access to multiple users at the same time, this is a great feature.

SSH access and SSL certificates — GoDaddy provides excellent security features for all types of users whether you need minimum security or the most top-notch.

Your website, your way — With many one-click installs, GoDaddy converts your website in to a forum, photo gallery, use WordPress, Joomla/Drupal, a variety of e-Commerce options, and much more.

Apart from the above, GoDaddy has literally hundreds of features and these are only some of the most commonly used ones. With only a few minutes of setup time, you can very quickly enable everything that you might need to help configure and develop your site.

Pricing of GoDaddy’s Services (at the time of writing)

Economy — $4.99/month. Comes with 10GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 100 email accounts, and 10 MySQL databases (1GB each).

Deluxe — $5.94/month. Comes with 150GB disk space, unlimited websites & bandwidth, 500 email accounts, 25 MySQL databases (1GB each).

Unlimited — $8.49/month. Comes with unlimited websites, disk space and bandwidth. 1,000 email accounts, unlimited MySQL databases (1GB each) and also a FREE premium DNS, site scanner, and SSL certificate with a fixed IP address.

GoDaddy also offers their existing customers discounts on an ongoing basis. For example, you will often receive notification of say a 30% discount to purchase additional domain names.

What’s great about GoDaddy?

GoDaddy’s biggest selling point is their extremely affordable pricing. They are known to price their plans competitively as they have a user base that allows them to really go as low as possible. So if you are looking to build one or many websites and you are on a budget, GoDaddy might be the place for you.

GoDaddy’s help desk is also very friendly and easily contactable. They also give you helpful hints on how you can optimize your plan with them.

The downside of GoDaddy

One of the biggest disadvantages of GoDaddy is that it has hundreds, even thousands of configurations and options and it is difficult to navigate them all as the Plesk interface is certainly not the friendliest in the industry (cPanel is considered to be better by most users).

Additionally, many individual features which one gets free at other shared hosting providers are not enabled by default at GoDaddy and they have to be individually purchased for small fees that tend to add up.

Auto-renewal for domains that are enabled on the shared hosting plan is also not set up by default. GoDaddy sometimes has trouble with delivering notification emails for domains which are about to expire and you may end up losing your domain if you are not careful and do not set this up manually in the beginning.

I recommend GoDaddy

While GoDaddy may not be loved by all, being that they’re the most popular web host online, they must be doing something right. They kind of do it all, too – anything you might need for your online venture, GoDaddy will almost definitely be able to provide it.

Plus, at a low monthly cost, you might consider giving them a go. If you end up running in to any difficulties, their customer support is always there to help you as well. You can start with their $1.99 domain names as advertised here.