GoDaddy Review

With more than a thousand website hosting services out there, it’s pretty difficult to find a host that’s perfect for your needs.

At first glance, GoDaddy is great, having low prices and some great features.

But if you look at customer reviews and feedback, you’ll see some polarized opinions, too.

So what is the case exactly with GoDaddy? Should you sign up with them, or not?

Well, we want to help make the decision easier for you. So, we have signed up with GoDaddy to test their performance. We took a deep look at all their features and terms and wrote this definitive review to make it easier for you to know if GoDaddy meets your needs.

Let’s take a closer look.

General Info & Hosting Overview

Pros of Using GoDaddy Hosting

GoDaddy might be best known for being a domain registrar, but they have also figured out how to provide a decent hosting service.

Namely, they have delivered solid uptime and page speed over the last few years. In addition, they offer more than 125+ free integrations for your website, as well as helpful customer support.

And all things considered, their cheapest Economy plan has good value for money, too.

Here are the top things we liked about GoDaddy’s hosting.

1. Great Page Load Time at 295 ms

This might come as a bit of a surprise:

Our GoDaddy test site has shown a great average page loading time as low as 295 ms over the past 6 months.

This is somewhat surprising because years ago you wouldn’t associate cheaper web hosts like GoDaddy with performance as great as this.

And fast loading times aren’t just for vanity.

As a matter of fact, studies have shown that slow loading times can cause your visitors to leave the site faster. In turn, this hurts your search engine rankings (especially on mobile) and, of course, negatively impacts your conversion rates.

Unfortunately, as you won’t be able to change your web host’s server speed, it’s vital to consider 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, based on our tests, you won’t have to worry about page speed with GoDaddy hosting.

2. Over 125+ One-Click Install Applications

GoDaddy will let you install some powerful third-party integrations to your website. In fact, you can add over 125 of the most popular applications on the Internet – with just one click. That includes 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 have a good variety of options that suit everyone from beginning bloggers to more experienced web developers. What’s useful for some 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.

3. Basic Cheap Plan is Good Value (for a Single Basic Website)

When we originally reviewed GoDaddy (in 2017), their cheapest shared hosting plan was too expensive, and the features were really limited. At least compared to the competition.

Now, though, it seems they’ve done a 180-degree turn. Currently, the Economy plan pricing is only $2.99/month with a 12-month contract.

But for such a low price, do you actually get any value?

Well, yes. You get one website, up to 100 GB of storage, and unmetered bandwidth. Also, you’ll get a free domain with any annual plan, and free Office 365 Email for the first year. All these features are really useful and not every host offers them as part of their cheapest plan.

The overall value you’re getting from GoDaddy’s Economy Plan for a single basic website is good, considering that it’s insanely cheap.

However, despite some remarkable features and a great price, you will have to make a few compromises with GoDaddy, too. It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you realize it’s not as good as it might seem. We’ll discuss this more in detail in the next section.

4. Good Uptime at 99.97%

GoDaddy delivers quite average uptime on their shared hosting plans. Their 6-month average uptime is 99.97%.

An uptime rate of 99.97% means about an hour and a half of downtime per year, which is not too bad compared to some other hosts we’ve reviewed.

Last 6-month average uptime:

• June 2024:99.94%
• May 2024:99.98%
• April 2024: 100%
• March 2024: 99.91%
• February 2024: 100%
• January 2024: 99.96%

Throughout several years, their uptime has been consistently decent.

Cons of Using GoDaddy Hosting

Although the value for GoDaddy’s cheapest plan seems good at first, you’ll find some problems once you look closer.

In fact, their low prices somewhat contribute to the problems. Namely, the cheapest plan lacks a few important features and there are a lot of upsells throughout the checkout process. Also, the renewal pricing will be much higher than the first-term discount.

In addition to that, we didn’t exactly enjoy GoDaddy’s slightly confusing and vague money-back guarantee, either.

So, here are the biggest cons we found, discussed in more detail.

1. Base Plan Lacks Critical Features (No SSL Certificate, Security, or Site Migrations)

The top hosts we’ve reviewed will throw in features like an SSL certificate on every plan. In fact, these have become commonplace and are pretty much required to run a site today.

Unfortunately, GoDaddy doesn’t offer any of the mentioned features in their base plans.

Let’s take a look at SSL certificates for example. Unless you’re already paying for GoDaddy’s most expensive plan, this feature will cost you:

To be honest:

These prices are a bit too much. Especially as most hosts today will give you a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for each and every one of your sites.

In addition to all that, there’s another common feature that GoDaddy doesn’t offer for free:

Site migrations.

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 managed migrations. This feature will cost $99.99 per site and per database, and it takes 7–10 business days. So it’s not just expensive but also slow.

If you add all of these extra costs up over the course of a few years then GoDaddy hosting doesn’t look that cheap anymore.

2. Lots of Upsells

All the lacking features that we discussed above, lead to a lot of upsells during the signup process. In fact, GoDaddy has become somewhat infamous for upselling. The reason for offering so many upsells is to increase the final price that you’re going to pay, as the initial plan prices are absurdly low.

The first upsell that you’ll run into has got to do with the monthly cost of the hosting plan. Based on the duration of your chosen plan, the amount that you will prepay can vary greatly.

A short, three-month plan has a significant monthly cost: $10.99/month. So, for the best value, you might have to sign up for 12, 24, or 36 months instead.

With such offers, you might be tempted to get a longer plan right away. But this means you’ll have to invest a larger sum of money upfront, making a much longer commitment.

And this is just the first of many upsells.

As discussed above, you’ll see upsells for 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.

And as if that wasn’t enough.

3. Inconsistent Customer Support

One feature that we’re always happy to see is 24/7/365 customer support. GoDaddy offers exactly that. They have a live chat, a great network of international phone support in a number of languages, and a decent knowledge base.

So, to test out their live chat support, we asked them a few basic questions about the site backups.

The outcome?

Inconsistent. We were first connected to the bot and to reach a customer support agent we had to wait for five minutes due to higher volume than usual. Waiting five minutes is not too bad compared to our last try when we had to wait over 40 minutes (!). Once we got the conversation going, our questions were answered in a timely manner.

In the past, we’ve had also a good customer support experience where we got connected to the customer support rep in a few minutes and got knowledgeable replies.

Overall, however, GoDaddy’s customer support is a bit unpredictable (you’ll never know if you’ll get a quick response or have to wait for almost an hour).

GoDaddy Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of GoDaddy’s hosting plans:

Quick Facts:

• Money-Back: A slightly 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 such as “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).”
• Upsells: A lot of upsells. Price variation for the initial term length, site migrations, SSL certificates, security, and more.
• Account Activation: Fast account activation.
• Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
• Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Lots of 1-click installation options with the most popular open-source apps.

Do We Recommend GoDaddy?

Yes, we do.

GoDaddy has fast page loading speeds. They work well with the most popular web apps you would want. And the initial pricing for the cheapest plans is still good value despite lacking several important features.

GoDaddy offers many upsells for basic features that you’d assume were just included for free (SSL, security, etc.). Adding any one of these might double the cost of your plan. But together, they could easily end up costing you significantly more than other web hosting providers.

Their uptime is reliable.

So while GoDaddy’s overall performance is good, they do have some drawbacks. However, they’re still a trustworthy host.

Visit www.GoDaddy.com

Do you have any personal experience with GoDaddy – positive or negative? If so, please leave us an honest, transparent review below!