Godaddy Review

Since 1999, GoDaddy has been growing into the largest domain name registrar and one of the largest web hosting service provider around the world. It provides more than 40 offerings, from domain names, web hosting and website builders to complete eCommerce solutions. With almost 14 years’ continuous development in this industry, there are more than over 54 million domain names under its management and over 10.7 million customers choose GoDaddy services.

GoDaddy Review on Features

GoDaddy gives people an impression of providing cheap hosting. In fast, it hasn’t been true since 2008. Let’s take Godaddy Economy package as an example. With $4.24/mo, people will only get 10 GB Space, 10 MySQL Databases, and 10 Email Account. No free domain, no shell access and PHP memory_limited is only 32MB.

Besides this, GoDaddy oversell its web servers a lot. According to the data from Netcraft, over 2500 domains are hosted in one server, which almost doubles what its competitors do.

And let’s compare GoDaddy with Bluehost (www.bluehost.com). As a professional Linux hosting service provider, Bluehost has been offering a deep discount to its solution with 50% off since 2008, which makes its award-winning solution at $3.95/month. With this low price, its customer will receive 1 free domain, unlimited disk space, unlimited MySQL Database, unlimited email account, shell access, free cPanel, and much more. Not say the better service Bluehost provides.

GoDaddy Review on Speed and Uptime

As a company led by business people instead of technical geeks, it’s hard to expect real innovation technology and high uptime from GoDaddy. A recent outage happened on 10th Sep, 2012, the issue last for one whole day. The data center were hacked and millions of domains were offline.

In terms of speed, people could find tons of complaints on Godaddy server speed in all kinds of web hosting forum. The reason should be they oversell the service too much and cannot guarantee a good performance. So how can Godaddy becomes the largest web hosts in the industry? Its simply because they offer free hosting service to each domain registered through them, most of the domain use Godaddy service are either low traffic or no traffic (park to domain). If you really want to build a site, it would be a good idea to consider the other options.

GoDaddy Review on Customer Support

GoDaddy support staffs are available to its customers by 24/7 phone and email support. Customers can contact GoDaddy at anytime if they had problems or search answers in its Forums. By the way, GoDaddy does not provide live chat support.

The types of customer support Godaddy offers are pretty typical. Without Live Chat support really brings a lot of inconvenience when seeking for help.

But the worse thing about Godaddy customer support is that GoDaddy only offers basic hosting support, if your web applications meet the issue to run in their web server, you will have to analyze the issues by yourself or you pay for the help from Godaddy. This is really unbelievable, especially nowadays more and more web hosts starts offer complete support to its customers.

To be honestly, we didn’t seen any improvement on Godaddy Customer support in the past 8 years.

GoDaddy Review on Ease-to-Use

It has to be mentioned that the control panel of GoDaddy provided is its own proprietary control panel instead of the most popular icon-based cPanel.

GoDaddy hosting control panel is divided into Windows hosting control panel and Linux hosting control panel. There is no big difference between the two panels.

Compared with cPanel or Plesk, Godaddy control panel is relatively difficult to use. It’s hard to find the functions through the navigation. But consider its icon-based features and powerful functions included, Godaddy hosting server is not difficult to manage even it takes some learning effort.

GoDaddy Review on Pricing

There is no doubt that GoDaddy offer cheap domain registration service. But when coming to hosting, its price are much higher.

GoDaddy Deluxe plan includes close features as Bluehost, and its price is sold at $5.09/month, which is around 30% more expensive than Bluehost. It’s really hard for us to say Godaddy has a good price.

If you are really looking for a web hosting solution, then you could consider the packages in Best Linux Hosting, Best Windows Hosting, Best VPS Hosting or Best Dedicated Server, all of them will offer you better price value and customer support than Godaddy.

Is GoDaddy Recommended?

Godaddy hosting is not recommended and this conclusion comes from the analysis on its features, price value, customer support, reliability, and server speed. To know more about GoDaddy, please visit www.godaddy.com.