GoDaddy Review 2023: Expert Rated 4.4/5

What Are the Pros and Cons of GoDaddy Hosting?

GoDaddy has a stable reputation as one of the biggest companies in the hosting industry, but that it also has it’s own drawback as well.

Pros of GoDaddy

1. Household name: GoDaddy, one of the most recognized web companies in the world, has a solid overall reputation.
2. Customer service: GoDaddy has always put customer service and technical support first, which is exactly what many people who are newer to running websites will need.
3. Diverse hosting options: Whether you need entry-level shared hosting, a dedicated server, or something in between, you will find it at GoDaddy.
4. Easy-to-use interface: From their front page to the back-end control panel, GoDaddy does a great job at making it easy to navigate to what you need.
5. Good system resources: While not the cheapest, GoDaddy’s hosting options offer generous system resources to ensure your site will run properly.
6. Free domain name: It is no surprise that GoDaddy offers a free domain name with your hosting since it is the world’s largest domain name registration company.
7. Reliable hosting: GoDaddy has done an impressive job at improving its hosting solutions over the years and today, it offers fast and reliable solutions for any type of website.

Cons of GoDaddy

1. Expensive: GoDaddy’s prices are quite a bit higher than most other hosting providers, especially on entry-level hosting packages.
2. Security: While GoDaddy keeps its servers safe, it is not as clear what measures are specifically taken to protect your site’s data.
3. Refund guarantee: GoDaddy only offers a 48-hour money-back guarantee if you sign up for a month-to-month hosting package. If you opt for an annual payment option, you will have a 30-day money-back guarantee.
4. Upselling: If you have ever used GoDaddy for domain name registration, you likely remember the checkout process where you are offered many different upgrade options. It is not much different with web hosting. GoDaddy tries to upsell you with various things that you likely don’t need.

GoDaddy may be the best web host for: Individuals, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and e-commerce websites.

Easy-to-use website-building tools

GoDaddy offers some of the best website-building tools in the industry. I’ve found these tools are effective and simple to use, so you can make a site regardless of your experience level.

Whether you are looking to build a website on the WordPress platform or want something more customized, it is all possible thanks to GoDaddy’s website builder tools included with the hosting packages.

Ability to use GoDaddy Payments for both online and offline sales

GoDaddy Payments is an innovative solution that this company makes available to all its customers. It will allow you to set up POS devices (credit card terminals, for example) in your physical store and take online payments on your website. This way, no matter where you make a sale, it comes through one easy-to-use platform. This will also help streamline your accounting since everything will be in one place.

Daily backup available

Even entry-level hosting packages at GoDaddy provide daily backup options so you can be confident that your data is always kept safe. This is often a premium service at other hosting companies, so it is nice that GoDaddy recognizes the importance of backing up your site’s data.

Use of GoDaddy’s e-commerce tools

GoDaddy has a lot of different tools made specifically for e-commerce websites. The GoDaddy Payments feature is just the beginning. You will have access to these tools to build your e-commerce business successfully.

Some of the e-commerc;e-focused tools I was most impressed with:

• Online pay links: GoDaddy makes it easy to create links that you can use so customers can more easily pay for your products or services.
• E-commerce hosting: You will have several hosting options specifically set up for e-commerce sites to give you the best performance possible.
• Online store tools: Once you set up your e-commerce site, you can use these tools to run sales, display prices, and much more.
• Low payment fees: When using GoDaddy’s payment options, your transaction fees online will be 2.3% + $.30, which is lower than most other payment gateways out there. GoDaddy does not require contracts. It also does not have any setup fees or other hidden costs.

Free one-year domain name registration

It is not surprising that you will get a free domain name for a year when you purchase hosting at GoDaddy, but it is certainly a nice feature. This will help you to save some money when getting your website started. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registration company, so you can be confident that you’re registering with pros.

Email through Microsoft 365

Rather than hosting domain-specific email addresses through its own servers, GoDaddy has partnered with Microsoft for this feature. Microsoft 365 is a cloud service with helpful features, including email management. You can create and access your site’s email addresses quickly and easily. I have been using the Microsoft 365 platform for years and absolutely love it, so I’m confident that you will appreciate how easy it will be to manage your email this way.

Daily malware scan

Malware is a big threat to online businesses, and GoDaddy takes that seriously. All of the hosting services from GoDaddy come with a daily malware scan that looks at all your files and folders to ensure nothing has been infected. This will protect your site and all the visitors to your site, which is extremely important.

Ability to hire an expert

An impressive feature that you will not find at most hosting companies is GoDaddy’s “Hire-an-Expert” option. It has a team of developers, marketing professionals, website designers, and others that you can hire if you need assistance with anything. This is an ideal feature for those who want to make a wonderful website but may not want to handle all aspects of managing it. While this feature is not free, it does give you reasonably-priced access to experts on an as-needed basis.

Uptime and reliability

GoDaddy offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and consistently meets or exceeds those levels. Unfortunately, it seems that GoDaddy has blocked external site monitoring tools for the last several years, which makes it very difficult to get up-to-date information. As you can see from the image below, it had great uptime and reliability for years before blocking this information.

Why would GoDaddy block testing?

While it is unfortunate that GoDaddy blocks the ability of people to perform certain types of tests against their site, it is not an indication of a problem. GoDaddy is one of the largest and most recognizable companies in the industry. Extremely popular companies like this often take steps to prevent ping tests and other similar things because the number of tests that people run against them can cause problems.

Site response times

GoDaddy’s servers are very responsive, ensuring your site will load up quickly for all your visitors. I ran tests on a GoDaddy-hosted website and it got an “A” ranking with good overall response times.

On the site load tests that I performed, the site was fully loaded in an average of 1.81 seconds, which is well within the acceptable range. It is not the fastest hosting provider, but as long as a site loads in under two seconds, it will not cause problems or frustration with visitors.

Daily malware scans

All hosting packages come with a free daily malware scan. This automated feature will see if your site has been infected with any type of malware. If there is a problem, it will notify you so you can either take care of it yourself or work with GoDaddy’s support team.

Backing up data

If you do run into a problem with your site, GoDaddy offers daily backup service with its hosting packages. You can restore your site in just minutes without worrying about a thing. Many hosting companies charge for this type of service.

You can get in touch with GoDaddy customer and technical support anytime you want, 24/7/year-round. I’ve always experienced friendly and helpful support from GoDaddy. You can get in touch with them via email, live chat, or phone based on your preference.

While there are many hosting companies that offer reliable customer support, GoDaddy stands out with its self-help and educational products. It has created hundreds of videos and tutorials that will help you to learn everything necessary about running a website.

This includes not just the technical side of how to create and host a site but also tips about marketing, SEO, e-commerce, and much more. If you want your site to be a success, I highly recommend taking the time to browse through the informational videos.

You can read GoDaddy’s newsroom page to see all of the updates, but the following are a few that really jumped out at me:

• Payments solution: GoDaddy launched an innovative payments solution that connects offline payment terminals with online sites to make commerce easier for millions of customers.
• GoDaddy invoicing and payments: It has included new ways for website owners to send invoices and payments to customers, an excellent addition for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
• Google partnership: GoDaddy collaborated with Google to provide tools and information that can help website owners to boost their online sales.
• WooCommerce extensions: GoDaddy released many new and innovative extensions for WooCommerce websites to improve the overall experience.

What is interesting about GoDaddy’s improvements is that they cover many things and are not just focused on web hosting or domain name registration. This company is taking a holistic approach to its long-term strategy, which should serve its customers well.

Compare GoDaddy Alternatives

There is a lot to love about GoDaddy, but this company is not for everyone. Looking at alternatives is an ideal way to learn which one will provide you with the best possible hosting experience.

Check out some of the top GoDaddy competitors and see if one will work better for your web hosting needs.

How I Rated GoDaddy

Whenever I am rating web hosting companies, I do my best to take a comprehensive look at all aspects of the hosting services provided as well as the company itself. In this case, that meant looking not only at the hosting services that GoDaddy provides but also its domain name registration services and the fact it has such a long and positive history as a company.

To do this, I looked closely at all the different services offered, including each level of hosting available. I also looked at its reputation in recent years, which has improved when it comes to hosting services. Finally, I ran tests on its hosting services using objective third-party tools to get a clear picture of how good its hosting is.

Since I am rating GoDaddy as a web hosting services provider, I factored certain things into its overall rating more heavily. For example, I looked at the reliability of the hosting services and server response times very closely since those are the most important considerations when choosing a hosting company. I also evaluated (and was quite impressed by) GoDaddy’s customer support.

While GoDaddy is undoubtedly an iconic company that helped build the foundations of the Internet as we know it today, it struggled to build up its web hosting solutions. For many years, its hosting services were sub-par and only became popular because of the fact that so many people used GoDaddy to register their domains. Over the past several years, however, the company has done a lot to improve its hosting services. Today, the hosting options from GoDaddy rival most of the other top-tier options in the industry.

While GoDaddy needs to keep its focus on providing exceptional hosting, I don’t think there is any reason to avoid its services. This is especially true for small businesses, entrepreneurs, social media influencers, and others who need shared or VPS hosting. Keeping your hosting and domain name registration services together at GoDaddy will make things easier for you. With all the improvements that GoDaddy has made, you will undoubtedly have a great overall experience.