Go Daddy Review

Full review

If you've searched the internet for website hosting reviews, you'll probably be surprised by the number of contradictory reviews. GoDaddy is now a well recognized brand and you'll struggle to find a more popular website hosting company.

Its highly likely that you will have seen one of GoDaddy television commercials. Beyond the attention grabbing marketing, is actually a well-run and finely tuned website hosting company.

Hosting

GoDaddy provides three different website hosting packages - economy, deluxe and ultimate. Hosting is 4GH, claiming a scalable, secure and fast hosting experience. Each differ in the amount of hosting space, websites, email accounts and databases you can have in each package. You can choose whether you want a Linux or Windows operating system and specify how long you want to sign-up for.

Economy at GoDaddy offers you 10GB hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, 100 email accounts. The Deluxe package gives you 150GB of space, unlimited websites and bandwidth, plus 500 email accounts. Ultimate includes unlimited websites, space and bandwidth plus 1000 email accounts, premium DNS, site scanner, SSL certificate and fixed IP address. All the packages give MySQL Databases and free Google, Bing/Yahoo! and Facebook Ad Credits up to a certain limit. GoDaddy guarantee a service uptime of 99%. If this level of service is not met, you can request a 5% credit from your monthly bill. During our testing we experienced no down time.

Domains

GoDaddy also provides domain registration services – in fact they host more than 30% of all domain names on the internet. If you’re looking for domain registration you’ll find GoDaddy does a good job or making the process simple and affordable. Features include private registration, use of a GeoDomainMap tool, a backorder domain registering service, discounts for bulk domain purchase and domain auctions for securing those high-value names. You can register domains in over 100 languages and transfer your domain to GoDaddy if you already have one.

If you register a domain name with GoDaddy you receive all you require to get online – a basic one-page website, an personalized email account, a photo album and a collection of starter guides. Other features come as standard such as domain locking and control over your DNS records.

Email

What’s a website without giving your readers the chance to get in touch? GoDaddy offers you a personalized email address so you don’t confuse people with strings of numbers or letters. GoDaddy has three email plans - personal, deluxe and unlimited. The personal option offers one address and 1GB of storage. Deluxe gives you five email addresses and 2GB of storage, while unlimited provides 10 (or more) addresses and unlimited storage. All offer mobile access on smartphones, iPhone, Blackberry and Droid. You can organize and access your emails easily and there’s a bunch of features like a calendar, file folder and fax through email.

Marketing & reporting

GoDaddy has an extensive shopping cart filled with SEO and Internet marketing services. You’ll find them easy to understand even if you’re not familiar with the SEO concept. According to GoDaddy, no technical skills are required though it does help to have a little knowledge so you know you’re making the most of the features. The premium plan allows you to upgrade with a number of extras including pay-per-click Google ads, local ads and a service from the GoDaddy ad people who also optimize the advertising results. There’s your own dedicated phone number and tracking and reporting features. You can set your own ad spend depending on your needs.

Ease of use

The GoDaddy site itself is easy to navigate and it takes you through all the steps to buying your website hosting services. Once you’ve spent your money, the GoDaddy experience is still reasonably simple to take advantage of. You will find it useful to have some knowledge of the website hosting process in order to create the most effective site. But many features offered by GoDaddy can be used without any prior experience or skills.

Help & support

Support for your website is very important, there is nothing more frustrating when your website experiences problems and you don't know who to contact or you don't receive a response.

GoDaddy provide telephone technical support 24/7. On the website where you'll find their number, it will give you an expected wait time. We noticed that this varies from 2 - 15 minutes. We gave them a call a few times and found them helpful and polite. GoDaddy also provides email support in the form of a ticketing system.

Overall

We really like the service and there are plenty of users who have been successfully using the service for many years.