As you may know GoDaddy is one of the oldest hosting companies in the world as well as domain provider on the market at this moment. They were founded long time ago in 1997 and today they have profit more than 2 billion $. From the available information it is evident that they currently have a market share of 15% just for SSL certificates which is huge. As well everyone who is in the website business has heard once or twice about GoDaddy.
But in reality how good is the most popular host provider from USA. What kind of the performance and the price offers to the users? So we have extensively tested GoDaddy hosting provider and at the same time we have compared it with other hosting providers.
Pros
- Fast modular system
- Website editor with simple UI
- 1 click installer
- Amazing look
- SEO pack for users
- Great customer support
- Super stable 99.9%
Easy to Use
GoDaddy hosting provider is very easy to use, and you will see why we are telling you that now. Normally they have one-click installation options for over 160 free applications with cPanel and they have at the same time also over 60 free applications with Parallels Plesk for Windows. Besides that the file manager, database manager, and space manager are clear and very easy can be used including beginners. Also if you did not know tools like online file manager are not common at hosting providers. It does not have all functions but still you can do more or less everything you need for any website project. However it is also equipped with more than the standard options, they also have features for advanced users.
Price
When we think about price GoDaddy is somewhere in the lower middle compared to other hosting providers. They have hosting plans at around 8$ per month for the cheapest hosting package and it can go up to 38$ per month for the their best super fast package. So you can see the prices are more high than the low cost providers for example like Bluehost, whether this is justified or not you will find out soon from our review.
As well you need to know that the essential SSL certificate is only available from the second package, therefore for the cheapest package you will not be able to get it for free. However there is the posibilty for business hosting option. The name of the option at first may be a little confusing and it is not clear what it is about at first. But we can tell you that it is some kind of VPS which is managed by their tech team from a technical point of view. So this gives you the ability including functionality of a VPS which can work with a simple Cpanel.
Support
GoDaddy is registered by ICANN and this enables the company to supply many diferent website products including services. As well, the web hosting provider gives support 24/7, 365 days a year which is perfectly fine. As you could see hosting provider GoDaddy offers all services related to online business from low cost web hosting plans, domain registration, to the very demanding website solutions. They also says that they do not handle outsourcers which is good to know. They completly own and maintain data centers. Because of that this allows the company to offer great protection to customers. So we can say that GoDaddy systems include many diferent secure modern plans, but also network redundancy including on-site customer support.
Performance
If you compare with other hosting providers GoDaddy is one of only a few hosting companies which guarantee to customers 99.9% uptime , which in the worst case can mean downtime of 8 hours and 20 minutes in one year. This is quite amazing in comparison with other hosting providers such as Bluehost.
With every hosting company we test, we use a testing website with the average WordPress installation including several number of different plugins. We want to have very similar testing situation to the average functioning website based on WordPress system. We always ask customer support if they can tell us a WordPress optimization plugins that could help additionally regarding speed including the loading speed. Because every hosting provider needs to get the chance to make a good first impression on customer.
GoDaddy customer support recommended us to install plugin called the Smush plugin for WordPress, this plugin compresses images in WordPress without loss of photo quality, but at the same time the image size is much smaller, and thanks to that the loading speed is much higher. We must admit that was a good suggestion from them, but unfortunately the only one.
During testing the average load time of our WordPress website on GoDaddy was total 2.93 seconds while the average global load time was total 4.330 seconds. Let be honest the website loading time must be less than 2 seconds, because everything else is too slow. Therefore unfortunately we are not entirely satisfied with the speed, we can assume that the same server is used by many other users, so it is most likely overloaded.
GoDaddy has three data centers from which you can choose, but for some reason hosting provider GoDaddy makes data center locations such a secret that you can not know where exactly are located. We only know they are locatedin USA, Europe and Asia. Most of the other hosting providers give more information about the location of the data centers, in which city it is, which capacity and similar information.
Summary
Hosting provider GoDaddy is located in USA and has been on the market for many years now and they have sales in the billions of US $ which is amazing. In their offer their services are made for everyone from shared hosting plans to VPS including dedicated servers. When we speak about performance we can tell you that is ok and they provide a stable servers. All in all GoDaddy is an average host provider which positions itself in the somewhere in the middle considering price and performance.