GoDaddy review – pros and cons, speed and uptime
GoDaddy is an American domain registration and hosting company. It is possible to purchase regular hosting, domain mail, website builder, WordPress hosting, VPS and dedicated servers. Let’s consider what are the advantages and disadvantages of this service, to whom it can suit and what opportunities it has.
Pros and cons of GoDaddy
GoDaddy Hosting has mixed reviews. On the one hand, the company has established itself as a reliable partner in terms of domain registration: over 80 million domain names are in service. GoDaddy has been on the market for more than 20 years, which indicates its good competitiveness and stability.
On the other hand, many users are not satisfied with the quality of hosting services. Webmaster practitioners note that web hosting is not a priority, but an additional direction of GoDaddy, and therefore many technologies have not yet been finalized.
Advantages and strengths of GoDaddy:
- providing domain registration, selection, renewal services, domain broker at a high level;
- it is possible to register domains in any zones, including those that are not available to large Russian registrars like REG;
- CMS auto-installation option;
- high uptime and good site speed;
- more than 150 applications available for installation;
- the presence of a simple, intuitive website builder with functions for online sales;
- no traffic restrictions on all tariffs;
- free DDoS protection for virtual private servers.
Disadvantages and “pitfalls”:
- when registering, you need to specify the card details, pay immediately – the free trial period applies only to the website builder;
- few options for web development, it will be difficult to create multifunctional advanced sites;
- lack of a free SSL certificate on the basic plan: you need to pay $70 or more annually for a data encryption service, for example, Wildcard SSL costs $369.99 per year;
- most of the services that competitors offer for free, GoDaddy offers for an additional fee: backup, virus protection
- no integration with CDN;
- no caching options;
- possible problems with technical support: employees are not always available in a chat during business hours, they cannot answer relatively simple questions, for example, how the tariffs differ from each other.
Is hosting easy to use?
To work with the site, the hosting offers the cPanel control panel for Linux and Plesk for Windows. According to some users, the panel is not user-friendly. Of the advantages, there are options for installing and auto installing CMS: WordPress, Joomla, CloudLinux OS and others, a total of 150 applications.
With Installatron, you can immediately install WordPress and start creating content. If you want to create a self-written site on your own code, GoDaddy supports MySQL, Python, PHP.
The process of registering in the service and subscribing to a tariff plan is intuitive. Hosting provides an A-record to connect the domain. It is important at this stage to take a screenshot of the A-record, or save it in another way so as not to lose data.
Some users had difficulties due to the internal technical flaws of the panel. For example, at the registration stage, it is not always possible to get into the section for connecting a domain. In this case, you need to contact technical support, dictate or write a client number, employees should help with domain binding.
After registering and making a payment, you may encounter a risk when the system mistakenly recognizes the user’s account as fraudulent. In this case, you will need to verify your identity. If you do not track the notification in time, the account along with the site may be deleted without the knowledge of the webmaster.
Download speed
The site loading speed depends on the hosting servers and on the actions of the webmaster to optimize the web resource.
Webmasters who have tested sites with Google’s load speed tool have reported good results, up to 1.3 seconds. But such a figure does not work for absolutely all sites.
Test data from another webmaster:
- The average load time for a site hosted by GoDaddy, according to testing on GTmetrix is 2.94 seconds. The fastest loading time is 2.2 seconds, the longest is 5 seconds.
- The average load time for users from other geos, according to testing on Sucuri is 4.16 seconds. The fastest download time from other countries is 3.83 seconds, the longest is 4.5 seconds.
Slow speed affects the fact that most users close the site without waiting for it to load and go to other competitor sites. When choosing GoDaddy as your provider, it is important to consider that less optimized sites may load slower.
The uptime, or period of time a site is available, is 99.97%, as measured by UptimeRobot. In general, the work of sites is characterized by high speed.
Some webmasters note that despite a good uptime indicator, there are problems with downtimes – periods when the site is unavailable. About once every one or two weeks, the site was unavailable for a few minutes. Competitors GoDaddy, this figure is on average 5 times lower.
The company has several data centers in different regions: India, Asia, Europe, USA. The exact cities where the servers are located are not advertised. It is possible to choose a data center, but there are no guarantees and no idea on which server the site will work better.
GoDaddy Pricing & Plans
GoDaddy offers several web hosting plans for Linux and Windows. All tariffs provide unlimited network bandwidth – there are no restrictions on traffic.
This can be identified as a separate competitive advantage of GoDaddy. Most providers limit traffic depending on the selected tariff. Bandwidth can be especially important for interactive sites, video blogs, and online stores.
The basic plan includes one domain, one database, 30 GB of disk space. On other, more expensive tariffs, more databases, domains and memory are available, more disk space. The more expensive the tariff, the higher the amount of RAM and CPU power.
The cost of services per month on tariffs:
- Economy – $5.99;
- Deluxe – $7.99;
- Ultimate – $12.99
- Maximum – $19.99.
The site shows discounted prices if you take the service for the longest possible period. The shorter the subscription period, the more expensive the price. You can subscribe for 1, 3, 6 months or 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years. Payment is accepted from bank cards.
Tariff plans provide non-transparent information, which makes it difficult to choose a service. After reading the price list on the site, there is no understanding of how the tariff plan for business differs from the cheaper one. It is not obvious the differences between a special hosting for WordPress and a regular one, where you can also install WordPress. According to user reviews, if you ask these questions to technical support, there is a chance that you will not get the correct answer.
Test period and money back
A trial period of 30 days is provided, but only for the website builder. You can get a refund within the first 30 days if you purchased a package for a year, and within 48 hours if you paid for 1 month. When returning, commissions may be withheld, for example, for domain registration. Payments for cloud servers, auction domains, domain brokers, and other products are not eligible for refunds.
Additional paid options
When connecting any tariff plan, the service includes additional paid options that you need to explore. If they are not needed, they should be discarded. Otherwise, the hosting will start charging for them automatically. Many of these services are called free, such as free Office 365 mail, but in fact, they cost nothing only in the first year.
Considering that many important services such as backup, and SSL-certificate at the initial rates are offered for an additional cost, GoDaddy cannot be called a profitable and cheap provider. Affordable prices may be offered at the beginning of work, but after the renewal of services, their cost rises sharply.
GoDaddy Alternatives
As alternatives to GoDaddy hosting, you can consider InterServer, Reg, Timeweb, Liquid Web, HostGator.
Conclusion
GoDaddy’s services can be used for small sites without complex functionality, or for temporary projects to test overseas hosting options. It is worth considering possible disadvantages and features: the likelihood of low download speeds, not always responsive technical support. Purchasing and registering a domain from GoDaddy can be profitable and successful as the company specializes more in domain names.
