GoDaddy Review

LATEST TESTING UPDATE: 9-15-2010

NOTE: As I’ve said, the point of this site is honest help in an ocean of filled with sharks. I’m not in this to make money or friends. I call them as I see them for the benefit of my readers. All GoDaddy testing has reached a point where I confidently direct readers to look elsewhere regardless of their needs. I have not found anything, after more two years of testing, that GoDaddy does well other than marketing itself. Their Linux servers are a slow. Their “grid” is a ridiculous. Their customer service inadequate, incompetent and, especially with someone who knows what they are doing, rude. And their reseller accounts provide you with an opportunity to pay them good money to attempt to sell their inferior products.

GoDaddy wasn’t always this bad; in fact, they were once pretty darn good. Their transition to offering their mainline customers “grid” service has been, in my opinion, a total failure. But not all is doom and gloom. At least they are nominally honest, only exaggerating their services a significant amount and trying every conceivable method to trick you into purchasing things you don’t want. This is actually more than I can say for a few other “name companies” out there.

I’ve since moved on from those free hosting days, but I still have accounts with GoDaddy. Why? Well, there are some great reasons to go with GoDaddy, now more than ever.

I still have testing accounts open at GoDaddy. If they ever improve, I’ll let you know.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am a tough grader (that also means that if you see a really good rating you know I meant it). Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:
Pricing:
Speed and Uptime:
Bandwidth and Storage:
Power Rating:
Customer Service:
Ease of Use:
Overall:

Hosting Plans and Scalability:  

I always put this rating first because it is so important and GoDaddy has the potential to eventually reach a 5 star here once they finish up the beta of their grid service. Well, GoDaddy did more than finish up their beta, they completely screwed it up, cramming so many accounts onto the same grid that you might as well send your site data via Morris code. Don’t worry, for only $99 a month to start, you can move your terribly performing site to their new cloud hosting. Please note that GoDaddy gets a 4 out of 5 here because that’s an accurate rating for the variability and scalability of their service (though you must scale by your own devices; don’t expect help). This is not in any way an endorsement of how these various options or scalability function, which is poor.

Two other types of hosting they offer are a plan that is specifically designed for WordPress users. From their marketing information: “Harness the combined power of WordPress® and Go Daddy Web Hosting to create your own personal, state-of-the-art Internet blog. The WordPress publishing platform has thousands of free plugins, hundreds of free themes and is completely customizable. WordPress and Go Daddy Web Hosting – the winning combination for your blog.”

The other type of plan that they offer is reselling. You can read my review of this here:

One other thing of note here, regarding scalability, is that if you end up going to grid computing, you will have to move your site yourself, although I was assured by a customer representative that they will help in the transfer.

Never mind all that other stuff. You don’t need it.

Pricing:  

Pricing is very competitive. You can, of course, get cheaper hosting, but it’s hard to imagine hosting done more cheaply. They offer every domain extension under the sun and usually for very good prices.

Speed and Uptime:  

  If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a thousand times, ALL HOSTS GO DOWN and experience slow times.  That is simply the way it is.  That said, GoDaddy is very good.  I have their uptime at 99.98% for 2009, and their servers are quite fast, pretty much competitive with the few top-of-the-line hosts out there.  Their grid service is not as fast as I expect from grid, but that probably has something to do with why it is still in beta stage. GoDaddy, since switching to what should have been a much better “grid” system, is now completely incompetent in this area. I have two test sites running under different accounts and if they weren’t pointless test sites I’d be furious. Databases get randomly disconnected from the servers and both sites, when available, are arguably the slowest I’ve tested. Strangely, the other company I would put in this same, bottom-class level also claims to offer their customers “grid” service, POWWeb.

Bandwidth and Storage:  

  I hate this one because people tend to want to emphasize their “unlimited” packages.  Remember that with shared hosting you can’t get “unlimited” bandwidth no matter how many times the hosting companies advertise it.  You only get so many resources allocated for your site.  On the other hand, there is one rare exception to this rule.  With the beta GoDaddy grid, you get unlimited use of resources, unlimited compute cycles.  I have to think they’ll limit that once the product goes to its new status.  Otherwise, the bandwidth and storage offered by GoDaddy is near the top. And with GoDaddy, it hardly matters how much “bandwidth” you are allotted since 48kb takes about a minute to load. Technically, by their stated limits, GoDaddy should get a 4 here, but since you couldn’t download the stated limits if that was your only goal in life (you’d die of old age first), they lose a point.

Power Rating:  

I don’t even know what to put here anymore. Any sort of power is only theoretical with them. If you need power, just go to either Media Temple or Ultrahosting, but preferably Media Temple.

Customer Service:  

Customer support is 24/7 by both telephone and email ticket.  I’ve called GoDaddy customer support several times, and the wait time has always been minimal, and the people I talk to are friendly and knowledgeable, unless you have a real problem and know more about it than they do.  Then you might as well just drive to Arizona and fix their servers yourself. But that’s they way of all hosting companies. On the bright side, I was never transferred around.  At one point when I had a site go down for no apparent reason (beta grid), I was placed on hold while my representative conferred with a technician.  When the rep came back, he said, “Try it again,” and sure enough it worked.  I would give GoDaddy a 5 here except that their customer service line is not toll free.  While that has no impact on me because of my cell phone plan, it could cause problems for others.

Ease of Use:  

Whenever I go around and read about people’s experiences with GoDaddy, there are two things that stand out beyond everything else:  One, that they are confusing to use; and two, that they are confusing to use.

There is some truth to this.  The last time I signed up a GoDaddy account for a client, which was in April of 2009, I went to the site and registered the requested domain and navigated the ads they throw up for “add-ons” and thought I had declined everything.  When I got to the check out page, I was presented with over $3000 in charges–FOR REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME!

It was easy enough just to deselect all the extras, and I found it pretty funny, actually, but for a new website owner, that would probably be pretty scary.  And I do think that the sales process is intentionally tricky, but I think it is probably a little trickier than they imagine that it is.  I don’t think they really wanted to trick me into paying $3000 for a domain name.

Once you have properly purchased what you need (and only what you need), users still complain about confusing control panels, but I haven’t seen a problem there.  You may have to get used to their set-up, but that is the same with any host.  I don’t find their panels difficult at all.  To be sure, they are different from everyone else, but you just have to look around a little bit, and you’ll find your way pretty quickly.

Really, they get a bad rep here where I don’t think it is fully deserved.  They simply are not that hard to use, and they have plenty of one-click installations of the stuff you are likely wanting to run.  If I were rating this just for me, I’d give them 5 out of 5 stars, but since other people seem to find them confusing, I’ll go ahead and hedge downward.

Overall:  

I think that GoDaddy is a host that I would recommend for pretty much any of their hosting plans, from shared and reseller to grid and dedicated.  And if you are looking to host one site (for the time being) that needs a lot of power, I would make GoDaddy’s grid service your top selection.  In any event, the incredible ability to scale your hosting to almost any need you could ever imagine having makes GoDaddy a very smart choice.

Only use GoDaddy if you’re into bondage. Now I have to go back and fix every post I’ve ever mentioned them in. Someone kill me.

Was this review helpful for you?  Are you crazy enough to still want to give them a try? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below: