GoDaddy Review

Company Information

GoDaddy is the single largest ICANN-accredited domain name registrar in the world and manages around 62 million domain names. It also offers web hosting and related services alongside domain registrations and auctions. Thus going by the market share, Go Daddy is the largest web hosting company in United States. It boasts of serving more than 13 million customers and has a huge employee base of around 4500 people in 14 facilities world-wide, including Arizona, California, Iowa, Washington, Europe, India and other parts of Asia.

GoDaddy was founded by Bob Parsons in 1997 as Jomax Technologies. In 1999, the name of the company was changed to “Go Daddy” and was later re-branded to “GoDaddy” in February 2006. In the last decade, the company has acquired several other players in web hosting and domain industry and operates as GoDaddy Group Inc. that also includes Wild West Domains and Blue Razor. Blake Irving is currently serving as the CEO of Godaddy Inc. The company has its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona. GoDaddy has a BBB (Better Business Bureau) rating of A+, which is enjoyed by only a select few providers in web hosting industry.

Go daddy has a notorious reputation for their Super Bowl commercials and sponsorship of NASCAR star Danica Patrick and other racy ads featuring women. In fact, most people in America who have nothing to do with web hosting or domain registration industry are also familiar with GoDaddy as a result of these commercials.
In June 2014, GoDaddy filed a 100 million IPO and eventually raised $460 million from this IPO in April 2015.

GoDaddy Hosting Products & Services

GoDaddy offers a complete product line, including domain registration, domain auctions, web hosting solutions, website creation tools, Ecommerce tools, SSL certificates, Email solutions and much more. The company has a wide range of web hosting offerings from Shared hosting and Managed WordPress hosting to VPS and Dedicated Servers, which makes it excellent choice not just for personal websites but large business websites also. The company also offers very flexible website builder plans.

Shared Hosting

GoDaddy is amongst very few web hosting companies that offer both Linux Shared hosting and Windows Plesk hosting. Which hosting you choose, depends on the specific requirements of your website and what you want to do with it. For example, if you want to install WordPress or other Web Apps, Linux is most recommended while for ASP and ASP.net technology, Windows is suitable.

The Shared Web Hosting plans come with 3 choices:

1. Economy Plan – Allows you to host only a single website
2. Deluxe Plan – Allows you to host unlimited websites and suitable for small personal or business websites
3. Ultimate Plan – Suitable for complex websites with high traffic requirements. An SSL certificate comes free for 1st year with this plan.

WordPress Hosting

With over 30% websites on web using WordPress as CMS, GoDaddy has come up with a web hosting platform especially designed to optimize WordPress performance and maintenance. This wordpress hosting environment is completely managed by GoDaddy team. It includes core updates, automated plugin updates, backups with option to restore using 1-click, malware scan and removal, protection against DDoS attacks etc. Customers also have access to full-blown staging environment. You can choose from 4 managed wordpress hosting plans – Basic, Deluxe, Ultimate and Developer starting from $3.99 a month and going up to $13.99 per month.

Cloud Servers

Go Daddy also offers Cloud servers with hourly pricing, which means that you pay only for the resources that you actually use. And there is a monthly price limit cap that you need to commit to. These cloud servers are highly scalable and use SSD drives and OpenStack powered KVM Virtualization. These are available only in GoDaddy’s US datacenter and you can choose from Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, CoreOS and Arch Linux operating systems.

Virtual Private Servers

GoDaddy has 3 types of virtual private server offerings that include Self-Managed, Managed and Fully Managed servers with a choice of CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu and Windows servers. All servers come with cPanel and root access. If you are a GoDaddy hosting customer and have outgrown shared web hosting, you can import your site to VPS with a 1-click VPS migration facility. For others, GoDaddy has a paid migration service. There are 5 price bands based on different storage and RAM settings.

Dedicated Servers

GoDaddy offers dedicated servers at very competitive prices. These are split into 5 price categories and include cPanel and WHM for managing your account. Also premium level support is provided for all dedicated server hosting accounts.

GoDaddy Website Builder

GoDaddy has a comprehensive offering of website building tools. Their Website Builder is very popular especially with beginners and small business owners. It is available in 3 different website builder packages – Personal, Business and Business Plus.

Go Daddy Website Builder has a very intuitive drag-and-drop user interface and includes over 300 professional templates populated with content. So you just need to replace this pre-populated content with your own content and your website is ready. It is that simple. Also the platform is WYSIWYG (i.e. What You See Is What You Get), so the layout you create in the website builder editor screen is exactly what shows up when your website is published. The editor screen is very well organized and offers a lot of control in the hands of the user. The only problem we find with the website builder is the inability to switch themes without losing your site content. It can be pretty annoying to add the content again whenever you pick a different theme for your website.

Other interesting features include 1-click Social Media Manager (to sync Facebook and Twitter feeds with your website), SEO Optimization and free SSL Certificate but, these are available only with higher end Business Plus plan.

GoDaddy Data Centers

GoDaddy has invested a lot in building state-of-art data centers across the globe. These are located at 9 different locations in United States, Europe and Asia. Their facility in Phoenix Arizona is around 270,000 square foot. The company uses highly sophisticated IT architecture and relies a lot on Open source technology. GoDaddy focuses on energy efficient and environment friendly datacenter designs. They use external power generators, redundant UPS systems, chilled water plants, N+1 air conditioning, fire protection, vascular scanning security system, integrated monitoring system etc.

Uptime & Performance

GoDaddy promises an uptime of 99.9%. Their secure and stable data centers and robust monitoring systems together with highly skilled administrators help to achieve this difficult goal with ease. In past, customers did face speed issues with Godaddy, and their service has significantly improved in this area in the last years.

Go Daddy regularly backs up customer websites at predefined intervals. Incremental backups are done daily with full site backups on a less frequent basis. 1-click backup restore option is available to customers with higher value plans, though others can purchase this facility at a small cost.

Customer Support

No matter how good the hosting service, you will need customer support at some point. GoDaddy support is available 24/7, all 365 days in a year. The customer support team can be reached via telephone, email or live chat. Telephone support is provided to global customers in over 50 countries through local phone numbers, including Australia, Canada, Singapore, India, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand, Malaysia etc. The list of these local telephone numbers is available on godaddy.com website. Live Chat option is available at the bottom right corner on the Help Center page.

GoDaddy Help Center accessible through their website includes articles and tutorials on various products like, Domains, Linux Hosting, Windows Hosting, SSL Certificates, Email, Online Store, Website Builder etc. These are extremely helpful for starters and also key to troubleshooting simple issues on your own.

Since, GoDaddy has a huge customer base, there are several active support forums and communities for Godaddy, where you can get help for minor problems. But we recommend that you reach out to the company technical support team in any event when you need help.

GoDaddy Cancellation Policy

GoDaddy observes a 45 day refund policy for all annual products. These include all web hosting and website builder plans. So you can get your money back, if you cancel within the first 45 days of purchase. After 45 days, you may still cancel your subscription, but you will receive an in-store credit for unused time (prorated based on date of purchase). Please note that for monthly products, the time window for refund is reduced to 48 hours. In all cases, Go Daddy expects you to furnish a reason for cancellation of service.