Overview
GoDaddy at a Glance
Established in 1997, GoDaddy has long been recognized as a pioneering domain and website hosting provider, merging professional reliability with a distinct, engaging brand personality. Known for its combination of humor and high-quality hosting services, GoDaddy offers an impressive blend of affordability, 99.9% uptime, and complimentary SSL certificates with most plans, making it an attractive choice for many.
GoDaddy caters to various hosting needs with a comprehensive range of hosting packages, including shared hosting, Managed WordPress, VPS, Dedicated Servers, and reseller hosting. The company boasts a global hosting center network, ensuring fast load times and enhanced customer satisfaction. Among its many benefits, GoDaddy provides unlimited and unmetered bandwidth, a free domain with annual plans, and complimentary Microsoft Office 365 business email for the first year.
In a significant stride towards the future of online business management, GoDaddy has introduced GoDaddy Airo™, an AI-powered platform designed to revolutionize how small business owners establish and grow their online presence. GoDaddy Airo™ offers an unmatched experience, enabling users to quickly transition from concept to online reality, facilitating business naming, website creation, and day-to-day operations through intuitive AI prompts.
Key Advantages of GoDaddy Airo™:
- Simplifies the process of naming a business, launching a modern, flexible website, and managing operations, all from the initial AI prompt.
- Empower small business owners to concentrate on brand building, customer engagement, and business growth like never before.
- Provides an AI-generated, custom logo that captures attention and makes a memorable impression.
- Assists in setting up an LLC quickly, saving hours of valuable time.
- Offers a free trial* of Professional Email, enabling domain-based email addresses (e.g., you@yourdomain.com).
- Facilitates the creation of branded emails and newsletters with ease.
- Enhances site visibility and traffic through AI-powered SEO optimization.
- Improves customer interaction and engagement with AI-generated responses in Web Chat.
- Requires no technical or design skills to use.
- Backed by award-winning 24/7 customer support.
- With the launch of GoDaddy Airo™, GoDaddy reaffirms its commitment to supporting small business owners by providing cutting-edge solutions that save time and foster success in the digital arena.
Cons of GoDaddy Airo™:
- Not ideal for very large, enterprise-level businesses
- Only available in the US and Canada to start
Best For
With so many hosting plans, domain options, and other special features, GoDaddy can accommodate nearly every type of online project. Its popularity alone attracts many first-time web builders.
Beyond GoDaddy being ideal for a user who has a little bit of web admin experience or is planning on creating a very simple site, GoDaddy is also ideal for small business owners and people looking to start a business.
Features
One of the benefits of a company as large as GoDaddy is that they have the resources to venture out and try new things. The company has technical features like unlimited storage, bandwidth, and MySQL databases, and it offers two tiers of hosting plans, the first designed for light-to-medium use. The second tier is Advanced Hosting solutions, designed for higher-traffic sites or hosting environments that require customization.
GoDaddy Airo™
GoDaddy Airo™ effortlessly turns business ideas into reality by recommending catchy domain names based on a brief description. Instantly after domain registration, it crafts unique logos, builds a comprehensive website with engaging content, and sets up a professional email to boost credibility. It simplifies online store creation with auto-generated descriptions and facilitates LLC registration. For growth, Airo™ offers quick strategies, including email campaigns, social media planning, and targeted ads to increase web traffic, streamlining the journey from concept to customer engagement.
Web Hosting Economy
Great for beginners or if you want to set up a single site. Economy gives you everything you need to get your website up and running with one website, 100GB storage, unlimited bandwidth, free Office 365 email for a year, and a free domain – with an annual (or higher) plan for the length of your initial plan. Economy is a good option for getting started and is more than sufficient if you don't have any particularly big online plans.
Web Hosting Deluxe
If you need something with a little more power and flexibility, Deluxe allows you to create unlimited websites. You also get unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, free Office 365 email for a year, and a free domain – with an annual (or higher) plan for the length of your initial plan.
Web Hosting Ultimate
If you're looking for more power for complex sites and heavy traffic, Ultimate offers unlimited websites, storage, and bandwidth; a year of free Office 365 email; free domain when you purchase an Annual (or longer-term) plan; premium DNS; and free one-year SSL certificate (again, only when purchases with an Annual - or higher - Web Hosting plan). All the above, plus double the processing power and memory.
Web Hosting Maximum
If you're looking for a hosting solution that supports multiple, complex sites, Maximum is the way to go. This plan offers unlimited websites, storage, and bandwidth, free Office 365 email for a year, free domain for the length of your initial plan, premium DNS, and a free SSL certificate (for extra security) for the full term of the hosting plan. Plus, double the memory and input/output (I/O) when using GoDaddy Maximum and cPanel with Linux.
Web Hosting Plus
Web Hosting Plus is your best bet if you're looking for the power of a Virtual Private server without having to manage a server. It offers dedicated resources and has a built-in, easy-to-use control panel (cPanel). Web Hosting Plus is ideal for ecommerce, high-traffic, and resource-intensive websites, and there are four plans to choose from based on your needs.
All plans offer unlimited websites, and unmetered traffic, including free Office 365 email for a year and a free SSL certificate (for extra security) for the full term of the hosting plan.
Advanced Hosting Solutions (VPS Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting)
For more significant undertakings, GoDaddy offers a souped-up service for web designers, developers and business customers including a range of self-managed and fully-managed virtual private servers (VPS) and dedicated servers.
There are packages for Linux and Windows, ranging from 1CPU, 1GB RAM with 20GB SSD storage, up to 8 CPU, 16 GB RAM with 400GB of SSD storage. Dedicated services allow for up to 8TB of HDD storage (RAID-1) with 256GB of DDR4 RAM (there are also SSD options for faster VPS service). If you are looking to max out the speed of your server resources you could sign up for NVME too!
Professional Email
A domain-based email inspires trust, promotes a brand with every message, and is backed by proactive protection with our Advanced Email Security through Microsoft 365. In addition, GoDaddy offers email backup, email archiving, and hassle-free email migration. Professional Email is available as a 30-day free trial** with GoDaddy Airo™.
Payable Domains & Pay Buttons
Each new domain purchase with GoDaddy comes with a Payable Domain that allows small business owners to create a payable and branded sub-domain they can text, email, or share on social media. In addition, entrepreneurs can put Pay Buttons anywhere on their GoDaddy Airo™-generated website, so they can collect one-time payments from customers.
Marketing Calendar
The GoDaddy Airo™ marketing calendar provides fresh, unique and personalized social marketing calendar suggestions and associated social post ideas that correspond with meaningful dates and holidays. Entrepreneurs can keep suggested content or customize each post through a series of prompts, and even add their own customized marketing promotions to the calendar.
Customer Insights
When anyone creates a full website using GoDaddy Airo™, they can view their site’s performance from the Customer Insights dashboard. See how many people have visited the site, how many sales and orders were made, and learn how to improve site performance. This dashboard also provides insights into how the digital marketing, such as email and social ads, is performing.
Security and Reliability
After establishing market prominence as the world’s largest domain name registrar, GoDaddy branched out into Web Hosting. On the upside, that means GoDaddy is constantly improving its service while staying vigilant and timely.
Recent reports suggest GoDaddy Security is vastly improved, with the security team monitoring the network 24/7 for suspicious activity and protecting against DDoS attacks, providing several options for password protection over your directories and numerous other steps you can take to look after your data.
Something GoDaddy has become very adept at recently is reliability. If the service provides you with anything less than 99% uptime, you can request a refund for the affected month. It also offers some of the fastest page-loading times on the web.
Technology
GoDaddy incorporates a significant amount of current and cutting-edge technology into its services. Even the Basic plans are crammed with technology-rich features. GoDaddy Web Hosting uses cPanel, adding a level of third-party familiarity to a sometimes vast menu of proprietary services.
Site builders aren’t limited to a single individual being able to do administrative work on the back end. Basic plans (Economy and Deluxe Web Hosting) allow for 50 FTP users while some plans have unlimited users. That same breakdown is reflected in GoDaddy DNS management, too. Basic plans have a domain-naming system, and the high-end plans (Ultimate and Maximum Web Hosting) have premium DNS, giving users complete control over how they set up the hierarchy of their online project.
Some less-obvious technologies are at work for other unique products and services; GoDaddy Bookkeeping has accounting processes going on behind the scenes and the auction service is completely out-of-the-box.
Ease of Use
The cPanel integration makes migrating a site from another host a simple task. It’s also easy to install popular applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento with a single click. WordPress users can look forward to a new onboarding experience, including a GoDaddy-exclusive template gallery as part of the first step of the set-up process.
From there, it’s super easy to customize your WordPress website. Ecommerce customers will appreciate the GoDaddy Quick Shopping Cart installation to start selling online. The multitude of one-click tools available is also a real time saver.
How GoDaddy Works
GoDaddy is a full-featured web service. You get a free domain for the length of your initial plan when you sign up for the Annual (or longer) Web Hosting plan.
Plus, they add free Office 365 email for the first year; 125+ free applications including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited storage with Deluxe, Ultimate & Maximum plans; free premium DNS with Ultimate & Maximum plans; a free SSL certificate (for a year with the Ultimate plan, free for the full term with Maximum plan).
And, there are lots of Web Hosting Plus, VPS Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting options for bigger web projects.
Help and Support
GoDaddy's support network is large and they offer both phone and chat support options, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So, if you understand the problem you are experiencing, it's relatively straightforward to get in touch and get it fixed. However, if you're not quite sure what may be happening, it can sometimes be a challenge to connect with the right person who understands your issue.
To supplement their customer support, GoDaddy’s help center consists of a substantial support section of articles and videos. Check there first if you’re experiencing a problem.
GoDaddy Pricing
Because of the sheer number of GoDaddy hosting plans, pricing can be difficult to track. The company offers multiple tiers for each of its Shared Hosting, Business Hosting, Managed WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting. Additionally, you can usually find a deal or discount on their main page. Beyond that, a quick online search will typically result in some available GoDaddy discount codes.
That said, GoDaddy Airo™ is included across a variety of GoDaddy products, including domain name registration, point-of-sale users and customers using Websites + Marketing.
Maximum
For more pricing details, refer to GoDaddy’s website for website builders, marketing tools, and domain registration.
GoDaddy Alternatives
GoDaddy vs Hostgator
If you’re a small business looking for a solid hosting platform, GoDaddy could be the best choice for you. They also offer a free domain forever, unlike Hostgator’s domain offer which lasts for only one year. A service provided by Hostgator that’s great for SMBs is the business email feature. This way, you can connect your online footprint to your brand and site and stand out from the competition by mail. When hosting it’s super important that your site is secure. While Hostgator malware scans only happen weekly, GoDaddy’s security team monitors the network 24/7 for suspicious activity and protects against DDoS attacks, providing several options for password protection over your directories and numerous other steps you can take to look after your data. Even more so, all of GoDaddy’s hosting plans are encrypted.
GoDaddy vs Bluehost
When comparing GoDaddy and Bluehost’s hosting services, the first obvious difference is the prices. GoDaddy is cheaper than Bluehost at $1.99/month for the first year. This price can really feel like a steal since the company provides an all-in-one solution for high traffic sites. The uptime is at 99.9% and it’s guaranteed. Bluehost also provides a 99.9% uptime but without a guarantee, only offering to solve any uptime problems within 15 minutes. Bluehost is a better option for those looking for simplicity and ease of use, without confusing add ons.
Bottom Line
GoDaddy is one of the most widely recognized names in web hosting and has come a long way since its early days as a simple domain registrar. This is a fast, reliable, and affordable web host with many different options and GoDaddy themes. GoDaddy provides plenty of flexibility and options for online projects of all scales and scopes, and tech-savvy developers will love GoDaddy’s toolbox full of gadgets.
If you're not at home in front of cPanel and you run into trouble, getting the help you need can sometimes be a laborious process. Other options like GoDaddy's Websites + Marketing offer a more comfortable starting point for beginners, allowing you to build a website without being a web expert. Recommended.
Disclaimers
* AI-assisted full website including all of the premium features like online store, appointment scheduling, and marketplace selling to name a few, requires paid subscription.
