Our Review of: GoDaddy

Overview:

Check out our current #5 rated web hosting provider, GoDaddy. Located in sunny Scottsdale, AZ and led by a team of hosting veterans, GoDaddy offers a comprehensive hosting solution at the low price of just $6.99/month. Moreover, the team at GoDaddy has made a commitment to continually improving the customer experience and it shows. Their 21 million+ customers are proof of this, needless to say. Currently employing over 8,200 employees across six continents, GoDaddy has the personnel and resources to keep customers happy for the long haul.

Their hosting tools and scripts are incredibly simple to use and their support team is happy to help you get them setup and utilize them. Best of all, their support is 100% North American-based, with incredibly short hold-times.

Servers are fast and reliable also, with 11 high-tech datacenters throughout the US, Europe and South Asia.

You may also know them for domain registration, of which they're easily the largest in the world, hosting over 84 million domains across the world. They were one of the first in the domain and web hosting industry and continue to be a value and service leader to date.

Pros:

• Lowest prices out there.
• Multitude of great scripts available.
• 100% english speaking support.

Cons:

• PHPMyAdmin isn't standard, but can be enabled on each account.

Features & Specials:

With plans starting at $6.99/month, it's hard to beat the service or, more importantly, the security GoDaddy offers. Their Web Hosting Economy Plan includes a comprehensize suite, which provides daily malware and spam scanning, business verification, 1-click WordPress install, Easy-to-use cPanel control panel, automatic daily backups, free SSL Certificate and more.

For storage, the Economy Plan offers, 25 GB NVMe enhanced storage, along with unmetered bandwidth, free domain name, free e-mail and a 30-day money-back guarantee, if you aren't completely satisfied. We've found it always makes things easier to maintain your domain name at the same location as your hosting service and GoDaddy makes this totally possible.

GoDaddy also offers over 150 useful website apps for use on your account, absolutely free!

Reliability & Speed:

When it comes to website uptime and reliability, GoDaddy is a class leader, hosting hundreds of thousands of websites across the world. With a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee, GoDaddy offers piece of mind that few other web hosting providers can, with employees on hand 24/7 to monitor suspicious activity and help deflect DDos and other cyber security threats.

GoDaddy employs a load-balanced architecture, with over 11 datacenters throughout the world. This ensures that if there's a network outage at one datacenter, your website will be available at other datacenters, making it still available, or "live" on the Internet.

Support:

The North American-based phone agents at GoDaddy actually listen to customers and understanding what they need. They're also pretty good at resolving issues and communicating with customers. Wait times were short, usually 2 minutes or less. We had great experiences with chat agents as well. GoDaddy offers 24/7 phone, chat and online/email support. The online interface is a little awkward, but certainly usable once you get used to it.

Overall, we found GoDaddy suppor to be quick and friendly, easily able to answer common questions.

Average Support Wait Times:

Chat Wait Time 5 seconds

Phone Wait Time 2 minutes

Control Panel:

The tools that GoDaddy offers are easy-to-use and consistently improving. In the last year, they've launched a fantastic file manager and have been incorporating more user interface standards into each of their tools. It's clear they test their interfaces for usability and they actively solicit customer feedback. Their main control panel is an in-house modified version of cPanel, which is the most popular web hosting control panel in the industry. Their version of cPanel makes modifying any aspect of your website account quick and easy. From adding domains, e-mails, databases, 1-click WordPress installation, or over 150+ website apps, no other control panel platform is easier to use, to date.

Given the robust offering of the GoDaddy suite of services, the homepage of the control panel can be a little overwhelming, but stick to your nav bar and you'll be fine. The control panel can also be a little slow around mid-day, but not so slow that it became unusable, during our tests.

What sets them apart?

Summary:

If you put a high value on security and want to create an effective website quickly, you're going to want to give GoDaddy a closer look. Not only is their web host offering robust and affordable, it's clear they've taken the time to understand their customers needs and they're constantly working to address those needs.

While they may be a little aggressive in marketing their extras, they really do offer an incredibly diverse and valuable suite of services. They also over many pricing specials, which make their extras seem well worth the added expense. That said, check out GoDaddy today, to see their outstanding web hosting plans.

GoDaddy Ratings ChartScore: 9.3%