If you’ve ever done some online research about either web hosts or domain registrars, it is certain that you’ve come across GoDaddy. Founded in 1997 as Jomax Technologies, GoDaddy has significantly grown over the past two decades.

As of now, GoDaddy is the largest domain registrar in the world and a major player in the web hosting industry, serving approximately 17 million customers worldwide.

But is GoDaddy really as good as its fame in the industry? Well, stay tuned because that’s exactly what we’re going to explore in this review.

Uptime and Reliability:

This is the most important metric to measure the efficiency and performance of a web host. Uptime refers to the amount of time your website remains online.

Servers at web hosting companies can sometimes go down due to a number of reasons, and that’s why even the very best web hosts have to face temporary outages.

Uptime becomes even more important if you have an ecommerce website because each minute of downtime means you’re losing potential customers.

During our tests, we recorded the average uptime of GoDaddy’s servers at about 99.95%, which is slightly lower than the industry standard of 99.99%.

What this means for you is that while your website will remain online most of the time, you should expect some minor outages in between (on average, around 10 minutes each week).

If you have an ecommerce based website and can’t afford even minor outages, you should consider other, better alternatives such as BlueHost, offering 99.99% uptime.

Features:

GoDaddy may not be the best web host when it comes to uptime but other than that, it has something to offer.

GoDaddy offers multiple hosting solutions including:

• Standard Shared Hosting
• Business Hosting
• Virtual Private Servers
• Dedicated Servers
• WordPress Hosting

All subscription plans come with unmetered bandwidth and free Microsoft Office 365 business email for the first year.

All subscription plans (except Economy) offer unlimited disk space as well. It should come as no surprise that being the largest domain registrar in the world, GoDaddy offers a free ‘.com’ domain of you subscribe for any annual package.

Recently, GoDaddy updated its website builder, turning it into a powerful and robust solution for quickly building any type of website. The GoCentral Website Builder now lets you add a ton of useful widgets as easily as drag and drop.

These widgets include appointment scheduling, email subscription signup, contact form, social media integration, photo gallery, and many others. You can even setup a full-fledged online store in a matter of minutes. You can use it free for the first month. After that, you’ll have to subscribe to a plan, starting from $6 per month.

GoDaddy provides foolproof security for your website through a variety of SSL certificates and specialized security plans. Subscribing to one of the security plans ensures a solid protection for your website against malware, brute force attacks, and several other threats.

Apart from these, GoDaddy offers website marketing solutions and toll free numbers for your website as well.

Many of us are not aware of other useful services provided by Godaddy. Here you can find what Godaddy offers other services.

Support:

Over the past couple of years, GoDaddy has greatly improved its customer support and presently, its customer support is among the most knowledgeable and responsive in the industry.

Customer support is available via support tickets and emails, as well as 24/7 support via phone. GoDaddy also offers a searchable and thorough knowledgebase where users can find a solution to nearly every known problem regarding GoDaddy.

Furthermore, GoDaddy also hosts a community forum which is maintained by technical experts. Unfortunately, the forums are not a speedy way to get answers. We posted a query in the forums and got a reply only after two days.

The phone support, however, was fantastic. After dialing the support phone number and entering our required details (phone PIN and customer ID), we were speaking to a knowledgeable and friendly support agent within two minutes. All in all, the customer support is pretty good and has improved a lot than what it used to be a few years ago.

Plans & Pricing:

GoDaddy stands tall in the webhosting industry when it comes to pricing. It offers one of the cheapest introductory plans in the industry. GoDaddy’s promotional introductory plan offers you a free ‘.com’ domain and 1 year of shared hosting at $1/month.

This means you get a free domain plus 1 year of shared hosting for a mere $12. However, similar to other web hosts, the price will go up to $7.6/month after the introductory period.

GoDaddy’s standard shared hosting offers 3 subscription plans; starting from $4.5/month for the Economy plan ($7.6 when you renew), $4.8/month for the Deluxe plan ($9.7/month on renewal), and $8.6/month for the ultimate plan ($16.5/month on renewal).

Let’s take a look its plans and feature in more details:

Shared Hosting Plans:

Business Hosting Plans

VPS Linux Hosting Plans

Dedicated Linux Hosting Plans

WordPress Hosting Plans

All plans come with unlimited storage (except Economy plan), unmetered bandwidth, a free domain, and free MS Office 365 Business Email for one year. A major downside of GoDaddy’s webhosting is that prices go significantly higher after the first introductory year.

User Friendliness:

GoDaddy used to have a custom control panel until 2014. Although it offered great power and control, it was quite complex to use and understand, especially for new webmasters.

GoDaddy addressed this issue in 2014 by adopting cPanel, the industry standard control panel for web hosting. New web masters may take some time to get used to cPanel but the time spent learning is absolutely worth it because cPanel is the widely used in the web hosting industry.

Summary:

Like any other web host, GoDaddy has its pros and cons. Whether you should go for this web host or not depends primarily on the type of your website, as well as your expectations from your website.

Although GoDaddy is a major name in the webhosting industry, its service is not as robust as one would expect from a company of this stature.

The primary strength of GoDaddy is its insanely low priced introductory packages but it lacks in some essential web hosting features such as uptime and loading speed.

If you’re a new webmaster who just wants to experiment and get a feel of things, you can go for GoDaddy because of their extremely affordable introductory plans.

If you’re not bothered by the uptime and loading speed of your website, then GoDaddy is one of the most suitable options for you.

On the other hand, if you’re serious about your website and can’t afford downtimes or average loading speeds, then you should go for other web hosts such as BlueHost.

The post GoDaddy Review: Uptime, Features & My Recommendation appeared first on HostingPill.com | Web Hosting Reviews, Coupons & more!.