Pros
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Dedicated hosting, dedicated IP, and managed hosting options
- Site builder, website accelerator, and mobile
- Unlimited bandwidth, storage, and websites on one plan, virtually unlimited email addresses
- Extremely affordable, especially during promos and sales
- Ad credits close to four times the annual plan cost
- Helpful phone support 24/7
Cons
- No live chat support
- Not quite as fast as the competition
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The Geek’s Take
If you haven’t heard of Go Daddy, you haven’t been paying attention. By far the biggest player in our roundup, Go Daddy assaults the senses with major marketing campaigns and celebrity endorsements aplenty, including their notorious Super Bowl ads. We’ve found Go Daddy to be more than just talk however, offering a great array of hosting solutions at a very reasonable price. For less than a Lincoln a month, you get unlimited hosting, 500 email addresses, 24/7 phone support, and $200 in ad credits. Go Daddy is the web host of this very site as well as all of the others in our network, so we have no qualms about wholeheartedly recommending them and awarding our Editors’ Choice in this category.
Full Review
**For the sake of comparison, we chose each web host’s least expensive unlimited plan which in Go Daddy’s case is the Deluxe Plan. Unless otherwise noted, details and features listed below are those of this plan.
Ease of Use
We’ve always found Go Daddy to be easy to use and simple to work with. All hosting plans come with access to Go Daddy’s custom control panel, a simple and intuitive interface for managing your site, installing apps, and changing settings. It’s like a snapshot of your site(s). From this control panel, you can launch Go Daddy’s simple Java-based file manager to manually upload or download files to/from your site. For FTP users, Go Daddy also offers FTP access with all hosting plans, allowing you to connect via client like FileZilla for moving larger files and entire folders.
Overall, we consider Go Daddy to be very easy to use once you master their control panel. And if you have questions, there’s always their 24/7 phone support – more on that later.
Reliability, Bandwidth & Storage
Go Daddy’s Deluxe plan provides you with what’s essentially unlimited everything with no caps on bandwidth or storage, which offers great piece of mind if you expect your site to grow (which you should). 500 email addresses are included as well, more than you’ll ever need, although the 100 MB of email storage will quickly run short if spread across several users. More email storage can be bought for a few dollars a month.
Another nice feature of the Deluxe plan is the ability to host several sites with different domains on the single plan, great if you plan on launching more than just the single site. GoDaddy claims that you can host “unlimited” sites through this plan, but they do admit in the fine print that hosting more than a dozen or so sites on one plan will negatively affect performance.
As for reliability, Go Daddy provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee, meaning they’ll provide store credit if your site is down more than just a few moments a month. The credit may not be enough to cover lost revenue depending on your traffic volume, but it’s good to know that GoDaddy has some skin in the game too.
For a fully itemized list of what Go Daddy’s Deluxe Plan offers, check out this chart.
Add-Ons & Features
In addition to the standards, Go Daddy offers a handful of specials and add ons to try and separate it from the hosting pack a bit.
- One Click WordPress Installation – Get going with a WordPress site or blog in just minutes. GoDaddy even offers special WordPress hosting plans specially tuned for those needs.
- Website Accelerator (Ultimate Plan required) – Boost your site’s speed with this premium add on. Includes stat tracking.
- $200 Ad credits – Get ad credits for Facebook, Google Adwords, and Bing Ads totaling $200, a great way to jump start your site.
- Mobile Friendly Sites – Convert your site to mobile with a few simple clicks using Go Daddy’s mobile site generator.
- Drag and Drop Site Creator – A great solution for novices, Go Daddy’s site builder plans will get you up and running with a professional site in no time.
Support
Go Daddy offers 24/7 US-based phone support with all plans along with next day email, an extensive knowledgebase, and active user forum. We have several instances using Go Daddy’s phone support here at Geeky Reviews, and have no issues singing anything but praises. Their team is smart and knowledgeable and willing to provide support and advice, often going above and beyond what would normally be expected. It’s top notch.
We do wish that Go Daddy also offered chat support, but alas, this isn’t in the cards apparently. Some of the competition does however, if this is a dealbreaker for you. We’d rather spend 5 minutes on the phone than 30 on a chat anyway, but that’s just us.
Value
All of the web hosting solutions in our roundup are very cheap for what you get. After all, the web hosting market is a competitive one, and that means consumers like us benefit. Go Daddy is no exception, offering their unlimited Deluxe plan for just $4.49 a month when signing up for at least a year. After that intro period, the price goes up to a modest $8.99, which we still feel is a great deal, especially if you plan on hosting multiple sites on the one account (which you absolutely can). That puts Go Daddy on the low end in terms of price and makes it a great value when you consider the benefits over the competition.
*Geeky Review Protip – always spring for a full year of hosting. You’ll lock in the intro price for a year and save some dough in the long run. You’ll need at least a year to get your site in its feet (and all of the hosting plans in this comparison offer money back guarantees anyway).
Save 50% on hosting plans through this exclusive Geeky Reviews offer. Just $4.49 a month for the first year! |
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Can’t decide on a web host? Check out our handy comparison chart!