GoDaddy Review

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Editor's Review

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Review written by Robert Beck
Editor

Network- and Server Administration since 2003. Specialist in Linux, SunOS, Windows. Any Questions? Drop me an email.

Latest update of this content was: Monday, Apr 4, 2011

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Editorial Ratings

Total rating:

89%

Price Value:

95%

Reliability:

95%

Performance:

95%

Control panel:

80%

Support:

85%

Feedback:

85%

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GoDaddy Company Overview

GoDaddy.com is the world's largest domain name registrar and belongs to The Go Daddy Group, Inc, Arizona, USA. Founded in 1997, the Go Daddy Group today dominates the domain, website hosting and SSL market, having more than 44 million domains under management for their customers. Some of us remember GoDaddy's SuperBowl commercials and the Go Daddy Girls.

Go Daddy offers high-quality hosting packages at super-low prices. Due to their sheer size and high level of automatition, they can make offers, other web hosting providers simply can't. Their feature-packed buget hosting plan starts at $2.99 (as a 3-year plan) for Linux OR WINDOWS! wich is unbelievably affordable for Windows hosting. This plan offers 10 GB storage (wich will be enough for 95% of all websites today), unlimited bandwidth, 100 email accounts, 10 mySQL databases and many, many features.

Go Daddy provides a good 24/7 US-based customer support. They offer SSL certificates and domains for significant lower prices than the competition. Go Daddy guarantees for 99.9% uptime.

Go Daddy is a huge player in the web hosting industry. In this review we will check out why they are so successful and if their hosting packages and services deserve the enthusiasm, many people have about Go Daddy.

Price Value

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Go Daddys budget hosting plan costs $2.99, if purchased as a 3-year-plan. It includes 10 GB of storage space (wich is huge for a website, except it contains giant amounts of videos), unlimited bandwidth, 50 FTP users, 100 email accounts and 10 mySQL databases (1 GB each, wich is huge as well).

The package can hold unlimited external domains and 25 subdomains. DNS management for domain pointing is available, too. Geeks will be happy to hear that custom cron jobs can be set up and PHP 4 or 5, Perl, RoR, custom php.ini and imageMagick are standard features of all hosting plans.

A 1-click-installer for many applications like forums, blogs, ecommerce, content management, Wikis and Galleries make it easy to start with the website. Additionally a web based file manager and scripts like jQuery make life easier. The package comes with $125 in marketing bonuses for Google and mySpace.

All this in available under Linux and Windows! For a Windows package, this price is extremely attractive. The Windows package includes support for ASP, ASP.NET AJAX, Frontpage Extensions and loads of IIS-specific pre-installed scripts.

Additionally, all plans include Google Webmaster Tools, daily data backup and website statistics.

We find this feature-stuffed hosting package to provide an extraordinary strong value at a very low price.

Reliability and Performance

Go Daddy has their own state-of-the-art data centers and do not rent rackspace at data centers owned by other companies, like many other hosting companies do. They have the financial background to own and operate their own data centers due to their sheer size.

The servers, routers and firewalls at Go Daddy are all best-of-breed. Data centers are monitored 24/7 and connected to the internet with several redundant fibre connections. Physical security and network security are monitored at high standards through a specialized 24/7 staff. Go Daddy guarantees for 99.9% uptime.

We tested the performance and reliability of Go Daddy for several weeks and found it to be strong.

Control Panel

On their shared hosting plans, GoDaddy deploys a self-developed control panel. It is pretty complete in its functionality. What we don't like about it too much is, that one is confronted with advertising promoting other Go Daddy products, when performing usual hosting account changes. Some menues are a bit unorderly. Large buttons are deployed for most functions. It's definitely not the world's best control panel, but it does its tasks.

Customers of virtual hosting or dedicated server hosting get the professional Plesk or cPanel control panels to manage their hosting.

Not a really great control panel, but does what it is supposed to do.

Support

Go Daddy provides 24/7 US-based phone support (however, not toll free) and an email support system. Waiting times at the telephone vary between 5 and 10 minutes, until a real support person talks to the calling customer. Email support has average response times of about 7 hours. Other hosting providers promise telephone support in less than 2 minutes and email support in less than 1 hour. However, to be fair it has to be said that these providers take much higher prices for their hosting service.

In addition to staffed support, Go Daddy features a large knowledgebase with many specific PDF user guides, a searchable, large database of hosting related articles and a large FAQ section.

The support level at Go Daddy is good. Bearing the price of their hosting accounts in mind, it is a high support value for a pretty low price.

Conclusion

Managing over 44 million domains since 1997, Go Daddy is a giant in the web hosting industry.

Their budget hosting plan starts at $2.99 /month (if purchased as a 3-year plan) and offers many features and super-high value.

Windows hosting is available at these rates as well, wich is an incredibly affordable price for this usually high-cost service. Additionally to shared hosting, GoDaddy offers VPS hosting, dedicated servers and Mac-Powered cloud servers as well. Furthermore, they are one of the largest and most affordable providers for SSL certificates and domain hosting in today's web hosting industry.

Go Daddy's reliability and performance is strong. Due to their size, they do not rent rackspace, but deploy their self-owned data centers.

Shared hosting plans at Go Daddy are managed with their self-developed control panel, that does its job, but without fame.

Support levels are good, bearing the low price in mind. 24/7 telephone support in less than 10 minutes response time is ok in our opinion.

Go Daddy is one of the most affordable web hosting providers. They offer high quality, feature packed web hosting plans and a wide variety of professional services. They're not only huge - we understand now after testing and investigation, why some people are so enthusiastic about Go Daddy.

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