Services And Features
GoDaddy provides a lot of value in the services they offer. WordPress hosting users will find the most value in its convenience. GoDaddy pricing is always competitive and has terrific value because they continue to provide discounts on other services such as domain buying and renewals.
Each of the Shared Hosting plans gives clients a 1GB MySQL Linux database, DDoS protection, and security monitoring, additional resources on the fly, and over 100 free applications with one-click install. Optional, paid backup is also something that is offered at around $2.99 a month.
The packages are all very similar in what is given, and most will find that the Ultimate Plan gives the best value for those that may want to scale up in the future but don't want to have to think about adding resources later. Each plan has unmetered bandwidth and unlimited storage and websites with the Economy plan being the exception with 100 GB storage and 512 MB of ram. Each plan also receives a free domain name when a client purchases an annual term for the plan.
GoDaddy WordPress Hosting is for one website and has several built-in benefits for their clients. Each plan provides one year of business email for free, several thousand plugins and themes, auto-updates to WordPress, a one-click migration tool, and a CDN booster that increases load times by 50%. Clients also get a free domain for one year and daily malware scanning. Readers will find that the first two tiers have metered bandwidth and do not have a free SSL certificate, but do have free website backup with a 1-click restore.
The WordPress "Pro" plans are geared towards clients that need more than one website. However, at this stage, a true professional would simply set-up their own Reseller Hosting or VPS and create multiple WordPress sites on that. With that said, there is some amount of convenience which these plans do provide. Each tier receives free site-maintenance tools, daily scans for malware, full-term SSL certificates, and backups to 90 days. The differences in the tiers are in the amount of storage and supported websites.
The security offered on all the hosting plans is very good. Servers are automatically scanned for intrusions and malware, but more advanced features are available for a premium. GoDaddy offers four tiers of additional website security ranging from $83.88/year to $299.00/year. The highest tier offers website repair, and all the tiers provide Advanced DDoS mitigation and Security analysts for more troublesome issues.
Sign Up
GoDaddy’s sign up process is quite different to other hosts as they offer a variety of shared hosting options. It can actually get a little confusing if you aren’t 100% sure what you are looking for or require. If you are attracted to their Websites + Marketing section for example, which includes their Website Builder, Online Store and Templates options, you will be asked to create an account without any credit card information being required. You can sign up using your Amazon account, Facebook account or Gmail account.
Sounds too good to be true? Correct, it’s just a trial and you’ll need to choose a payment plan to continue once the trial ends. However, GoDaddy are one of the very few hosts who allow you to test their website builder features before purchasing hosting which is an impressive and rare feature. Their other sign up funnels include WordPress, Domains, Web Security and Hosting which leads to Web Hosting, Business and Reseller Hosting as well as WordPress Solutions and Servers.
Website Builder And Control Panel
Go Daddy use their own custom website builder called Go Central which focuses on simplicity and speed. It’s not the most technical of builders, but is ideally suited to beginners. As mentioned you can trial their builder which is a pretty strong statement about how confident GoDaddy are in it's usability. It instantly feels user-friendly thanks to features such as asking, "What's your industry?" and providing you with a drop-down box with multiple choices. These choices populate premade templates for your specific industry which we really like.
The menu in the top right corner allows you to fully customize the theme of your website, it’s pages and selections, as well as access your settings. They also allow you to preview all customizations, so test out all the fantastic templates and pages!
GoDaddy’s custom control panel is packed full of features and options which we can’t help feeling leads into confusion. There are multiple menus and so many sections that it isn’t too clear where you can manage what. The main dashboard lists your websites, domains and additional products and all can be managed from here. They do also have helpful tools to guide you to your best options based on what you navigate to.
Customer Support
The customer service often goes above and beyond, but you will want to listen carefully as they do try to up-charge quite a bit. We don't fault them for this, but some of the services they will attempt to upsell are mostly for convenience. Overall, the customer service provided by GoDaddy is some of the best in the industry, especially when working at their VIP Pro level.
Domains And Email
Purchasing a domain with GoDaddy is straight-forward and can be done separately to buying hosting. A clever feature when searching for a domain is that GoDaddy suggest other available domains similar to the one you have searched. They then offer some fantastic savings if you choose to purchase multiple domains which is great when you are building a brand.
As well as the classic TLDs such as .com, GoDaddy also offers more unique domain TLDs such as .global, .fit, .health, .app and much more, all at competitive prices!
GoDaddy offers several ways to set up email. Email can be set up using webmail, Workspace and Office360. Or prefered if you are pressed for time is using Godaddy's Workspace Email. They have a handy tool that walks users through the entire process of creating an email, setting up a recovery email, accessing email, adding to mobile/desktop, and composing emails.
