GoDaddy

GoDaddy Pricing and Key Features:

Sticking with the tried and trusted multi-tier hosting model, GoDaddy offers a range of different hosting packages ranging from low cost, entry-level plans suitable for small sites, right up to all-powerful, no expense spared plans that make a good option for high traffic sites and those requiring advanced functionality.

For the purposes of today’s review, I’m going to focus on the plan that’s sandwiched right in the middle of those two; the £3.99 per month Deluxe shared hosting package.

There’s a couple of reasons for this:

This is the plan I’m personally the most experienced with and thus best able to comment on

The unlimited resources make this a similar plan to others I’ve reviewed on this website, and thus makes for a fair comparison

It’s the one plan I think represents the best value for money.

Indeed, whilst the £2.99 Economy package may be £1 cheaper, the limited storage space of just 100GB for a single website only makes this a good option for those who only need hosting for one single, small website. If that sounds like you, you might well have no need to pay any more than the cost of the Economy plan (which will eventually set you back £4.99 per month after the first term expires).

For the rest of you, particularly those of you who may be looking for an unlimited hosting plan capable of supporting multiple website projects, Deluxe is certainly the way forward. After the £3.99 discount term expires, you’ll be looking at paying £5.99 per month, which puts GoDaddy’s pricing at the cheaper end of the scale, with similar plans from the likes of iPage costing the better part of £9 per month after the first term expires.

What’s included

Along with unlimited storage space and bandwidth, GoDaddy Deluxe also comes with all of the following key features and resources:

– 50 FTP accounts

– 25 x 1GB MySQL databases

– Backup and restore option

– 500 email addresses

– 500 MB total email storage.

Admittedly, the number of email accounts, and particularly the low amount of storage, don’t exactly make GoDaddy an ideal solution for customers who make need much heavier email use, but for small businesses with limited email needs, I still think the overall price and list of features make this a solid investment.

Domain Names

As you’d probably expect from a company who started their journey to the top of the web industry by specialising in domain names, there’s actually a lot of good to say about GoDaddy in this particularly area.

Free domain

First, the standard free domain name registration offered by many top hosting companies is here, though unlike services such as eHost, this is only for a single term of either 12, 24, or 36 months, after which you’ll need to pay the full, regular renewal rate for your new domain. That said, domain renewals here are at least typically cheaper than many of GoDaddy’s competitors, with the costs typically combining with the reasonably priced regular hosting fees to make this an attractive option for long-term hosting on a budget.

Domain management

The cost isn’t the only thing I really like about GoDaddy’s approach to domain names. Managing and configuring your domains is -in my opinion at least- easier to do with this particularly company than perhaps any I’ve seen so far.

Just as practical and efficient for managing multiple domains as it is a single one, the control panel here is well laid out, and even tackling some of the more complex issues like setting up new Domain Name Servers is straight-forward.

Coupled with the fact that GoDaddy Deluxe hosting supports unlimited add-on and sub-domains, I would say that if you’re planning to have (or already have) a number of different website addresses for your projects, GoDaddy is one of the easiest and most affordable options for managing all of them through one simple interface.

Ease of Use

Whatever flaws GoDaddy may have in other key areas, they’re hard to fault when it comes to ease of use. To be fair, this isn’t too surprising. A huge part of the company’s success has been their ability to strip out technical jargon and do away with many of the more technical aspects of web hosting, replacing both with easy-to-understand terms, and a very intuitive user interface where everything is laid out in a clear, simple-to-navigate style.

Easy to manage

One of the things I really like about the company is that, as soon as you log-in, you have direct access to many of the key areas of your hosting plan right from the top menu.

Managing domains, email accounts, and your general account was a breeze, certainly easier than it has been with those high-end hosts who bury such features behind the scenes,and absolutely better than the likes of HostGator, who -as I mentioned in one of my most recent reviews- force you to use an entirely separate browser tabs for account management and general website management.

cPanel Use

Speaking of the latter, GoDaddy’s Deluxe shared hosting plan comes with cPanel, the industry-leading web hosting dashboard where everything is accessible through a series of large, visual icons.

Using your cPanel, you can do everything from launch website building applications like WordPress and the drag-and-drop website builder (more of these later) to more complex tasks like setting up website analytics and configuring your domain hosted email to work with your desktop email client.

By and large, I’ve found GoDaddy to be one of the easiest hosting companies to use, so if you’re relatively new to hosting websites and looking for something that’s simple to set up and manage, this is certainly a company I’d be glad to recommend.

Performance and Reliability

Though GoDaddy certainly get a lot of things right, I still think the company has some kinks to iron out before they’ll be as renowned for the reliability of their hosting services as they are for their competitive costs and user friendliness.

Though I’ve found their performance rates to be decent enough for small, static brochure websites, running a powerful Content Management System like WordPress does have it snags with this company, with loading speeds for several of my projects leaving something to be desired.

The same can be said about the general level of uptime. In fairness, I’ve yet to experience any major, lengthy bouts of downtime with my own projects, but I have seen enough temporary server outages during the year’s that I’ve used GoDaddy to be wary of using them for more important projects.

Rather, I tend to look at the company’s average 99.85% uptime records and choose this host only for small, personal websites such as a blog which, though it still needs to be online the majority of the time, isn’t going to cause any disasters to my business if the hosting server temporarily goes down, much as it’s often prone to doing with GoDaddy.

Building a Website

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably starting to sense a theme here: GoDaddy’s shared hosting is far better suited for small websites with mid-level traffic than it is for powerful, high performance sites.

Not that keeping away from large-scale projects means you have to stick with a small amount of options for building your sites. There’s actually a lot to like about GoDaddy Deluxe when it comes to actually getting your website off the ground.

For intermediate and advanced users, one-click installation of over 125 applications is available through cPanel, and allows you to launch all the usual CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento, whilst also taking advantage of tools and features to add greater functionality, interaction, and increased performance to your website.

Meanwhile, I suspect that beginners may prefer to use a drag-and-drop website builder. GoDaddy actually bundles one of these tools together with other hosting essentials into its own paid-for-separately package, though I have found that by going into cPanel and looking through the one-click application library, a couple of the more common website builders are available for free with your hosting plan.

As with the paid version, these tools allow you to load up pre-designed templates, drag elements into place using your mouse, and customise the whole thing to suit your style and content. Doing so with GoDaddy’s tools is as easy as it is with other hosting companies, and in my opinion are an ideal solution for those looking to create a professional looking website with a limited budget and limited technical skills.