Godaddy Review
Founded back in 1997, GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar, with over 13 million customers.
The company provides hosting plans to small businesses, web design professionals, and individuals and has offices in some of the world’s hottest tech corridors, including Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Seattle, Hyderabad, Belfast, and Phoenix.
Even if you are unfamiliar with the hosting/domain registration industry, you’ve likely heard of GoDaddy via one of their Super Bowl or NASCAR commercials.
Interestingly, GoDaddy is also committed in supporting a range of philanthropic causes – In Phoenix, where GoDaddy has a 270,000-square-foot facility, the company has made substantial donations to the Phoenix Children's Hospital, the Arizona Humane Society, and the Phoenix Zoo.
GoDaddy's IPO raised $460 million in April 2015.
In June 2014, GoDaddy Inc. filed for its IPO in June 2014 with a placeholder value of $100 million on the deal. The company eventually raised $460 million from its IPO on April 1st, 2015.
Domains
The biggest part of GoDaddy’s revenue consists of domain name registration and domain name renewals.
During the first nine months of 2014, the domains category of services brought in a revenue of $564 million.
The revenue GoDaddy gets from a registration can vary significantly. The company charges different prices for different types of domains. For example, at the time of writing, a new .com registration costs $8.99/year for a 2-year term. Interestingly, .net and .org domains cost the same, while .today costs $24.99/year.
Hosting And Presence
The second biggest part of GoDaddy’s revenue is what they get from offering hosting and presence type products.
The Hosting and Presence section of GoDaddy brought in nearly $370 million during the first nine months of 2014.
Revenue drove from “Hosting and Presence” section includes website building products, SEO, SSL certificates, SiteLock website security, private IPs and much more. When it comes to hosting, GoDaddy offers shared, VPS and dedicated servers at rates starting at just a few dollars a month per domain. In addition, the hosting includes site building tools so that even beginners can figure out how to get a site up and running quickly.
BusineWQss Applications
The Business Applications portion of GoDaddy brought in a revenue of about $81.6 million during the first nine months of 2014.
GoDaddy's “Business Applications” includes items such as email accounts, online bookkeeping, online data storage, email marketing and an online payment system.
Some of the specific products that integrate into Business Applications include:
- Microsoft Office 365, which starts at the price of $4.99/month per user
- Email marketing service, which starts at the price of $9.99/month for up to 1,000 subscribers. It has similar capabilities to MailChimp and GetResponse.
GoDaddy Web Hosting Plans
Okay, enough company background and financial numbers. In this review we will focus on GoDaddy's hosting services. The company offers three different hosting plans to both individuals and businesses:
- Economy: $4.99 per month for 1 website, 100 GB storage, unlimited bandwidth, and up to 100 email addresses.
- Deluxe: $5.99 per month for unlimited websites, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and up to 500 email addresses.
- Ultimate: $7.99 per month for unlimited websites, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and up to 1,000 email addresses.
All plans include a free domain with an annual plan, 24/7 security monitoring and DDoS protection, and a user-friendly control panel.
Keep in mind that while all plans technically boast unlimited bandwidth, and both Deluxe and Ultimate hosting plans advertise unlimited storage, it isn’t technically unlimited. GoDaddy reserves the right to notify users if their bandwidth use of storage use compromises the stability of GoDaddy servers or affects uptime. In this case, users would be required to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server or a Dedicated Private Server.
More about GoDaddy uptime & server error nightmare
Uptime record
Everything seems fine at first [when I first signed up on GoDaddy]. memory usage of WordPress in the hosting slightly more than 150 MB, Speed is not so fast but you can’t call it slow either. I use Jetpack Email updates to monitor uptime of website. It checks website regularly and sends you alert e-mail when site is down or up. Two or three times a week I receive alert that website is down, and usually it is up within 10 minutes. Longest downtime I have seen is 39 Minutes. That hurt.
Server error
In past 3 months I have seen “Error Establishing Database Connection” 4 times. These errors are random in nature and I am sure that there is nothing wrong with WordPress. However these issues are easy to fix. The company doesn’t let users use a caching plugin and I found that the hard way. After installing WPSuper Cache the site broke and it took me lots of effort in fixing this. Sometimes I have faced Error 520 too, and these errors are just random.
Bottomline: Should you go with GoDaddy?
That depends on two things. The first one is: are you going to use WordPress? The other thing is your budget.
GoDaddy budget hosting is okay for people who want small website and just want to show-off their online presence (like a small static website that showcases your offline business). If you want that you are good to go. However, if you are planning to use CMS like WordPress, GoDaddy has a lot of restrictions for you. You may have to spend a lot of time fixing things in their cPanel. So if you want to host WordPress website either go with their Managed WordPress hosting plans or look for any other web host.
My GoDaddy rating, at best, is 3 out of 5.
