Posted on March 8th, 2011Go Daddy is one of the more visible webhosting companies out there. You have doubtless seen their commercials – they’ve been pretty common for the last few years. When it comes to webhosting, Go Daddy offers affordable solutions, and they seem to have the name to back it up. They also offer several other key services, such as website design and domain name registration (even if you don’t host with the company). How does the company compare to others out there, though?
Reliability and Uptime
In terms of reliability and uptime, Go Daddy comes in relatively high. Their guarantee is 99.9% uptime, and the company certainly seems to do their best to live up to that guarantee. In terms of reliability, most customers experience very few problems during the length of their hosting plan, and most issues are addressed in a very timely manner.
Value
When it comes to value, Go Daddy earns high marks. Their pricing is very reasonable, and their features are good. Their lowest tier package (the Economy package) costs $4.99 per month and comes with 10 GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth. That also includes 100 email addresses, 10 MySQL databases and some other perks that users will find appealing.
Their best value hosting is just $7.99 per month, and it offers 150 GB of disk space and 500 email addresses. It also provides 25 MySQL databases. They also offer a higher priced package that comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth, as well as 1,000 email addresses. This is the best package for resellers.
For those simply interested in hosting a basic website, the lowest pricing tier is more than adequate. However, if you expect to have quite a bit of storage needs, then the middle pricing tier offers the best value. This is possibly the only drawback to using Go Daddy – they don’t offer unlimited storage on any but the highest tier.
Support
Go Daddy offers support 24 hours per day. If you need to speak with a representative, then you can do so through their email function, or you can call. They do not offer a chat function, though. Still, response times for email service requests are very short, as the company has an enormous staff of support specialists.
Control Panel
The control panel is really the only fly in the ointment here. If you choose to use Go Daddy for your hosting needs, then you’ll have to deal with their proprietary control panel. They don’t offer cPanel at all. While their control panel has plenty of functionality, the learning curve is high and it’s not quite as functional as some users would prefer.
Overall Rating
Overall, Go Daddy is a very strong option, particularly if you want a basic site without tons of extra storage space. Their unlimited bandwidth means that you can have all the traffic that you want, but the 10 GB of storage on the lowest priced hosting package might not be the ideal solution for your hosting needs. Still, Go Daddy is a reliable provider and provides a lot of benefits for their users.