GoDaddy Review – Why Are They Hated So Much?

IntroductionIntroduction

If you’d look for GoDaddy reviews, you’d see that it gets a lot of hate. You probably too know this company as a villain always scamming people out of their hard-earned money. I was on that boat as well. But you see, some time ago people believed that witches existed too, and look how that turned out.

So once and for all, I need to put an end to these myths surrounding the company.

Is GoDaddy as bad as everyone tells or is this reputation the leftovers from the wild 2000s? 

In this GoDaddy review, I’ll put them through all the tests to see if they can perform fast, is the pricing transparent, is it easy to use, and if the support is good.

Let’s do this.

PricingGoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy’s pricing is the first subject receiving lots of questions so let’s interrogate it. The cheapest shared hosting plan starts at $5.99 a month. One thing is clear – GoDaddy is a premium service and you do get a lot in that plan; 100GB storage space, unlimited bandwidth, and domain name included.

Let’s compare them all:

The plans are priced quite high but in return, you get generous resources. For example, some providers won’t include 100GB of storage even with the most expensive of plans. Here you get that on the entry-level.

Talking of which, I have quite a good discount if you only need one website. 

If you decide to purchase GoDaddy through one of the links here, you’ll unlock a $1 a month deal for 12 months of Economy. 

So considering all the stuff you get in, that’s the best deal possible. 

But one thing is clear. For other plans, you’ll have to opt-in for the longest 36-month period to get the cheapest price. And that’s not a commitment a lot of people want to make but really a standard practice in the hosting industry. I can’t bash GoDaddy here too much. 

Another disappointing thing is that SSL is not included in the Economy and Deluxe plans. That’s a big thing as other providers worked to set up free certificates on all of their plans and GoDaddy is just denying that – you have to pay almost $7 a month for that. That’s more expensive than some of the plans!

Fortunately, you don’t have to pay for an SSL with GoDaddy. I have a short tutorial on how to install a free one yourself. 

So what can we say, is GoDaddy offering a good value or not?

Well, in all consideration and without discounts, GoDaddy is expensive. BUT. You get a ton of server resources starting with an entry plan. PLUS, you can use the $1/mo deal to get every hosting essential for 1 website – domain name, lots of storage, and easy to use control panel.

Talking about the control panel…

InterfaceInterface

One thing GoDaddy has nailed is the user interface. Once you log in, you get to experience this nice and clean dashboard with your hosting account ready to be launched. You can manage most of the things from this dashboard but cPanel is also available for more complex configurations.

Here’s the main dashboard I talk so high about:

Here you can see all the services that belong to you – domains, hosting, and professional email.

Each of the categories has a “Set up” button. Once you go through them all, you’ll have your WordPress website live with a domain name and a professional mailbox working.

Just keep in mind that the Office 365 package is only included for the first year. So if you don’t want to get hit by a high bill next year, don’t forget to cancel auto-renewal.

Now, about hosting setup. It is super easy. 

You’ll basically go through the setup wizard answering questions like “What’s your website name,” “What’s your username,” and so on. One of the choices is the server location.

That’s one of the biggest draws of GoDaddy – with servers on 3 continents, you can get very close to your visitors. This means an improved website speed for them. 

Talking about more complex configurations, there’s cPanel.

cPanel is the ultimate standard in the hosting industry. It looks 2000s but works flawlessly. Here you’ll be able to create subdomains and redirects, find auto-installers for all the apps (not just WordPress), manage files, and even see metrics like how many people visited your site.

All in all, ease of use is where GoDaddy is seriously good. No issues here whatsoever. For basic websites, you will be able to use the main and modern dashboard. For advanced configurations, there’s cPanel. 

PerformanceGoDaddy Performance

The next question in this GoDaddy review is whether or not the performance is good. As per usual, I’m doing my 3 standard tests – speed, stress, and stability. TL;DR GoDaddy turned out to be quite reliable and fast. 

First things first, using the setup wizard, I installed WordPress. Just a default theme and no optimizations here. I then used GTMetrix to see how fast GoDaddy can load this website.

And it did quite well. 3 main things to look at here – time to first byte, largest contentful paint, and time to fully loaded. 

The time to first byte is 395ms. That’s barely two eyeblinks and almost as good as it gets with shared hosting. On premium plans, you’d expect something around 200ms but that’s only available on VPS or Cloud services.

Largest contentful paint is 0.8s – that’s when most of the website is loaded. Like the main picture, for example. This time is really good, users expect to see this in 1 second.

Now most important, fully loaded time is 1.2 seconds. That’s not the best result ever but quite fast compared to the providers of similar pricing. For example, SiteGround at $6.99 a month can load the site in 0.7 seconds. Faster but not by much for a much higher price.

So that’s an A for the website speed.

Next up, I tested if GoDaddy can handle the traffic. The previous test was done on a website with 0 visitors. Now, I’ve sent 50 of them via K6 Cloud to put some major stress on the server.

And it handled it okay. 2 main things here; blue line – that’s our speed; grey line – virtual users. In ideal scenarios, we want the blue line to be as flat as possible. In this case, it increased together with virtual users.

That’s not bad in itself – the server slowed down a little to handle this much traffic. If it didn’t slow down, it would have taken the website down altogether.

Slowdowns are often the thing with shared hosting. Only very few providers are capable of handling loads of traffic without any issues. 

So the last test is stability. I monitored my GoDaddy website for over a month now to see how much time it is offline.

And the result is very average. While GoDaddy promises to be up for 99.9% of the time, it was up more – 99.92%. But compared to providers like SiteGround (yep, again) or Bluehost, this result is on the lower side.

99.92% a month translates into 39 minutes of total downtime. For profitable businesses, that’s a no-go result. Cause, what business if it’s offline? 

But for personal websites like blogs, that’s a perfectly good result.

So in all considerations, I’m giving GoDaddy’s performance a B+. The speed is great, stress was handled okay, and stability is somewhat 50/50. 

Customer SupportCustomer Support

GoDaddy has 24/7 email, live chat, and phone support. There’s also a big knowledge base, tutorials section, and even an active community forum with professional moderators. Despite all this, support is one of the biggest drawbacks.

You see, GoDaddy outsources their customer support agents. This means, as friendly as they may be, those people are not 100% familiar with the product.

The response times are quick, agents seem to be friendly and willing to help, but… they can’t always do that for the lack of training. Often you will be redirected to the knowledge base instead of getting a good answer.

Language is another barrier. Not every agent is 100% fluent and miscommunication happens. 

So this is the area where GoDaddy should really improve. If not have an in-house team, at least train the agents a little bit more.

Fortunately, there’s a knowledge base and forum. That’s where I was looking for help most of the time. You will find guides on any topic you can think of and they are quite easy to follow.

Sooo, support agents – a big minus. Self-help sections – a huge plus. In any case, as unreliable as support might be, it’s not the reason to ditch GoDaddy. There are many ways to get help and you’ll not be left high and dry.

RecommendationGoDaddy Review – My Recommendation

In this GoDaddy review, I did not find the provider to be this huge bully of the hosting industry. Yes, the pricing is quite high and there are some missing features. On the other hand, the performance is above average while the control panel is a pleasure to use.

So can I recommend GoDaddy?

Yes. If you need a provider for a personal site, the $1 plan is the cheapest 1-year web hosting option for the resources included available. Plus, you get a domain name. So if you’re starting a blog, want to learn how to use WordPress, or want a professional portfolio – grab that deal while it’s available.

On the other hand, I will not recommend GoDaddy for serious business ventures. I can see it is improving, but not yet to be trusted completely.

All in all, the provider is not as bad as pictured in all those GoDaddy hosting reviews. Or at least not anymore. 

The witch hunt is over. 

I hope my review was helpful and I burst at least some of the myths. Let me know about your experience with GoDaddy in the comments down below!