GoDaddy is one of the giants amongst the established web hosting platforms—and while their plans are deserving of a spot on this list of the best hosting plans—I wouldn’t recommend them over any of our other picks in the affordable range of hosting companies (despite their $2.99/mo introductory offer).
That’s largely because their cheapest hosting plan comes with a heavily restricted feature set, and the price jumps up to $9.99/mo after your first year at the starting $2.99/mo rate. Despite their most basic plan not meeting the same standards as the other best plans here in this list, GoDaddy is still a great company. They’ve been around since 1997 and have grown to become the world’s largest domain registrar—with 14 major facilities around the world.
Thanks to their massive advertising campaigns (that include running Super Bowl spots and sponsoring NASCAR driver Danica Patrick), they’ve become synonymous with web hosting and domain registration. But does that experience and fame translate into having some of the best plans on the market?
Let’s take a look under the hood of what you’ll get with GoDaddy’s plans.
Performance
Having been in the game longer than many of the other companies on the market today, GoDaddy proves itself by offering a pretty exceptional product when it comes to performance. With load times averaging between 0.0294 and 0.517, they rank amongst the best.
Uptime
With GoDaddy servicing your plan, downtime is almost unheard of—as the platform boasts a 99.9% uptime rating.
Customer Support
GoDaddy’s award-winning customer support is one of the reasons the company has grown to be the giant it is today. That and a massive advertising budget. Reachable by phone, chat or email, you’ll get help very quickly from GoDaddy’s customer service team when you need it—regardless of the plan you’re on.
Pricing for GoDaddy’s Web Hosting Plans
Another reason GoDaddy markets themselves as “the people’s favorite” is the fact that it’s very easy to make a website with them—especially from a pricing perspective. With plans starting from as low as $2.99/month, they offer one of the cheapest introductory priced plans on the market today.
As I noted though, the $2.99/month is an introductory price that you’ll only enjoy until you renew your plan after the first year—and then your plan’s price goes up to $9.99/mo after that (then making it much more expensive than other plans of their class). Now, let’s take a look at all of GoDaddy’s plans:
GoDaddy’s Basic plan starts at $2.99/mo for the first year and includes:
- 1 Website
- 10 GB storage
- 25,000 monthly visitors
- Free daily backups with 1-click restore
- Automatic daily malware scans
- Built-in sign up forms
- A free domain when you purchase an annual plan
Their highest-tier plan (eCommerce) offers the same features plus:
- WooCommerce pre-installed
- 5-50 websites
- 50-200 GB storage
- 800,000 monthly visitors
- One-click staging site
- Free SSL Certificates — 1 per site
- Free site maintenance tools
- Real-time performance and uptime monitoring
- Automated client report
GoDaddy also makes it easy to migrate your website over from a different hosting company by offering free website migration and automatic WordPress core software updates.
With all of this being said, some very noticeable caveats of going with GoDaddy’s (cheapest) Basic plan, are that:
- You don’t get a free SSL certificate
- Access to cPanel comes at an extra cost
Both of these two features come free with similar packages from competitor hosting companies, making this a big miss in their offering lineup.
Overall, GoDaddy is a robust and reliable platform that serves their customers well, though the extremely low introductory pricing (for your first year’s hosting plan) and restricted features can come back to bite you after that first year is up—as their pricing then jumps up to being much higher than other comparable plans like what you’ll get from Dreamhost and Bluehost.
In my opinion—you’re ultimately better off going with a starter plan from a company like Dreamhost. You’ll get more features, better support and your pricing won’t suddenly change at any point in the future.