One of the largest in the industry, GoDaddy is a company that you just can’t ignore.

Taking into consideration that I started my Webmastering journey with this registrar, you may consider me to be biased, but it’s just that they are good enough for me to keep coming back. They constantly have promotions, discounts and promo codes available, it virtually makes them ideal for all those people who don’t need much, are on a tight budget, or perhaps just need few domains for testing ideas and projects.

Reliability

The idea behind reliability is that almost every company out there is offering 99.9% uptime per year. What this actually means is that your websites will be available to people around the globe “almost” always. When they say it like that, it’s actually translated as “By contract we have the right to be off-line this long:

Daily 1n 26.4s Weekly 10m 4.8s Monthly 43m 49.7s Yearly 8h 45m 57s

You know, I don’t want to be splitting hairs but that’s almost 9 hours per year. This doesn’t apply only to GoDaddy, it applies to all of them.

So, is GoDaddy reliable? The simple answer is: yes. As much as any other hosting company out there. I have had only 12 minutes downtime in an entire year, that I was testing their services as a hosting provider.

Features

Not too bad. The usual goodies are all here, as you can see in the screenshot. This is more than enough for most of the users that do not need advanced features, or if they are just starting their Internet Journey.

Most people tend to avoid domain registrars as their hosting providers, but you must admit that these are quite decent features for a Small Business Website or some small niche site. It is also very easy to use GoDaddy as a test ground (sandbox) for your new projects and ideas.

I love how they put this inside: Access without “www.”. They are specifically targeting people with low or no technical knowledge. And that is just what it is, a starting point in a dark and murky waters of Web Hosting world. For people who need it, GoDaddy is an ideal starting point.

Specifications – Specs

Well, they are not the worst I had, not the best either. They tend to up-sell you a bunch of things you’ll never need, but never make things complicated. Try not to buy things that you don’t need during the checkout phase. So here are some specs that will interest many of you, and they are actually not that hard to find.

Resource (Units) Economy Deluxe Ultimate CPU (Accessible cores) 1 2 2 Physical Memory/RAM (MB) 512 1024 2046 I/O (KB/s) 1024 1024 2046 Entry Processes 100 125 150 Files (Inodes) 250,000 250,000 250,000

Not bad, if I may say so myself. Entry processes are something that is important to all webmasters choosing to take shared hosting plan. It determines how many people can connect in the same exact moment to your website. Per user, these processes are taken up for 1 or 2 seconds, while they download your website to their browser. After that, as long as they aren’t clicking something, a new user can connect to your website and so forth. Cron Jobs also take one entry process while they are executed.

Even this Economy plan is good because it gives you a lot of breathing space. But the real problem with GoDaddy is that their servers tend to get overcrowded very fast, and you will get slow server response times, in a very short period of time. They are constantly working on migrations and new server upgrades.

Ease of Use

Here is where GoDaddy shines, simplicity and elegance. Nothing to distract you, and nothing to upset you. Everything is easy to get to, and most of all changes to the DNS take effect somewhere around 5-25 minutes mark. C-Panel is user friendly, and building your website is really straightforward. Actually this is one of the best Web Hosting Providers for those who are new to Web Hosting in general. Standard things like Softaculous script installer is included, which will no doubt be a starting point to your website.

Help & Support

Not that I really needed these guys, but every now and then you (or someone else) makes a mess, and you need those tech guys to patch you up. This is one of the worst aspects of GoDaddy. You must admit, with over 12 million customers, you would be slow too, but when it comes to the fact that you need something done, like yesterday, you’ll get stuck in a queue for what looks like an eternity.

Average time I waited is somewhere around 20 minutes, with conversations spanning for more than an hour. I am speaking about phone support, because I tend to avoid e-mail as much as possible. It is also good to know that their refunds tend to get stuck in a queue for like a month, so don’t get freaked out if they are a bit late. All things considered, I can’t honestly say that they are bad, just sluggish.

GoDaddy Summary

All things considered, they are giving you what you are paying for. They aren’t the best, they are far from worst. One of the reasons most people choose to start with GoDaddy, are their discounts and promotions. They occasionally have promotions for domains ( 0.99$, 1.49$, 1,99$) and Hosting for 12$ per year + a free domain. You have to admit, pretty cheap, and ideal for new start-ups on the internet.

So, would I recommend them? Yes, I would. Cheap, reliable, and above all beginner friendly.

I recently was contacted by a reader Adam, who had some insight about GoDaddy, and their ability to host Adult ( read : porn ) websites. I did a short article about it here. This actually raises a good point. Is GoDaddy a viable option for Adult oriented websites?

Heck, 12$ / YEAR for Adult website and a free domain with it? It is definitely the cheapest option. For some other options you might check this list of viable Adult Web Hostings



