You may remember GoDaddy from their controversially scintillating Super Bowl advertising of the past 3 years. We remember them for their long-standing tradition of providing an affordable blizzard of shared hosting plans, domain services, email services, virtual and dedicated servers, and business solutions (though the focus of this review will be their shared hosting plans principally).
And when we say "affordable" what we really mean is "downright cheap". GoDaddy is the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of shared hosting providers. You might find more and fancier dishes (read: frills) elsewhere, but it's doubtful you'll find a better price for the features you will get. To make it easy for you, the absolute best value here is the deluxe plan offering 150 GB disk space and 1500 GB bandwidth, available for $5.94/month. This hosting package can handle a growing business or a personal website for sharing lots of pictures and information.
Price Value
Every GoDaddy shared hosting plan includes free email accounts (at least 500 of them), MySQL Databases (at least 10), email forwards (a minimum of 50 and an unlimited max), plus forums, photo galleries, blogging, and a variety of free pre-installed and add-on software applications.
All GoDaddy customers can count on 24/7 FTP access, free website stats, ASP, ASP.NET, and Microsoft FrontPage extensions, and daily backups. There are no setup fees and no annual commitment required (though of course the bargains increase with your level of commitment). And even the least expensive GoDaddy plan promises no advertising will appear on your site. Also, though domains are not free upon signup, as they are with so many competing hosts, they only cost $1.99 a piece with your purchase, which is really a pittance.
Reliability
Even though GoDaddy is an eclectic company with many irons in the fire beyond hosting-only, they nonetheless own, operate, and support their own world-class data centers outright (as opposed to renting them like so many hosting-only companies do). The routers, firewalls, and servers running your site are all best-of-breed, and monitored round the clock. That means all your data is secured as well as the physical systems and structures supporting it.
And, never to be outdone, GoDaddy offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Control Panel
GoDaddy touts its own proprietary control panel, though you'd be hard pressed to find a sample or demo of it anywhere on their site (or anywhere else on the net for that matter). As with most control panels, there are a careful selection of task-centered menus (Domain Names, Email, Websites, Secure Certs, Customer Info, etc.) all selectable by clicking on large, obvious buttons. Pretty basic and standard fare, yes. Some of the menus however, like the Domain Control Panel, are a bit crowded and could use some spring cleaning in the layout department.
But if there's one extreme drawback to the GoDaddy control panel is the number of screens you have to rifle through advertising other GoDaddy products and services that you can buy. That said, virtual and dedicated server customers get to enjoy the more reputable and tried-and-true Plesk and/or cPanel control panels.
Customer Support
GoDaddy offers 24/7 telephone support (though not toll free), plus an elaborate and searchable Help Center, no less than 30 topic-specific .PDF User Guides, category-specific email support with a 7 hour response time.
Unix/Linux Hosting Plans
Economy Plan: 10 GB disk space, 300 GB bandwidth @ $3.65/month
Deluxe Plan: 150 GB disk space, 1500 GB bandwidth @ $5.94/month
Premium Plan: 300 GB disk space, 3000 GB bandwidth @ $12.74/month
GoDaddy Hosting Review
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