GoDaddy Hosting Review 2022

RAMI October 4, 2022

0 575 6 minutes read

Table of Contents

GoDaddy‘s hosting is great, Like other distinguished hosting companies it has low prices and some great features.
But if you look at customer reviews and comments, you will also see some polarizing opinions.
So what exactly is the case with GoDaddy? Should you register with them or not?

We want to help make the decision easier for you. So, we signed up with GoDaddy to test their performance. We’ve taken an in-depth look at all of its features and terms and written this final review to make it easy to see if GoDaddy meets your needs.

General information and hosting overview


Speed:	280 ms (March 2022 to August 2022)
Runtime:	99.98% (March 2022 to August 2022)
the support:	24/7 live chat, phone, WhatsApp
Applications:	WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and 125+ other apps with 1-click installation
Advantages:	Unrestricted bandwidth, 100GB storage, the free first year for Office 365 mail and domain name
Hosting plans:	Shared, WordPress, Cloud, Reseller, VPS, Dedicated Servers
Site transfer:	Not Free ($99.99 per site)
Pricing:	Starting at $2.99/month ( Renewable at $8.99/month )

Advantages of using GoDaddy Hosting

GoDaddy may be known for being a place where you can find a domain name for your new website, but they’ve also figured out how to offer decent hosting.

Namely, they have achieved solid uptime and page speed over the past few years. Additionally, they offer 125+ free integrations for your website, as well as helpful customer support.

And all things considered, the cheapest economy plan has good value for money too.

Here are the top things we loved about GoDaddy hosting.

Large page load time at 280ms

In fact, studies have shown that slow loading times can cause visitors to leave the site faster. This in turn hurts your search engine ranking (especially on mobile) and of course, negatively affects your conversion rates.

Since you will not be able to change your web host’s server speed, it is essential to consider this before signing up with your hosting provider. If your web host is slow at the server level, it is unfortunate that your hands are tied.

You won’t have to worry about page speed with GoDaddy Hosting.

More than 125+ apps to install in one click

GoDaddy will allow you to install some powerful third-party integrations on your website. In fact, you can add more than 125 of the most popular apps on the internet – with just one click. This includes content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.

GoDaddy also includes developer-friendly tools such as cPanel, MySQL, CloudLinux, Python, and multiple versions of PHP.

Therefore, they have a good variety of options that will suit everyone from novice bloggers to more experienced web developers. What’s useful for some beginners, is that they even have a drag-and-drop website builder, which comes with a separate pricing plan (starting at $9.99 per month).

The cheap basic plan is a good value (for one basic site)

When we originally reviewed GoDaddy (in 2020), the cheapest shared hosting plan was quite expensive, and the features were really limited. At least compared to the competition.

Now, though, it looks like they’ve made a 180-degree turn. Currently, the Economy plan is priced at just $2.99 per month with a 12-month contract.

But for that low price, are you really getting any value?

yes. You get one website, 100GB of storage, and uncalculated bandwidth. Also, you’ll get a free domain with any annual plan, and a free Office 365 email for the first year. All of these features are really useful and not every host offers them as part of their cheapest plan.

The total value you get from GoDaddy’s Economy Plan for one primary site is pretty good, considering it’s very cheap.

However, despite some great features and a great price, you will have to make some compromises with GoDaddy as well. It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you realize it’s not as good as it might seem. We will discuss this in more detail in the next section.

Good uptime of 99.98%

GoDaddy provides average uptime on their shared hosting plans. The average uptime for 6 months is 99.98%.
Average uptime of 99.98% means about an hour and a half of downtime per year, which isn’t too bad compared to some of the other hosts we reviewed.

Average uptime in the last 6 months:

August 2022: 100%
July 2022: 100%
June 2022: 99.94%
May 2022: 99.98%
April 2022: 100%
March 2022: 99.91%

Cons of using GoDaddy

Although the value of GoDaddy’s cheapest plan seems good at first, you will find some issues just by looking closely.

In fact, their rather low prices contribute to the occurrence of problems. Specifically, the cheaper plan lacks some important features and there are a lot of upsides during the checkout process. Also, the renewal price will be much higher than the discount for the first term.

Plus, we didn’t quite get to enjoy GoDaddy’s confusing and obscure money-back guarantee either.

So here are the biggest flaws we found, which are discussed in more detail.

The basic plan lacks critical features (no SSL certificate, security, or site migrations)

The best hosts we reviewed will offer features like an SSL certificate on every plan. In fact, these have become very common and in demand to run a site today.

GoDaddy does not offer any of the features mentioned in its basic plans.

Let’s look at SSL certificates as an example. Unless you’re already paying for GoDaddy’s most expensive plan, this feature will cost you:

These prices are a bit high. Especially since most hosts today will give you a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for each of your sites.

In addition to all of that, there is another common feature that GoDaddy doesn’t offer for free:

Site migrations.

Again, many hosts will move at least one existing site to their servers for free. Many of them can do this within a few hours of asking so you don’t have to wait.

Not GoDaddy, though. They do not offer any free managed migrations. This feature will cost $99.99 per site and per database, and takes 7-10 business days. So it is not only expensive but also slow.

If you add up all of these extra costs over a few years, GoDaddy hosting won’t seem cheap anymore.

Lots of Upsells

All the missing features we discussed above lead to a lot of upsides during the signup process. In fact, GoDaddy has become somewhat infamous for selling it. The reason to offer so many sales is to increase the final price you’ll pay since the prices for the initial plan are absurdly low.

The first sale you’ll encounter relates to the monthly cost of the hosting plan. Depending on the term of the plan you’ve chosen, the amount you’ll pay upfront can vary widely.

The three-month short plan costs a hefty monthly: $10.99 per month. So, to get the best value, you may have to sign up for 12, 24, or 36 months instead.
With these offers, you may be tempted to get a longer plan right away. But this means that you will have to invest a larger amount up front, which leads to a much longer commitment.

And this is only the first time among many sales.

As discussed above, you’ll see sales of SSL certificates and “Basic Website Security” indicating malware scans and updates.

GoDaddy’s checkout process can feel like a minefield, as you need to carefully monitor each step before mistakenly paying double or triple the initial price.

Inconsistent customer support

One feature we are always happy to see is 24/7/365 customer support. GoDaddy offers just that. They have live chat, a great network of international phone support in a number of languages , and a good knowledge base.

Overall, however, GoDaddy’s customer support is somewhat unpredictable (you never know if you’ll get a quick response or have to wait about an hour).

GoDaddy pricing, hosting plans, and quick facts

Here is a quick overview of GoDaddy’s hosting plans:

	economic plan	luxury plan	Final plan
Pricing	$2.99 per month, renewing at $8.99 per month	$7.99 per month Renewing at $11.99 per month	$12.99 per month , renewing at $16.99 per month
Websites	1	Unlimited	Unlimited
Bandwidth	not calculated	not calculated	not calculated
storage	100 GB	not calculated	not calculated
Email accounts	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Other Features	• Free email for the first year (renews $23.88/year)	• Free email for the first year (renews $23.88/year) • Unlimited subdomains	• Free email for the first year (renews $23.88 per year) • Double the processing power and memory • Free SSL Certificate • Premium DNS

quick Facts:

Money Back: A slightly confusing 30-day money-back guarantee.
Site Relay: No free conversions. Managed migration costs $99.99 per site. The deportation will take 7 to 10 working days.
Free Domain: Free for the duration of the initial annual plan (12, 24, 36 months, etc.).
Ease of Subscribing: Signing up is very easy.
Payment methods: All major credit cards and PayPal are accepted.
Hidden Fees and Terms: A somewhat confusing refund policy and terms such as “If the hosting service has already been implemented, it is non-refundable (if not implemented yet, it is eligible for a refund within 30 days of the transaction date). “
Upsells: Lots of ups and downs. Price variance for initial term length, site migrations, SSL certificates, security, and more.
Account activation: Quickly activate the account.
Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
Install applications and content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Lots of one-click installation options with the most popular open-source applications.

Do We Recommend GoDaddy?

GoDaddy has fast page loading speeds. It works well with the most popular web applications you want. The starting price of the cheapest plan is still a good value despite its lack of many important features.

GoDaddy offers several upsells of basic features that they assume are included for free (SSL, security, etc.). Adding any of these could double the cost of your plan. But together, they can easily end up costing you a lot more than other web hosting providers.

Reliable uptime.

So while GoDaddy’s overall performance is good, they do have some drawbacks. However, they are still trustworthy hosts.