This GoDaddy WordPress hosting review 2024 takes a look at all the good, the bad, and the nasty of the hosting service provider. GoDaddy used to be the joke of the website owner’s community but not anymore. Today, they are one of the most popular hosting services providing personally curated plans for WordPress.
GoDaddy WordPress hosting promises a lot many features at very lucrative prices. Managed WordPress hosting ensures timely updates and reduces room for human errors. In this GoDaddy WordPress hosting review 2022, we share our personal experiences so that you can decide if it’s worth your money, time, and efforts.
GoDaddy promises plans packed with features such as easy website setup, SEO, and security. It may seem great at the first glance but the community provides mixed reviews.
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GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Review 2024
For all our impatient and busy bees, here is a very short summary of what we’ve discussed in detail: We do not recommend GoDaddy WordPress Hosting.
- The good: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
Plans can be considered if you wish to build a basic website. Provide some awesome features like a daily backup, staging environment, and unlimited malware and hack protection with premium plans. An eCommerce plan might be suitable for new online business owners. They provide WooCommerce Premium Plugin. - The Bad: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
Hosting plans are decent, nothing out of the ordinary. Can be expensive if you don’t want to commit for 36 months. Renewals are expensive. Customer service is a mixed basket of eggs. - The Nasty: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
Complaints from users regarding slow performance. Sites built on GoDaddy take an average of 2.2s to load. The issue with site uptime with pages facing 503 error.
About GoDaddy
GoDaddy is an American company that leads domain registration services. Their founder, Bob Parsons was an entrepreneur and Marine corps veteran. After selling his company ‘parsons technology’ which provides financial software services for $65 million, he went on to start ‘Jamox Technologies’. The team felt that the name wasn’t memorable, hence we got GoDaddy – memorable and funny.
GoDaddy ruled the domain registration industry till 1998 when ICANN was formed and the market was open to competition. Soon, in 7 years, they became the largest domain registrar and they remain undefeated since.
Now, the company has ventured on into other services including Webhosting (WordPress hosting is a part of it). In our GoDaddy WordPress Hosting review 2023, we will review their WordPress Hosting services for you.
WordPress Hosting Plans Offered by Godaddy
GoDaddy offers WordPress hosting starting as low as ₹149 per month. They have four plans for managed WordPress hosting and all plans come with 24/7 customer support, SSL certificate, automatic WordPress updates, free domain, and business email. They also promise 99.9% uptime, the latest PHP 7 version, etc. They promise to make website building easier for beginners with drag and drop tools.
Here in our GoDaddy WordPress hosting review 2024, we take a look at the features, pros, and cons of all of their plans.
Basic Plan: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
Apart from all the features that come packed with all the plans, the basic plan also provides 30 GB of storage space; website backup, and automatic daily virus and malware scans; and can handle traffic of up to 25000 per month. The basic plan is priced at ₹149 per month when bought for 36 months.
Who should buy GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Basic Plan?
While theoretically, the plan seems ideal for beginners, providing cheap hosting and essential features. It is a dumbed-down version of what other hosting providers offer, some at a better price and with more features.
If you are testing the waters before going live, the plan might seem great. It packs all the basic features at a lucrative price. Although, it is important to remember that the offer price is only when you make a commitment of 36 months. Which is a lot more than anyone takes to test waters.
Summary: If you are a beginner and plan to launch your website with limited content and features, then you might consider this plan for its basic features and price.
Pros:
- Price: The plan comes at the best buy price of ₹149 only which is cheaper than many providers.
- Freebies: The plan packs a free SSL certificate and domain name saving costs.
- Backups: The plan provides website backups
- Malware scan: Your site will be scanned daily for viruses
Cons:
- Commitment: The best buy price is available only if you commit for 36 months.
- Uptime: While GoDaddy claims an uptime of 99.9%, hands-on experience begs to differ. Their uptime is consistently lower than other hosting providers.
- Features: The plan packs only basic features and it is difficult to make a commitment of 36 months.
- Performance: Users have regularly noticed lower loading speeds and pages showing 503 errors despite being optimized.
- Renewal: The renewal costs are very high if you do decide to go for one.
Deluxe Plan: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
The Deluxe plan packs 75GB of storage apart from the basic features mentioned previously. The plan is not much of an upgrade from the basic one. It provides a similar backup and malware scan and can handle traffic of up to 100,000 per month. The plan also comes with a staging environment.
The plan also comes with a pre-installed Yoast SEO optimizer (Note: The free version of Yoast is good in itself and can be installed by anyone with just a click. Trust us, this is not much of an upgrade). The plan comes at a price of ₹249 per month.
Who should buy GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Deluxe Plan?
As mentioned earlier, this plan is just a notch better than the basic plan with better storage and capability to handle higher traffic (Just the basic plan that went to the gym). It packs the same features as the basic plan and requires a commitment of 36 months to avail of the best buy price. The extra SEO optimizer feature isn’t exclusive and would take only a click to install even if you go with the basic plan.
This plan can be considered by beginners who wish to launch a website with appropriate content and features. It might be a little easier to commit to this plan for 36 months.
Pros:
- Storage: The plan offers ample storage to store your data.
- Traffic: It comes with an upgraded ability to handle traffic of up to 100,000 visitors per month.
- Staging environment: Changes can be tested on a demo website.
Cons:
- Features: The plan packs the same features as the basic plan. It is not an upgrade.
- Cost: Same features are priced at a higher cost.
- Commitment: While it might be easier to commit to this plan, it is yet not ideal.
- Performance: There is no improvement in load time or uptime of your website even with the upgraded plan.
- Renewal: The renewal price is exorbitant for the features.
Ultimate Plan: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
The ultimate plan comes with unlimited storage and a capacity to handle unlimited traffic (but nothing is truly unlimited). It packs the general features of an SSL certificate, free domain name, customer service, etc. The plan comes with backup and automatic malware scan with an added feature of unlimited malware removal and hack repair.
It comes with a pre-installed Yoast SEO Optimizer and staging environment at a price of ₹449 per month.
Who should buy GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Ultimate Plan?
The plan comes with unlimited storage and unlimited capacity to handle the traffic. It also boasts of a staging environment where you can use your demo site to test changes and premium Yoast pre-installed into the site.
These features are a bit redundant for a beginner. This plan is ideal for someone taking their website to a higher level. If your site is established and already has a good number of visitors coming to your site, then this is a nice plan for you. The plan doesn’t have enough features for an expert or a higher-level website owner. It might be a good upgrade for people who have initially hosted their site on cheaper GoDaddy Hosting plans and have had a good experience with it.
Pros:
- Limitless: The plan provides unlimited storage and traffic hosting capacity.
- Staging environment: You can use a demo site to test changes before publishing.
- Malware and virus removal: The plan comes with unlimited malware and virus removal.
- Protection from hackers: Plan also comes with an unlimited hack repair policy.
Cons:
- Features: We can’t emphasize enough how much they try to upsell. The features are mediocre, at best.
- Renewal: Again, a very expensive renewal.
- Performance: GoDaddy consistently shows poorer performance as compared to its competitors.
- Upselling: Even in the ultimate plans, we see basic protection and backup. You will have to shell out extra cash for advanced safety and backups.
E-Commerce Plan: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting:
Ecommerce is a power-packed plan specially designed by GoDaddy for online store owners. The plan packs all the features of the Ultimate plan like unlimited storage, unlimited visitors, premium Yoast SEO, malware scan, and unlimited malware and hacks protection. Additionally, the plan contains premium WooCommerce, which is the most popular plugin used to set up online stores.
The plan comes with premium WooCommerce, appointment scheduling, real-time shipping rates, and premium Yoast SEO at a starting price of ₹1,139 per month.
Who should buy the GoDaddy WordPress Hosting Ecommerce plan?
The plan is ideally designed for online store owners. The features that it boasts of include premium WooCommerce with real-time shipping rates and appointment scheduling. It also boasts of a premium Yoast SEO optimizer.
If you are looking for a plan specially curated for your needs of setting up an online store, then this plan might be for you. It is best suitable if you are starting with an e-store and makes setting up an online store easy. The plan is slightly expensive but its worth it given the features provided are much more expensive individually.
Pros:
- Premium WooCommerce: The premium extensions included are insanely expensive individually. This is great value if you wish to set an online store.
- Malware and virus protection: The plan offers a regular scan and unlimited malware removal software.
- Hack protection: the plan also comes with unlimited hack protection.
Cons:
- Features: Apart from WooCommerce, other features are limited and might not be sufficient for a website owner leading to extra product purchases.
- Performance: The site has a slower load speed and uptime when compared to other hosting service providers.
- Cost: The plan is a little expensive and has even more expensive renewals.
- Upselling: You still get basic backup and security with the plan. Extra software purchases might be needed for complete protection.
Why You Should or Shouldn’t Go Ahead with Godaddy WordPress Hosting:
GoDaddy is a big name hosting every 1 in 20 websites. While we have specifically discussed their plans, let’s take an overall look at their WordPress Hosting:
Pros:
- They provide decent features like SSL Certificate, Free domain name, daily website backup, and staging environment.
- The cost is low if you’re willing to make a commitment for 36 months.
- It is beginner friendly.
- It comes with some premium WordPress plugins.
- Backups: Daily backups are created and can store backups of up to 90 days.
- Updates: WordPress updates are automatically installed.
- They provide unlimited bandwidth.
- They also provide detailed tutorials to help you easily launch a website.
- They use SSD for better loading speed.
- They provide easy site migration.
Cons:
- Performance: The average page loading speed for GoDaddy has been measured to be 2.2s, which is a lot higher than the recommended 2s.
- Uptime: The sites were noticed to have a lower uptime than competitors.
- Expensive: The plans come with basic features and are expensive if you are unwilling to make a commitment for 36 months. The renewals are expensive as well.
- Customer Service: They claim to provide 24/7 customer service but many consumers have reported negatively on the same. While they respond on call, it takes them forever to reply to the email. Some users have even reported insufficient and improper help for customer care.
- Security: They include only basic security even with premium plans. You will have to buy various upgrades.
- GoDaddy is notoriously known for upselling and cross-selling.
- They are also notoriously known for restricting data usage.
- Only one website can be hosted per plan.
- Very secretive about their data centers and do not mention the exact locations.
- SSL is free only for the duration of hosting. Thereafter, it is priced exorbitantly.
- They make it very difficult to migrate to another hosting provider.
- It is extremely slow and painful to create a staging site.
Summarising Our Godaddy WordPress Hosting Review 2024
At first glance, everyone is wooed and excited to get such feature-packed plans at such low prices. The reality though is very different. In all honesty, GoDaddy provides a dumbed-down version of other hosting providers.
Their features like daily backups and extra malware and hacking protection are appreciable. They provide basic site security but, you will need to buy upgrades for better protection. They are beginner friendly.
Users have faced issues with website performance and website uptime which is consistently poorer as compared to competitors. Their customer service is a mixed bag of apples – while they are prompt over call, you never receive a reply over email. They claim to provide 24/7 customer support.
Like any other service provider, they highlight the good and downplay the bad. They provide decent, basic features but nothing too out of the ordinary. You might be able to bag similar features, maybe at a lower price than other service providers.
FAQ: GoDaddy WordPress Hosting
1. Do I need to be managed by WordPress Hosting?
A WordPress site can be hosted on any server. Although, managed WordPress hosting provides tools specifically catering to the CMS provider which makes it easier to use and provides better and faster performance.
2. What features are provided by GoDaddy?
All hosting plans come with: an SSL certificate for the duration of hosting, backup of up to 90 days, free domain name, free business email, unlimited bandwidth, automatic WordPress updates, daily malware, virus scan, and some premium WordPress plugins.
3. Is the SSL certificate provided for life?
No, The SSL certificate with all hosting plans is only provided for the duration of hosting.
4. What are the renewal costs?
Renewal costs vary depending upon the plan you buy. Refer to the table below:
|
Features
|
Price
|
Renewal Price
|
|---|---|---|
|
Basic Plan
|
149/month
|
349/month
|
|
Deluxe Plan
|
249/month
|
449/month
|
|
Ultimate Plan
|
449/month
|
799/month
|
|
E-Commerce Plan
|
1139/month
|
1779/month
|
5. How many websites can be hosted with a hosting plan?
GoDaddy allows you to host one website with any of their WordPress hosting plans.
6. How many business emails are provided?
They provide one business email, free for the first year. It is charged thereafter.
7. Does hosting come with daily backups?
Yes, it includes daily backups and can hold backups of up to 90 days. You can schedule a backup every 90 days or manually create and download one. Includes automatic software updates, backups, and security patches.
8. What is the bandwidth provided by GoDaddy?
Fortunately, GoDaddy doesn’t limit bandwidth and provides unlimited bandwidth with all its plans.
9. What is GoDaddy’s 99.9% uptime with a money-back guarantee?
GoDaddy provides a money-back guarantee if they’re unable to maintain 99.9% uptime. Fine print Only 5% of the monthly hosting fees is refunded which can be used to buy GoDaddy products.
10. Which software does GoDaddy use for website security?
GoDaddy site security is powered by Sucuri – a powerful service to keep the site clean and free of malware. Sucuri was acquired by GoDaddy.
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