I know I am preaching to the choir as many of you already know to avoid GoDaddy like the plague, but I think we can agree that the GoDaddy brand is absolutely massive and there’s many individuals who fall for their persistent marketing believing GoDaddy to be the best when in reality they are far from it.

If you’re building a website for the first time, I highly recommend staying away from GoDaddy as not only their products over priced, but GoDaddy often leads to technical headaches in the future which is why most developers shudder when they hear a client has been onboarded onto GoDaddy.

TL;DR - The best alternatives to GoDaddy in my opinion is going with Porkbun ($11/yr) as your domain registrar, Cloudways ($11/mo) as your web hosting provider, and WordPress (Free) as your content management system. If you'd like to do this, I highly recommend watching this YouTube tutorial as it will walk you through the entire process.

Anyways, In this review I’m going to try and (to the best of my ability) break down all the tricks of this Father who wishes to be called Daddy.

He is not your Daddy.

Do not buy your domain with GoDaddy

Most people start their online business adventures by purchasing a domain and of course gravitate to GoDaddy because that’s the brand they’re the most familiar with from all their advertising.

GoDaddy .com domains renew at $22/yr. They mark up their .com domains by 100% all while giving the impression that they’re giving you a discount.

Here is a table of .com rates so you can see how GoDaddy compares to other domain registrars.

As you can see above, there are much better alternatives to GoDaddy that will save you over 100% a year. However, upon first glance on their website, their marketing gives the impression you’re getting a deal when in reality you are not.

If you were to go forward and purchase your domain with GoDaddy, they’ll further bombard you with various different products to up-sell you on including:

• Web Hosting

• E-mail services (With Microsoft 365)

• Website builder

And the thing is, they hide the renewal rates of these products in fine print so at checkout a lower cost appears.

It’s instead best to just not use GoDaddy all together and instead get your domain name, web hosting, and email services, separately!

Not only is this more secure (reduces attack vectors for hackers) but it actually will save you more money each year as many web services (like GoDaddy) will bundle all of these together in a convenient package, but significantly mark-up the cost to earn a profit.

Do not buy an SSL certificate with GoDaddy

GoDaddy will try to sell you a SSL certificate for $100/yr. This is completely ridiculous, you can get an SSL for FREE with a non-profit called Let’s Encrypt which is supported by most web hosting providers.

However, with GoDaddy it’s very difficult to install Let Encrypt SSLs because they don’t support the ACME protocol. This is stated directly from Let’s Encrypt themselves.

GoDaddy does have a free SSL option with AutoSSL which they don’t advertise. You have to dig to figure this out. Definitely something a newcomer isn’t privy to. This brings me to my next point of why you shouldn’t get your web hosting with GoDaddy.

Do not get your web hosting with GoDaddy

At the lowest, GoDaddy will give you a shared hosting package for $12/mo but will try to push a 36 month plan on you that renews at $359.64 along with a paid SSL certificate, e-mail services (from Microsoft), and website security.

There are much better options than GoDaddy, for example for $11/mo you can get a cloud hosting environment with Cloudways. Cloud hosting is known to be better than shared hosting since your website resources are distributed amongst multiple servers instead being on a single server shared with multiple people.

So not only do you get a better hosting environment, but you get it at more affordable cost.

Cloudways is one of the only web hosting providers that will offer a cloud hosting environment at the price found amongst shared hosting providers. That's one of the reasons why I believe them to be the best web hosting provider.

People will debate endlessly on what the best web hosting is, one thing Redditor’s will agree on however is to stay away from Newfold Digital hosting companies like Bluehost, and Hostgator because Newfold Digital is a web hosting conglomerate known amongst web developers for poor service.

Purchase e-mail services separately

Even though the e-mail service is provided by Microsoft 365, GoDaddy HEAVILY restricts the environment and limits what you can/cannot do (like administrative privileges).

Instead it’s better to just go directly to Microsoft 365 for Business or Google Workspace and set up your e-mail that way to ensure you have full control over your email. For more info check out my write-up on how to set up a business email.

Is the GoDaddy website builder worth it?

This is the only thing I really can’t comment on because I’ve honestly never used the GoDaddy website builder, so I’ll leave it to the comments to share their viewpoints. Of course, because I’m heavily biased against GoDaddy, I would just stay away from it.

Personally I prefer to go the route of using WordPress as my content management system and then using the Elementor page-builder plugin to build out a website since it has an extensive ecosystem, and a large community with tons of YouTube tutorials as resources.

To be honest though, even if the GoDaddy website builder is good, I don’t think it would be worth it in total since you’d still have to deal with the GoDaddy ecosystem. But of course I’m biased… as you can see from this entire post.

/endrant

What are your thoughts?

Just defederated a small client using the T-minus365 guide as I’ve done many times. Including adding CSP licenses and killing their GDAP access etc etc.

Customer didn’t cancel their subscription like I told them and instead just didn’t pay the renewal but otherwise identical to others I’ve done.

Few days after after GoDaddy subs expired their users got blocked access coinciding with a “pay your bill” email… at first couldn’t figure out how they did it but then thought to check roles and noted there was an MS partner center service principle with GA rights - figured that was probably it so deleted it.

No other privileged roles now other than our GA, no GDAP other than ours. All good right?

Nope - few days later a final “f you” email from GoDaddy and customer users got deleted. Thankfully our GA wasn’t and we restored the users.

For the life of me I cannot figure out how they’re accessing the tenancy. Have re-run through the guide three times now (not like it’s my first rodeo either) - anyone got any ideas?

Or do GD just retain some kind of back-end access via MS that can’t be blocked or revoked? Every other thread I’ve found where something like this happened their GDAP was still active and that definitely isn’t the case here.

EDIT: For anyone coming across this thread in future: The culprit was an Enterprise App called "Partner Center Web App" that gives GoDaddy persistent access. In addition to following the T-Minus365 guide, this enterprise app also needs to be deleted.

Hi. I am in over my head and asking for help. Around 20 years ago I had an email and domain name only package with Go Daddy. We have four email addresses for the family. It went from under 20 bucks a year to a couple hundred dollars a year. If it makes a difference, I don’t use the webpage, just the email. Go Daddy used to have their own email platform but now use Outlook online. On our phones we just use the email app.

I understand there are other companies out there that will host my email, but I’m not sure how I would switch to another company without losing all of my archives of saved emails. For each account.

I am in over my head. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Is there any other service I can switch to that might be less money than Go Daddy that would allow me to keep my emails?

I have searched Reddit, but can’t seem to get a firm understanding. on our phones we just use the email app. I will appreciate any and all advice about how I can get what I’m looking for. Thank you so much.