Hello,

I am getting quite a great deal on GoDaddy and a friend sent me his WordPress blog link, which he hosted on a Shared Hosting plan and it seems quite fast. I asked him to create a test blog for me and I did my tests and it seems pretty fast.

However, I had a really bad experience about a year ago with GoDaddy. I had shifted from another no-so-famous web host which was extremely fast. After that, I shifted to Hostgator and they disappointed me even more.

So, my current web hosting is going to expire soon. And since my friend shown me that GoDaddy has improved, I was planning to get their web hosting, since it is quite cheap for me.

I am confused though. Did they really improved? Or was I just unlucky with GoDaddy? I mean, like, being hosted on a shared server which was really busy?

I also saw many reviews bashing GoDaddy, especially saying how GoDaddy still uses HDD, but when I looked at GoDaddy's website, they seem to be offering hosting on NVME SSDs as well. So, have the things really changed?

If I was just unlucky with them, then I guess I won't be taking another chance. Since the offer is only valid on annual plans.

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?

Everybody always says Godaddy is trash, leave them ASAP, etc. But WHY? What do they do wrong that makes them such an unusable hosting provider?

For context: I’ve been purchasing my domains through Godaddy for years and therefore found it most convenient to purchase their WP hosting as well. I’ve always noticed my WP sites are painfully slow, even when I use the bare minimum for plugins and have literally only 1-2 blog posts up with only a couple photos. I know a giant plugin like Yoast can slow down a site, but I also know there are millions of functioning websites out there using Yoast and loading just fine.

Is it Godaddy or is it me?

I’m in the process of migrating to SiteGround, and I hope I’m making the right decision.

This is a personal review from me after being their customer for 4 years.
First, who doesn't know this—overly expensive GoDaddy. Anything they sell is expensive (domains, hosting, SSL.).
Secondly, today I had trouble with my website and tried to change to nameservers. I have full domain protection on for my domain (which, by the way, cost 11.99$). It has given me very, very limited features, only the basic ones like 2FA before making major changes and protection in the case of the domain renewal failure. But the problem is that when you change nameservers and DNS records, GoDaddy is supposed to send you an OTP for one time, like I made the first change, and I got an OTP (after waiting 6 minutes) on my email address. When I tried to do other changes, I got asked for an OTP and got a new one again on my email (after 5 mins). I lost my traffic due to their slow mailing system; each email took from 5 to 10 minutes! and note that this service cost 11.99$ !!! wtf
Thirdly, I would say their support system is completely useless, and the site is full of many bugs. For example, recently I had this issue where they notified that an OTP had been sent to my phone number when they had not. Because of this, I was denied access to my account to update my banc cart info prior to my domain renewal. Support and verification of identity took 7 days; if I didn't have the 11.99$ protection service, I would have lost my domain because that's how long they took. Their OTP system on both SMS and email is super slow.
This is my review on Godaddy, and what I would really not recommend to anyone is the Godaddy.

Hi-

What’s your experience using Godaddy to build your website and/or SEO ?

I need a website up asap.

I know SEO takes months…how does one really know they’re doing what you paid for with SEO back-links ?

Hello everyone, I am not the typical redditor, more like a lurker, but current state of things like google and sponsored websites force me to look alternative methods for information. The topic is website security - TLS and SSL and the way GoDaddy chat support behaves. straight to the point, we saw that our certificate is expired - bizzare since things are supposed to be automatic. No problem! login, look around pay for SSL certificate and configuration, wait a bit and see that nothing has changed. Next we contact their support, an indian guy trained in sales wants to sell the best deal of the century 1600 usd for 5 years best price and so on. We just want to pay yearly since it is a company policy so 5 years subscription is quite alot. Also the price sounds like a gotcha add 700% value for 24 hours deal, hell yeah. Anyways went back and forth with other "deals" like 3 year package for 1,2k and so on, but in the end we get to the point where we are paying for what we want - 1 year for approximately 500 usd. Ok lets go, the credit cards were already linked so they knew the payment details, next thing we get 3 consecutive payments pending for 500 usd. The card in question got blocked since they tried to place more payments obviously and now I am here, ranting on reddit. Anyone had such splendid experience? Anyone know more about GoDaddy and their lovely procedures? please let me know if I have to look for alternatives or deal with them. Thanks in advance!

My cousin wants a website for his home remodeling business. It's just a glorified business card, static site, to add legitimacy to his business and provide pictures of past work as well as contact information.

People always seem to recommend squarespace for this, but at $15/mo vs $10/mo for godaddy's website builder, I figured I'd ask if anyone had any experience with it.

I have no clue how to set up a website on my own, it’s fairly expensive to have done, but this offers an AI generated option that is customizable and sets up an online style for product.

Just wondering if anyone has tried it and what site some pros and cons

My wife has a company and GoDaddy hosts everything. I looked at invoicing and GoDaddy is charging us $180.00 a year for the website. We also have 3 employee emails, the 1st email is $70.00 for 1 year 2nd email is another $70.00 per year and 3rd email is $50.00 per year. I don't know the price seems awfully high but I have no experience with this sort of thing.

It's 2023 and there is so much competition. Yeah I get the website is $180.00 for a year but GoDaddy charges extra because they are easy to find via SEO so maybe we can get that cheaper but the emails.... I mean come on what the heck $190.00 for 3 emails every year?!

I searched older Reddit posts but I'm kinda confused and was hoping someone could give me the down low on this sort of thing.