GoDaddy Hosting offers both web and managed WordPress shared hosting plans. You can use their shared web hosting plans to build your WordPress website. The difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting plans is that WordPress hosting plans offer additional features specific to the WordPress platform. This article covers an in-depth review of GoDaddy shared web hosting, including speed and global uptime tests from independent websites.
Two Web Hosting Plan Categories:
Standard Performance Plans: Ideal for simple websites
- Web Hosting Economy: 1 Website and 25 GB Storage
- Web Hosting Deluxe: 10 websites and 50 GB storage
- Web Hosting Ultimate: 25 websites and 75 GB storage
- Web Hosting Maximum: 50 websites and 100 GB storage
High-Performance Plans: Ideal for high-traffic or resource-heavy websites
- Web Hosting Plus Launch: 50 websites and 100 GB storage
- Web Hosting Plus Enhance: 100 websites and 200 GB storage
- Web Hosting Plus Grow: 150 websites and 300 GB storage
- Web Hosting Plus Expand: 200 websites and 400 GB storage
Key Features:
- Free domain for 1 year
- Free daily backup
- cPanel
GoDaddy offers cPanel for a website with their hosting plans. With the cPanel, you can manage your website’s files, databases, domains, metrics, and security. You can also access various website metrics via cPanel.
To comprehensively test the GoDaddy hosting service, the website was tested for speed and global uptime through reputable independent websites. The website was tested without installing any optimization plugins to get the most accurate results focused only on the hosting service.
Speed Tests
The website’s speed was tested with the Google Page Speed Insights tool for both desktop and mobile.
Desktop Results:
- The test assigned a performance score of 96, which is an ideal score.
- The website’s accessibility score was 100%, indicating no issues with the website’s access.
- The speed index for the desktop, which implies the website’s load time, is 1.3 s, indicating satisfactory website speed.
Mobile Results
- The test assigned a performance score of 77, which is reasonable since a website needs to be optimized for mobile devices. The speed index is 2.8s, indicating satisfactory website load time.
Global Uptime Test
A global uptime test was run for the website hosted on GoDaddy using the Global Uptime Test tool by Uptime.com.
The test was run for a total of 9 international checkpoints. The test result was that the website was available across all 9 checkpoints with satisfactory load times.
The uptime of the website Godaddy.com was also tested using the tool UptimeRobot.com. According to the monthly uptime report, the overall uptime was 99.976% for the website for an entire month.
Scalability:
There are two plan categories offered by GoDaddy:
- Standard Performance.
- High Performance.
While standard performance plans are for simple websites, high-performance plans are meant for high-traffic and resource-heavy websites. The top-tier high-performance plan offers 400 GB of storage and 32 GB of RAM, which should be sufficient unless you run a mammoth website.
Customer Service:
GoDaddy offers three types of customer service:
- Phone support.
- Text support.
- Chat support.
During the testing, it was noted that chat support was unavailable most of the time. Phone support was easily accessible with minimal wait times. While customer support is easy to reach, the support representatives could not handle some basic questions, which indicated that the staff is not well-trained. The call was put on hold for an extended period before they could answer the queries.
Migration Assistance:
If you are migrating your WordPress website from another hosting provider, you have to do this by yourself using their migration tools. Their experts’ assistance is chargeable, which costs more than $100. This is expensive compared to other hosting providers, such as SiteGround, which offers the same service for around $30. Moreover, Hostinger offers free migration assistance from their experts.
Based on the GoDaddy web hosting review, the following pros and cons were noted:
Pros:
- Satisfactory website performance.
- Offers a free domain for one year.
- Accessible phone support.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- Free daily backups.
Cons:
- In the most basic plan, the SSL certificate is free only for one year, unlike many other hosting providers, such as Hostinger, that offer it for free for a lifetime, irrespective of the plan. The renewal cost of the SSL certificate can be more than $100, which can be quite expensive.
- Lack of trained staff to handle customer queries.