No matter where you turn these days, there’s GoDaddy. A company whose  high profile advertising campaigns, coupled with some of the lowest costs in the industry, have helped them become perhaps the most recognised web hosting provider in the world.

Originally starting out as a domain registrar, GoDaddy have since expanded rapidly to provide a whole range of solutions with the idea of helping business owners to grow their online presence.

Hosting plans

One thing we really like about GoDaddy is that they have a lot of different options available for hosting, so that no matter how big, or small, your requirements, you’ll find a plan to suit both your needs and your budget.

Shared hosting

At the core of the hosting-arm of GoDaddy lies flexible, affordable shared hosting plans.

Whilst a free one-year domain registration and unlimited bandwidth are both common factors across all of GoDaddy’s shared hosting plans, most other allocations vary from plan to plan, though all are pretty generous considering what you’ll be paying for them.

For most users who only ever plan on launching the one, single website, the Economy plan, with 100GB of storage and unlimited email addresses should be more than sufficient.

If you think you’ll soon max out that 100GB, or if you’re starting your own online empire across several websites, you’ll benefit greatly from the uncapped storage space offered by the deluxe plan, which actually only comes in at £1 more than the economy package.

Meanwhile, high-end users expecting lots of traffic are well served by the still-cheap ‘Ultimate’ package.

Hosting features

Whichever shared plan you choose, you’ll benefit from easy, one-click installation of over 200 applications, including all the key players like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Magento. You’ll also have access to some of the best customer support in the hosting industry at any time of day or night, something we’ve found invaluable in the past.

What’s more, the company’s commitment to helping people launch their own online businesses means they’re good at offering scalable solutions, so when you eventually outgrow the restrictions of your existing hosting plan, you can always upgrade in a way that is both cost-effective and hassle free.

WordPress hosting

httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni9LNudrMj4

Much like rivals iPage, GoDaddy offer special hosting plans specifically designed for WordPress users.

First-term prices start from as little as just £1 per month for a package that will easily cope with up to 25,000 monthly visitors on a fairly decent sized blog. Much like the Economy shared hosting plan we mentioned above, this should be more than enough for those who want to set up a simple website with a blog they’ll perhaps update a couple of times a week at the most.

At the top end of the scale, you’ve got the WordPress Pro plan, with a first-term price of £18.99 per month for a package capable of dealing with literally millions of visitors to 25 websites, with unlimited storage and bandwidth allocations to make it all possible.

Whilst you could always benefit to save a little by just installing WordPress on a shared plan, with their designed-for-the-purpose packages, you enjoy the benefits of running your site on a platform built for fast, reliable WordPress performance.

Another feature we like here is that you never have to spend your time dealing with those regular WordPress platform updates. GoDaddy take care of that automatically for you.

GoDaddy Pro

Though the company more than hold their own when it comes to providing easy, accessible hosting solutions for the common man, they do gain an edge over the competition by taking the needs of expert web professionals to heart with their GoDaddy Pro suite.

Along with competitively priced VPS and dedicated server packages which not only offer great value for money but make the process of setting up your own server as easy as clicking a few buttons, the GoDaddy Pro site also leads you to helpful guides, tutorials and blog posts designed to make life easier for webmasters.

Ease of Use

Whether you’re installing a WordPress blog, building your site from scratch using your hosts free, inbuilt website builder or simply uploading a pre-built site via FTP, you shouldn’t have any problems doing what you need to do quickly and effortlessly.

If you do, there’s a huge knowledgebase at your disposal, chock full of guides and tutorials to help out if you get stuck.

When your site is live, you’ll have access to lots more features to help you do things like increasing your traffic, managing your content and accepting payments directly from your site, all without any of the costs or complications normally involved in such things.

Customer Support

Though we’ve had a few issues with live chat in the past (namely that GoDaddy tells us there’s an agent available to help us when there clearly isn’t), beyond that, it’s hard to fault them. When you do manage to speak to somebody via live chat, they solve your issues quickly and efficiently.

The same goes for their first-rate phone support, where we’ve found that we’ve never had to wait longer than a few seconds to put directly through to somebody who can help us.

Pros of GoDaddy Hosting

Along with excellent support, the main advantage to a GoDaddy hosting account is that there’s so much more on offer than just the basics. You could be using your platform for months before you discover all kinds of new features to help you grow and manage your business online, and it’s this dedication to going one step beyond for their business customers that puts the company way out in front of the cheap web hosting crowd.

Cons of GoDaddy Hosting

Perhaps the biggest drawback to GoDaddy is that, once they’ve hooked you in with really cheap deals on your first term, those prices do go up an awful lot when it comes time to renew. It would be nice, too, if the company would leave us alone when we do decide to hand over our hard earned money, instead of taking a somewhat aggressive approach to upselling that can sometimes confuse you into buying products and services you didn’t really intend to.

Our verdict

Get through the payment process without being sucked in by constant upselling, and what you’re left with is a hosting provider that really seems to go out of its way to offer plans that suit just about any website and, of course, any budget.

What others say:

“I’ve been with GoDaddy for several years now and in that time I’ve never had a single issue. It’s this reliability that means I’ll keep on using them for years to come.”
David Eckersley,  van hire business owner

“Searching around for an advanced hosting solution, I found GoDaddy’s VPS packages some of the best on the market. I’m very happy with my new server and am already planning to upgrade with GoDaddy in the near future.”
Mark Renshaw, IT professional

“I heard a lot of good things about GoDaddy, so when I came to build a new website to showcase my music, they were my first choice. So far, they’ve lived up to the hype and then some.”
Emily Lees, independent musician