GoDaddy Review: NEVER Use This Provider

Although GoDaddy is most well-known for their domain registration services, they are also one of the largest hosting companies in the world. But is it actually a good place to host your website?

GoDaddy has a slick, trustworthy-looking website and a name that rings a bell with virtually everyone. When a family member of mine who had never done anything with websites before went to register a domain name, she did it through GoDaddy.

I've been a customer of theirs since 2015 and have hosted multiple domain names with them during that time.

In this review, however, I'm going to focus my attention primarily on their web hosting offerings. In short: GoDaddy's hosting is slow, insecure, and far too expensive for what you get. You only receive a free SSL certificate with their Ultimate plan, which costs €16.99 per month after renewal. For their other plans, you'll pay €69.99 per year for it. For the record: most web hosts provide a free SSL certificate with all of their plans.

Their customer service is disastrous, and there are also some issues with their domain registration that aren't quite right (I'm going to transfer my domain names that are still with them elsewhere).

I'll explain all this in more detail in this GoDaddy review.

GoDaddy at a glance

GoDaddy speed, uptime, and customer service

Speed, uptime, and customer service are the three most critical components of web hosting. GoDaddy fails miserably on all these fronts.

Speed

In the hosting industry, it's common knowledge that GoDaddy packs their servers to the brim with websites. The problem with this approach is that when one site experiences a traffic spike, it slows down all the other sites on the server.

GoDaddy also doesn't use modern server infrastructure or the latest PHP version. Looking at their cheapest hosting plan, we can see it only has 512MB of RAM (which you also have to share with other websites) – just a fraction of what other hosting providers offer. Additionally, all their plans have strict CPU limits.

Don't worry if you're not familiar with all the terms mentioned above. The most important thing to understand is that all of this leads to slow websites – and in some cases, websites that don't load at all.

Uptime

Uptime refers to the time your site is online, while downtime refers to when your site is offline. Every hosting provider experiences downtime, but GoDaddy websites suffer from significantly more downtime than the average hosting provider. This is disastrous for business websites, and it's not acceptable for hobby sites either. When visitors can't access your site, you potentially lose revenue, and moreover, it's harmful to your SEO.

Downdetector gives you a good idea of what's going on.

There's been a flood of complaints about this, not just on this site but also on Facebook groups, forums, and review sites like TrustPilot.

GoDaddy claims to have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but even without digging into their fine print, this doesn't seem to hold up:

Pay attention to their wording: if they can't deliver on this guarantee, you may receive a discount on your hosting. “May” doesn't really sound like a solid guarantee.

Customer service

GoDaddy offers 24/7 customer support that you can reach via live chat or by phone.

GoDaddy's customer service isn't really customer service at all, but more of an extension of their sales team. For example, when you contact them about issues with your shared hosting plan, their response typically suggests upgrading to a more expensive plan. They do this even for websites with almost no visitors or other factors that might cause slowdowns (such as plugins).

I'm afraid that many people who don't know any better fall for this and end up paying way too much money for a service they don't need at all.

When you try to contact GoDaddy by phone, expect to wait at least 20 minutes. Once you finally get someone on the line, they're unhelpful and try to get rid of you as quickly as possible (because, of course, every customer who calls costs them money).

GoDaddy's customer service easily ranks among the absolute worst in the hosting industry.

Here's a small sample from the endless stream of negative customer experiences.

Examining GoDaddy further

Now we'll look at GoDaddy's dashboard, security features, and everything else they have to offer.

Dashboard

GoDaddy has a custom-designed dashboard where you can manage your websites and domain names, adjust account information, and handle your payments.

This dashboard looks attractive and is easy to use. However, there are a few annoying glitches. For instance, it randomly asks you to log in again with your Google account while you're navigating through different pages.

For website management, GoDaddy offers cPanel, which allows you to install and manage WordPress and other content management systems.

Security

There are probably few hosting providers on earth where it's less safe to host your site than GoDaddy.

There have been countless incidents of data breaches:

• In 2019, over 28,000 users had their login credentials exposed
• In 2021, over 1.2 million GoDaddy managed WordPress users were affected by a data breach

Another issue worth noting is that GoDaddy at one point was injecting their own JavaScript into customers' websites without informing users. This JavaScript could slow down your site and in some cases even break functionality completely.

This isn't hearsay. GoDaddy themselves admit this on their website:

Let this sink in for a moment. The fact that a host adds code to your site without permission—not only to collect data without your consent but also potentially destroying your site in the process—is completely insane.

Many sites hosted on GoDaddy are struggling with malware issues. This is because GoDaddy barely invests in their security measures. Of course, as a user, you bear some responsibility for keeping your website secure. However, you should expect any decent web hosting provider to handle the majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to security.

Hosting extras and features: you have to pay extra for an SSL certificate!

GoDaddy is terrible when it comes to hosting extras and features. At GoDaddy, it's all about one thing: upsells.

And so you end up paying extra for site backups (€1.99 per month) while any decent hosting provider would include this for free.

Even more ridiculous is that GoDaddy doesn't offer a free SSL certificate with their three cheapest plans (with the most expensive one costing €9.99 per month after renewal). These days, virtually every hosting provider offers a free SSL certificate through the non-profit organization Let's Encrypt. It's actually not even worth mentioning anymore. At GoDaddy, you'll casually pay €69.99 per year for it, almost €6 per month.

Since a website essentially can't function without an SSL certificate anymore, you're practically paying ten dollars per month after the introductory rate for GoDaddy's cheapest web hosting. Actually, it's more like $12 if you want backups, which is something every site really needs anyway.

GoDaddy website builder

GoDaddy offers its own website builder. This type of website builder (or website maker) can be useful for complete beginners who find WordPress a bit too much work. You can create simple sites with it using a number of templates. With a drag & drop tool, you can then add text elements and images.

GoDaddy's website builder isn't terrible, but there are plenty of better alternatives available.

Webador is an excellent alternative for Dutch users. This Netherlands-based website builder offers a homegrown solution that you can learn more about in our Webador review.

GoDaddy hosting plans and pricing

GoDaddy offers a fairly wide range of web hosting plans. Since I don't recommend GoDaddy as a web host, there's little point in examining all of them in detail, so we'll just look at their most popular plans. These are their shared hosting plans aimed at new, smaller websites and beginners.

These are their shared hosting plans:

Starter

• 512 MB RAM (extremely low)
• 1 website
• Unlimited bandwidth (this is a lie)
• 30 GB of storage (much more than you'll ever need for a single website – nice to have but completely unnecessary)
• Cost: €2.99 per month when you pay for 3 years in advance (€3.99 per month upon renewal)

Affordable

• Standard performance (very vaguely described)
• 1 website
• Unlimited bandwidth
• 100 GB storage space (30 GB for a single website is already excessive, so 100 GB is completely overkill)
• Free domain name
• Cost: €3.99 per month (renews at €7.49 per month)

Deluxe

• Standard Performance
• Unlimited number of websites (there's no such thing as “unlimited” in web hosting)
• Unlimited storage space (same as above)
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free domain
• Cost: €3.99 per month (renews at €9.99 per month)

Ultimate

• Increased processing capacity
• Unlimited number of websites
• Unlimited storage space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free domain
• Cost: €7.99 per month (renews at €16.99 per month)

Keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier, that on top of this you'll need to pay extra for an SSL certificate with the three cheapest plans, and you'll have to pay additional fees for backups with all plans.

What's particularly striking when looking at these plans is that GoDaddy excels at displaying empty marketing promises. They don't tell you how many visitors each plan can handle, yet they promise things like “unlimited bandwidth” – something that simply isn't possible.

GoDaddy offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you're reading this review and you've just purchased a GoDaddy hosting plan, you can fortunately get your money back and switch to a good provider (you'll find my recommended providers a bit further below).

Warning: GoDaddy steals domain names

There are countless people who report that GoDaddy snatches domain names right from under your nose. Here's how it works. You search for a specific domain name on GoDaddy. The domain name is still available, and you click away from the GoDaddy site to think about it for a while. A few days later you return to the GoDaddy website. The domain name is no longer available, but you can get it for 10 times the usual price.

While the evidence for this is anecdotal, it would be naive to think that a company like GoDaddy doesn't engage in these kinds of practices.

Major companies that advise against GoDaddy

Countless major companies and organizations advise you to steer well clear of GoDaddy.

Wikipedia no longer does business with them and iThemes finds GoDaddy's hosting terrible.

GoDaddy alternatives

The good news after all this is that there are countless hosting companies that do offer excellent service. You probably just haven't heard of them because, unlike GoDaddy, they don't spend millions of euros on marketing campaigns.

These hosting companies are just as easy or even easier to use than GoDaddy, while being much faster, more secure, and less expensive.

• Cloud86. A Dutch web host offering lightning-fast servers and excellent customer service. Very competitively priced. Learn more about this hosting provider in our Cloud86 review.
• Hostinger. An international hosting provider with 24/7 customer support and LiteSpeed servers. It's a budget host, so customer service isn't the fastest or best (expect around 30-minute wait times), but it delivers excellent value for the price. Read more about this hosting provider in our Hostinger review.

You can also check out our article on the best hosting providers for Europeans where we directly compare our favorite providers. Or take a look at this article to learn more about WordPress hosting if you're planning to build a WordPress site.

In conclusion: avoid GoDaddy like the plague

GoDaddy charges outrageously high prices for worthless web hosting. They target people who simply don't know any better and make them pay extra for services that virtually every hosting provider offers for free, such as SSL certificates and backups. Meanwhile, they fill their servers with far too many websites and their server infrastructure is outdated. This means your site isn't safe with them and will load slowly. Their customer service could hardly be worse.

Finally, they engage in unethical practices such as snatching domain names right from under the noses of interested users.

If you've been considering using GoDaddy, let me strongly urge you: avoid this provider like the plague.