GoDaddy Hosting Reviews – Why You Should Look Elsewhere

GoDaddy About Us

From a quick glance at GoDaddy’s about us page, you can find that they have an impressive resume.  Nearly all webmaster has heard of the name “GoDaddy” at one time.  There is a reason they have grown so rapidly over the years.  Love them or hate them you have to give them a ton of respect for their marketing campaigns.  They are fantastic at marketing.  At a time when there were few domain registrars, GoDaddy soared past the competition, quickly.  There is even a GoDaddy bowl game for college football.  Of course, as we all know, they advertise during the Super Bowl.

Largest Registrar In The World

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar.  Currently, no other company beats them regarding clients for domain names.  They control 30% of all the domain names.  T that they have 58 million domains under their management.  They currently have 12 million customers.  They have 14 facilities.  Godaddy employs 4,000+ employees.

Simply put, GoDaddy isn’t just a startup brand.  They are not going to take your money and run.  They are established.  GoDaddy has been in business since 1997.  Perhaps they are the most successful regarding growth and client base.

Websitebuilderexpert.com

It is a website that reviews many site builder programs. They have examined some website builders such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace.  They have also reviewed GoDaddy’s website builder. This site is really good.  It does have a lot of useful information about website builders. I kind of wish I would have thought to do something like this. The primary focus is on GoDaddy’s website builder, though. Anyways they give three pros about Godaddy.   Easy to use with professional design themes.  24/7 support.  GoDaddy has backup points which you can revert to at anytime you feel like it.

Websitebuilderexpert.com does give three cons of GoDaddy. They can’t change themes.  You lose all your data if you do. There are no eCommerce tools.  The designs are bland.

For the most part, it looks like their site builder has a simple builder that is easy to use. You can create a site with zero experience whatsoever. There are a variety of support, tutorials, and community resources. Jeremy Wong, the editor at sitebuilderexpert.com then rates GoDaddy site builder 4 out of 5 stars.

TopTenReviews.com

TopTenReviews.com has reviewed dozens and dozens of hosting companies. They put every business they review to a steep test. Meaning, that they try out their service.  Then write them up a review. Out of all the hosting companies, they have reviewed they have ranked GoDaddy #2.  Second to JustHost. While I may disagree with their rankings on a lot of hosts.  I am going to show you what Kent Dunn, the author of this GoDaddy hosting review has said about them.

Features 9.4/10

They are an economical hosting service. They do offer a lot of features.  It is a good start for those small site owners. Their plans seem to work great as long as you’re not getting a ton of traffic (10 GB) allotment. They do support all programming languages. You are allowed 5 thousand emails per year on their entry plan.

Ease of Use 9.4/10

Ease of use is one of the best things about them. You can manage what you need from file managers, database managers, and domain managers. It does take some time to setup MySQL databases (1 day).

Support 8.1/10

GoDaddy does have some faqs and information for those that are looking for a knowledge base.  It is for both advanced and newbie site owners. You can contact them by telephone or email.  It is a little slower to get one on one support since they have so many clients. They do respond to your request in usually one day.

Pros

Lots of features.  GoDaddy has what you need to develop a site.

Cons

Expect to pay for more features for an extra cost.

In summary, GoDaddy is a big brand that has a lot of customers. They have stood the test of time and managed to expand over the years. They don’t love the fees for add-ons but rate them 8.95 out of 10.

Pcmag.com

This article by Jeffery L. Wilson on Pcmag.com talks about the types of plans that GoDaddy offers. He shows that for entry level sites it is a pretty good option.  But where they excel is with their business hosting plans. Then he talks about GoDaddy’s web builder tool and how it is easy to use. Their builder creates a much more attractive builder than other competing companies. They have eCommerce software that has a lot more flexibility than a lot of other competing companies. You do get Adwords credits too.

Jeffery has also stated they have great customer support.  He placed a call at 10:00 P.M. He asked a question about the plans and was impressed with how knowledgeable and friendly their customer support was. Live chat was also good. He does recommend that you do business with GoDaddy. His review of GoDaddy is rated four out 5.

Pros

• Window and Linux based servers.
• Excellent customer support 24/7.
• Email uses Microsoft apps.

Cons

• Basic accounts lack options.
• Have to pay for site builder.
• Higher cost than other hosting companies.

Read the full article here.

iThemes.com

iThemes.com is a place where you can purchase WordPress themes, plugins, and even get training. They are widely known by site owners.  They are an excellent asset to a lot of web designers businesses. This may seem like outdated information since it was posted in 2010. But, many site owners have left comments in the comment field and stated that it is not outdated information and the problem still does persist today.

They warned all their customers to stop using GoDaddy.  They massively oversell their servers. Meaning you can start a shared server, then a VPS, and then dedicated server and your site still load slowly. The real problem isn’t the type of web hosting you have.  It has to do with the infrastructure and how many clients you have on a server. The developers at iThemes are tired of updating their code just to get them to work on GoDaddy’s servers.

Quality of Service Isn’t There

Obviously, quality hosting is important and as the owner of this article Chris Jean stated it is the backbone of your site. Whenever your site goes down, you are losing money. Each time your site goes down you is losing money. Chris only used iThemes for testing and for clients that are having problems with their theme. He notices a ton of issues, though.

GoDaddy is using their own control panel which is worse than an off the shelve control panel. For instance, databases, subdomains, FTP users, changing mailer email addresses, enabling SSH, (they just say pending). There is no time frame or anything telling you exactly how long you are going to need to wait. Instead, you log in and keep checking until it no longer says “pending.”

Each seven days their error logs turn themselves off. Making troubleshooting issues a big ordeal.

GoDaddy’s Customer Support Is Lacking

The support with GoDaddy is very lacking. Meaning that if you’re a coder or have any experience you should be able to communicate with their tech team. Experienced site owners can tell right away when support is incorrect, not taking care of an issue, and not provide any real help.

This article even states that support is just an extension of sales. Meaning that they will do a limited amount and then try to sell you a VPS, dedicated server, or some other bells and whistles that you don’t need. They don’t take the time to troubleshoot stuff. It is all about marketing and making more money. They like to blame plugins, themes, etc. but never admit anything is ever their fault. Chris even contacted them, and they asked him to contact the developer of the plugin he had problems with. The funny part is he is the developer of the plugin!

All in all, people have left a lot of comments on this post and state that GoDaddy is slow.  They have lots of problems. Chris said that GoDaddy just doesn’t care anymore.

AuthorMedia.com

Author Media is a site that provides lots of information on blogging, social media, website tips, writing, etc. This site was created by four people.  The CEO of AuthorMedia.com Thomas Umstattd wrote a post called “6+ Reason Why Authors Should Avoid GoDaddy”. The following points were addressed in this article:

Support

Thomas had a client that had problems with her email account. Her email would go down from time to time. Thomas had to listen to their conversation when they contacted customer care. To his surprise, GoDaddy would give them inaccurate information. Since then there has been an update and GoDaddy has improved their customer support, though.

Overpriced

Godaddy starts you off with a low price. I am sure you have at one time seen the prices for $.99 or $1.99 domain names. But, when you renew your domain name the prices goes up to $10.  Then the next year after that $15. Compared to NameCheap a domain for one year with email forwarding and whois protection would be $13.57/year. With GoDaddy, it would cost you $24.95/year.

Hard To Use

A lot of new site owners sign up with GoDaddy. Thomas isn’t too fond of people signing up with them. GoDaddy spends a lot of time up-selling their customers. If you are not careful, it is easy to go ahead and pay for things you don’t exactly need. Makes it harder to manage your domain.

Slow speed

As my research shows iThemes called GoDaddy out for overselling their servers. Meaning GoDaddy puts thousands of sites on a single server. If you run a popular site, you could run into major speed issues. Google started penalizing sites with slower speeds. Meaning you won’t rank as high in the SERPS if you host with GoDaddy. Lastly, making changes to your website is slow too.

Little Control

Unlike most companies, GoDaddy didn’t use to offer cPanel. It means they used to use their own in-house control panel. It made it a lot harder and more expensive to do a simple task.

Smut

The whole way GoDaddy got so big was by running their Super Bowl commercials. You remember the GoDaddy girls? They used “smut” to sell their business. GoDaddy used to display “too hot for TV” right on their site. They sold their service by showing attractive females and using that as their primary marketing.

SOPA

GoDaddy did support SOPA. SOPA was a bill that was supporting censoring the internet. They did back out on it.  But once they got such a negative reaction from other site owners they backed out on the SOPA bill.

Overall, Thomas Umstattd does not recommend GoDaddy to anyone.  He highly recommends that site owners use NameCheap, Hostgator, or ZippyKid. There have been 164 responses to this post, and most of them seem to agree with the author. To make matters worse not one single employee of GoDaddy felt the need to stop by and leave a comment. It is bad for public relations. For this reason, I am adding this piece of my research to my negative section for GoDaddy.

PissedConsumers.com

It is a site much like RipOffReport.com. You don’t want to be featured on this site.  Don’t be surprised if people stop by this site and leave them a rotten review. I have been researching and hosting with GoDaddy for years.  I was not surprised that there are 125 complaints on them. Here is an overview of what people are complaining about:

• Accounts have been deactivated.  GoDaddy wants you to pay them a fee to re-activate your account. Once you pay the bill nothing is restored.
• There are bugs which do cause random 404 pages. People have contacted GoDaddy on this.  They did charge them a fee to recover their site. The sad part is GoDaddy left the site completely broken.
• Many site owners have reported that customer support isn’t that good. Spending hours upon hours to get matters resolved seems to be common.
• Their sales team does have limited knowledge of technical issues. They rely on the message to a tech. You could spend a few hours on the phone.  Sadly you don’t always get solutions for your problems.
• If you do use their site builder.  Later you decide to switch to another template.  Then you will lose all your content.
• Some of the products they sell do not work correctly.  You will have constant problems with them.
• Domain names do start at $.99 for the first year. The price does jump up 10X to $11.99 for the following years.
• Their SEO service does not provide a lot of value. Instead, it looks like someone from outside the U.S. created it. One example is title tags that were changed to two sentences that didn’t even make any grammatical sense.

Lots of Hacked Off GoDaddy Customers

All in all, there is a lot of GoDaddy’s name on this site. I should note that there are over 125 complaints.  The average person loses $4,500 who left a complaint. So far it looks like 14 people have stated they have an unprofessional staff.  14 people said they have poor customer service.  12 people have stated that they have questionable ethics.

Picking a dependable host is a big deal. Unless, you’re made of money. The overall losses are $270,000.

Forbes.com

Kelly Clay has written an article that was posted on Forbes.com.  This is a somewhat older article.  It was published on September 10th, 2012.  It has received almost a half a million views.  This article talks about the five reasons you should leave GoDaddy.  The following points are:

• Previous Sexual Advertising.  GoDaddy did use some T.V. advertisements that air during the Super Bowl to grow their company.  These ads were sexist and defamed women.  These were known as the GoDaddy girls.

• Zimbabwe Elephant Killings.  Bob Parsons, GoDaddy’s old CEO went on a rant and published a video on his personal blog.  It glorified the killings of elephants in Zimbabwe.  PETA boycotted GoDaddy.  They removed all their sites away from GoDaddy.

• Unethical Practices.  It included buying domain names that users search.  Then inflating the value of the domains so GoDaddy could make more profits.”

• Supporting SOPA.  The SOPA bill was a bill that never made it.  This bill wanted to censor freedom of speech and activity on the internet.  After GoDaddy had got a lot of heat from this headline, they decided to change their stance on SOPA.

Read the full article here.

WebHostingJury.com

WebHostingJury.com is another web hosting review site.  It is like tbwhs.com.  There is no editorial review section. Instead, the reviews are made up entirely by the users. There are nearly 200 reviews on this site. I am going to highlight some of the complaints and praises on this site:

GoDaddy Praises

• Compared to a lot of other web hosting companies GoDaddy is cheaper.
• Some customers have been with them for 15 years.
• Support is good.  GoDaddy prides themselves on doing a good job.
• Cheap domain names. Promo codes are always available.

GoDaddy Complaints

• Accessing FTP is a real chore.
• They have a lot of help articles. Some of them are outdated.  The walkthroughs don’t exactly match how the interface is now.
• Site builder is not a fun experience.  It is “Plain Jane.” There isn’t a lot of creativity that you can do with it. There are a ton of limitations. You have to keep you the site builder because you can’t transfer to another host. It is a way to keep customers there. It went up $2/month.
• Sometimes you are on the phone for nearly an hour with GoDaddy.
• Servers ran slow. You get passed around from server to server.
• The canceling account is hard. You have to scan your driver’s license. They don’t always cancel the right service.
• Frequently get 500 error messages on WordPress sites.

People have been commenting on this GoDaddy review since 2005. There is a steady stream of complaints from site owners. From 2014 to currently there were a few comments that praised GoDaddy. Mostly, people try GoDaddy for a little while get frustrated.  Then they migrate to another hosting company. Overall, GoDaddy gets a 2.6 out of 5 for reliability.  2.2 out of 5 for support.  3.5 out of 5 for pricing.  An overall score of 2.2 out of 5.

Consumeraffairs.com

Consumer Affairs is a site that is featured on The New York Times,  CNN, Forbes, AARP, NBC News and Washington Post.  They review it all for consumers.  They review airlines, auto, credit cards, doctors, electronics, and online dating.  Yes, you guessed it web hosting companies.  The goal of Consumer Affairs is to provide lots of information for people that are considering different products and services.

They have a special section on GoDaddy for “customer complaints.”  As of September 25, 2016,  they have collected over 301 negative complaints about GoDaddy.  This could be anything from their site builder, domain name registration, and web hosting.

It looks like there are many past GoDaddy clients that are upset with the company.  This could be anything from billing concerns, customer support issues, hosting issues, etc.  I do like how this site shows the users full name, the location where they live.  You can also view the date in which the dispute was written.  There is a rating system at the top of each users comment that shows how they rate the company.  Then on the top left-hand side, you can see the overall satisfaction rating.  Then on each complaint, you can vote on whether or not the feedback was helpful or not.

Check it out here.

Nytimes.com

On vacation Bob Parsons the CEO of GoDaddy killed an elephant in Zimbabwe.  He did it for his own personal gain.  He tried to play it off as he was saving the village. Crops were being trampled and if he killed one of the elephants the rest of the pack would run away.  There was a graphical video that was showed Mr. Parsons hovering over the dead elephant.  AC/DC was playing in the background.

PETA boycotted GoDaddy and encouraged others to move their sites away from GoDaddy.  Ms. Gonzalez from PETA called Bob Parsons “America’s scummiest C.E.O. of the year”.  This story made it’s way around the internet fast!

View article here.

Theregister.co.uk

Back on September 19, 2011, John Leyden wrote an article that was featured on theregister.co.uk.  It shows there was a massive hacking attack on GoDaddy’s servers.  This indicates that 445 sites were injected with an injection of hostile code in the .htaccess file.

Todd Redfoot told Domain Name Wire “These accounts were accessed using the account holder’s username and password.”  There are speculations that the passwords that were obtained were obtained by a phishing attack.  Since then the problem has been cleared up.

View the article.

TechCrunch.com

There was a day called “dump GoDaddy day.”  It sounds weird, but ever since GoDaddy supported the bill SOPA, there was a lot of outranging amongst customers.  Once GoDaddy learned of the news, they immediately decided to oppose the SOPA bill.

Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman stated this comment. “Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities.  Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.”

View the article.

WebHostingHero.com

WebHostingHero.com is a web hosting review site.  There is all user generated content on it, though.

A professional system administrator named Stephane is the owner.  He has nearly 20 years in the industry. Their GoDaddy hosting reviews show what others are saying about them.

The user reviews primary focus was around GoDaddy’s:

• Awful customer support.
• Delayed fix of issues.
• Fraudulent events.

GoDaddy gets five out ten stars from WebHostingHero.com.  Most of the reviews do not speak highly of the company.  

Host-Shopper.com

Host-Shopper.com is a hosting review site.  They review hosts.  They currently have about 40 or so reviews.  Robert has collected almost 60 reviews from a lot of site owners.  Most of these reviews are not praising GoDaddy.

This site does point out all the plans you can purchase with GoDaddy.  You can then compare the plans to see how they stack up against each other.  Users are always encouraged to write up a review.  They will post it on their site.

The average GoDaddy rating is 1.67 out of 5.  It shows that people are not praising them.  Some of the problems that people have reported are:

• SSL issues.
• Email issues.
• Spotty uptime.
• Poorly train technicians.
• Poor support.

Better Business Bureau Rating

One thing that a lot of people are not aware of is GoDaddy’s Better Business Bureau rating. They have acquired an A+ rating from the BBB. However, at a glance, an A+ rating looks fantastic. I checked their BBB rating on September 3, 2016. If you did a little deeper into the rating, you’d actually find that they have 934 complaints against them. 470 of these complaints are from site owners that had problems with their products/services. 303 of these complaints are billing/collection issues.  Since they are such a big company, they are going to get more complaints than smaller companies.

However, as I told you, I would be monitoring GoDaddy more and more in 2016. I found that 130 of these complaints have been filed in just 24 months! I will be keeping a close eye on their BBB rating in 2017.

ClickNowMarketing.com

ClickNowMarketing.com is a site that specializes in SEO, local SEO, reputation management, and selling on Amazon. The did an article titled, “Godaddy QUIETLY Ends Email Support – Replaces with the flawed chat system.”

So, GoDaddy’s live chat is flawed. There were suggestions they had for GoDaddy. They were:

• Chat should be 24/7. Currently, you have to keep checking to see if your queue is low enough.
• Needs to have audio. It would prevent users from knowing when they are connected with an agent.
• Wait times should not be as long as they are.

They tried out live chat, and it took over 1 hour and 20 minutes. Also, there is no email support. Instead, you are prompted to a page that says call us.

They have reached out to GoDaddy, and they haven’t done anything to improve the service. They did reply on Twitter saying GoDaddy does not offer email support anymore. No more email support because GoDaddy was getting 1000’s of emails a day.

DownDetector.com

Commonly, people Google “GoDaddy having problems today” and DownDetector.com is what shows up on Google. DownDetector.com is a site that you can go to if you want to know if there is a known problem with a website. What I like about this site is it shows problems reported over the last 24 hours.

You click on the “I have a problem with GoDaddy” button and then you can choose from the following:

• Domains
• Web Hosting
• Email
• Web Tools
• or something else.

People do report problems with GoDaddy throughout the day. When I checked it on 12/17/2016 I found over 25 problems people have reported. There is a ranking for GoDaddy and people have rated GoDaddy 2 out of 5 stars. There have been 5,550+ comments left from people that have problems with GoDaddy.  42% of the problems are with GoDaddy’s hosting.

Whoishostingthis.com

This is an excellent web hosting review site.  It has been around since 2007.  I use their website for a lot of research with different hosts I review.  They give their own “expert” review and have collected 500+ user reviews on GoDaddy.  Whoishostingthis.com really does have a lot of reviews on the most popular hosts.  In fact, they have over 660 companies that they have reviewed as of September 25, 2016.  Here are the problems and praises left in this GoDaddy hosting review.

GoDaddy Problems

• Lots of site owners feel customer support is lacking. Could end up waiting 30 minutes on live chat. Some wait a couple of days for ticket support.  Others spend some hours talking with them on the telephone. They don’t give the best technical advice.  GoDaddy will blame plugins or other themes.  They have completely screwed it up on a once working site. This caused their site to be left broken. Then they need to hire outside help to get the matter resolved.
• There have been internal loop errors that are problematic when you update your DNS.
• The site builder does have a lot of issues. Whenever you update stuff, there are constant bugs. If you ever do decide to switch your theme, you will lose all of your content.
• Their control panel is wonky. It takes awhile to hunt and search for stuff you want to change. Then you have to wait for the changes to take place. It takes a lot longer than other web hosting companies.
• Sites do go offline from time to time.  GoDaddy oversells their servers. You can’t expect to cram a ton of people on a single server without speed issues.
• Sites do seem to get hacked. There are some major security issues with their servers.
• GoDaddy will call you out of the blue for an upsell. Some site owners have requested that they are removed from their call list. However, they still get sales calls.
• Sometimes you have downtime.
• There have been lots of email problems. Meaning that they don’t receive emails.
• Their help articles are out of date. Meaning that they haven’t been updated in years. This makes the article completely irrelevant.

GoDaddy Praises

• They do have many loyal clients.  They have been using them for 15+ years.
• A lot of site owners are happy with customer support.  You get a lot of 1 on one help. There have been times when their staff walked you through technical stuff.  They showed you how to do it correctly. They do have U.S. support for clients located in the United States.
• Their prices are low for domain names. Their hosting is also cheap.  This helps site owners that are on a tight budget.
• The uptime with them seems to be 99.9%.
• GoDaddy does do a good job at updating their clients.

GoDaddy has received 3 stars out of 5.  It shows that they are average.  They do also have many reviews which don’t speak highly of GoDaddy.  The biggest complaint according to Whoishostingthis.com users seems to be their performance and support.  

This review on GoDaddy is definitely worth a read.  Their GoDaddy reviews are a vital piece of my research.  WhoIsHostingThis.com has more than 500 GoDaddy hosting reviews on their site.

Reviews.com

Reviews.com is a site that has reviews on it all. They have a section for fitness, taxes, credit cards, stock trading, software, etc. They do have a section for hosts.  Also, they have Godaddy hosting reviews.  This is maintained by Yan Huang.  He runs a marketing business at Gray Hat Web.

GoDaddy does allow you to purchase lots of plans. A lot of new site owners tend to start with GoDaddy. They do offer a lot of advertising credits whenever you sign up. They have some good things about them. The following good things were addressed:

Pros of GoDaddy

• They have a website accelerator.  It is included in their plans. No matter where your server is located this should help increase your site’s speed.
• You do get a “one click” app which makes it easy to install WordPress.  You can install lots of other applications.
• They do have a good money-back guarantee. It is an anytime money-back guarantee.  When you cancel within the first 30 days, you can get a full refund.
• GoDaddy can also help you with your site.  They have a site builder for an extra fee.
• They can update your site for 30 minutes per month.
• Help create and manage a Facebook business page for you.

Cons of GoDaddy

• You don’t get live chat support with them. They do have a phone number you can call.  Support ticket and emailing are sometimes delayed.
• The Economy plan limits you to 90 subdomains. If you do exceed that amount you will have to upgrade your account.

The author of this site rated GoDaddy 3 out five stars. Out of all the people that left a comment for them, it was nearly all negative except one comment.

WebHostingSecretRevealed.net

WebHostingSecretRevealed.net is owned by Jerry Low. It is a hosting review site. He writes about his experience with each host. Also, he has used over 50 hosts in his life. Jerry has a lot of knowledge making sites. It was a matter of time before Jerry tried GoDaddy. So, he signed up and wrote a GoDaddy hosting review. These pros and cons are stated.

GoDaddy Pros

• Price. The price tag is under $2.3/month. Also, you get unlimited bandwidth and 30 GB of space.
• Uptime. GoDaddy does promise 99.9% uptime. It is true. His site was down for 10 minutes at a time. 39 minutes was the longest time his site was down.
• cPanel. It is easy to use. A tad was different from some host. Was easy to drag and drop modules.
• Lots of plans. GoDaddy offers a ton of plans. They are easy to upgrade.

GoDaddy Cons

• The issue with WordPress. Could not install a caching plugin.
• Errors. “Error establishing database connection.” This occurred three times in 2 months. Very annoying.
• Upsells. GoDaddy tries to sell you upgrades. This happens when you renew your plans. So, it is easy to buy extras buy mistake.

He rates GoDaddy 3/5. If you are using WordPress GoDaddy does restrict you. Other hosts are a lot better. He says that GoDaddy is a budget host.

Jim Landers has been using computers for 20 years.  Jim has been designing sites since 2000.  He is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) Master Designer since 2003.  Jim is an A+ Certified technician in computer maintenance and repair.  Mr. Landers has been building blogs and sites exclusively with WordPress since January 2010.  Jim has over 100 free video tutorials on his YouTube Channel.  You can find more information at JupiterJim.com and JupiterJimsMarketingTeam.com

Why do you think so many people sign up with GoDaddy.com?

People sign up with GoDaddy to register a site. It is because they are so well known. Ask someone to tell you the names of 2 other registrars besides GoDaddy.  They can not do it. I have had many web design clients. It is amazing to me that people know the name “GoDaddy.”  But they do not get the difference between a ‘domain name registrar’ and a ‘hosting company.’

GoDaddy allows you to register a domain name.  They have servers that allow you to host your site with them.  GoDaddy is providing two completely separate, but vital functions that are dire to making a website.  Most people that want to build a site do not get that.   They probably get that you can get your domain name from GoDaddy.  That is all they know about it.

So people ‘sign up’ with GoDaddy because the name is so well known. It is well known because they have done a great job branding the company through celebrity sponsors.  They are promoted during the Super Bowl. GoDaddy should be marveled for their marketing!

What do you think are the best pros and cons are for GoDaddy?

GoDaddy is a one-stop shop for registering my domain names.  I can log into one site and keep track of all my domain names.  GoDaddy is good at letting customers know when their domain name is about to expire.  This is vital to the functioning of your site. Their 24/7 support is generally good.

There is a con to GoDaddy.  It takes awhile to get in contact with them. I hate dealing with GoDaddy. Long wait times compared to most web hosting companies. If you don’t hit the ‘#’ key on your keyboard on time, you have to listen to their music. It can be annoying.  30 minutes of music is no fun.

GoDaddy’s Support Is Bad

Customer support can range from friendly and helpful to downright bad. It is totally random who picks up that support phone.  One problem required me to call customer support three times.  I finally got someone who was knowledgeable. My guess is that the company is so big they simply don’t have time to train everyone good enough.

Tell me about your past background with them.

Godaddy seems to have a great backup service. That is a very good thing.
There was a speaker at a WordCamp Orlando 2014. I will never forget her speech.  It started with “Friends don’t let friends use GoDaddy.” She was speaking of their hosting service. I agree with her. No real WordPress web designer would ever use GoDaddy. That tells you something right there. It seems fine for most people to register their domain name with GoDaddy. It is not wise to host your WordPress site with them.

Changes Wouldn’t Register With Them

A few months ago a client insisted I build his WordPress site on GoDaddy’s servers.  Since he had paid for a WordPress account.   For two days we would make changes in the WordPress dashboard.  The changes would not register. They did show up on the site.  The client grew annoyed. We moved his hosting account to WebHostingHub.com those problems went away.   He kept his domain name registered with GoDaddy.   And that is typical of hosting your WordPress site with GoDaddy.  If it’s not one thing, it is another.  And that’s why I don’t host any of my sites with them.

Would you recommend GoDaddy?

Yes, I would recommend GoDaddy as a domain name registrar. I would NOT recommend them as a host for your WordPress site.

There are things I do not like about their TV ads.  The elephant hunting debate, and some of the claims made against them.  I even tried to use another domain name registrar.  But then that company also has problems.  Because of the way they send their lawyers after people who write negative reviews about them.  So, although there are many things I don’t like the politics of GoDaddy.  I do not know of another good easy to use, cheap domain name registrar that I would recommend.  Concerning my domain names, I have used GoDaddy for many years.  I have not had any problems.

However, I would never recommend that anyone host their WordPress site with them.  Even though they now have some WordPress service.