GoDaddy Web Hosting

• Price Range
• Data Centers in North America, Asia, and Europe
• Reliability
• Customer Service
• Variety of Features

Price Range

GoDaddy offers regular discounts for its hosting products, which are usually about 50 percent less than the renewal rate. Unlike many companies, GoDaddy is fully transparent with its renewal prices, so that customers are able to see the rate that they will be paying when the initial term expires. Another difference between GoDaddy and its competitors is that GoDaddy prices its Linux and Windows shared hosting at the same rate. Normally, the industry standard is to price Windows plans higher due to different licensing agreements required between the hosting company and Microsoft. GoDaddy's pricing is competitive and extremely transparent. For those just starting with a web presence, the company's ability to manage all of one's web needs is attractive.

Data Centers in North America, Asia, and Europe

The company does not disclose much information about the centers online and its representatives are reported to have given vague answers about the centers, only stating that they are state of the art and located in North America, Asia, and Europe. Conversely, the company has informative tours inside one of its data centers, featuring the resources used to maintain uptime, keep the servers secure, and reduce the company's carbon footprint. GoDaddy's data center tour gives viewers an inside look at the workings of the data center, which is both informative and unique. GoDaddy uses both generators and batteries to ensure that the servers do not experience power interruption. Cooled water is one of the primary methods that the company uses to cool its data centers, which is both environmentally friendly, and extremely effective.

Reliability

GoDaddy states that it maintains at least 99.9 percent uptime. The company has delivered this uptime percentage at or above this level for the last several years. BestCompany.com uses data from independent testing sources that send thousands of pings to a hosting company's servers per month to randomly determine if the site is up. GoDaddy has performed very well historically on these tests, having been monitored for several years continuously. The only exception to this exemplary performance was a series of outages on September 10, 2012, which left the servers down for hours, resulting in an uptime percentage of 99.674 percent for that month. Users should have little concern about GoDaddy and its reliability.

Customer Service Support

GoDaddy's customer support is one of the best in the industry. The company offers phone support that is available 24/7. The support is also available for international customers with local numbers. GoDaddy's knowledge base and forum are comprehensive and easily searchable. GoDaddy has live chat options available for its customers as well. Many GoDaddy reviews report that agents are knowledgeable and professional.

Variety of Features

GoDaddy gives its customers access to more than 125 apps on its cPanel/Linux hosting. These are easily installed with a few clicks. Users can access their accounts with FTP as well as the cPanel. Users have the option of several add-ons that its customers can purchase for security and privacy. The company offers its customers access to top level domains that are not easily accessible through other website hosting providers.

Visit Site

• Refund Policy
• No Email Support

Refund Policy

GoDaddy has a 30 day refund policy, but we are concerned about all of the fine print that accompanies the refund. Some reviews cite a 30-day return policy, which is only partially correct. Customers purchasing an annual plan have 30 days to receive a refund. Monthly hosting subscribers have 48 hours from the time of the order to initiate a refund request. Other products have varying time periods during which a refund can be requested and granted by the company. While GoDaddy is transparent about its policies by directing customers to visit GoDaddy's Refund Policy, the policy itself is filled with many varying terms that make it difficult to navigate.

No Email Support

While there isn't a lot to complain about with GoDaddy's services, we would like to see some changes. Currently, they do not offer email support. This seems like a basic customer service tool that should have been added a long time ago. All customer service support must be handled through the online chat or over the phone.