14455 N. Hayden Rd.
Suite 219
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
(480)505-8877
GoDaddy has been in the business of domain names since 1997 and has offered web hosting services since 1999. With data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific, GoDaddy supplies shared Linux and Windows web hosting, virtual servers, dedicated servers and cloud services to millions of customers around the world.
Review
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Sales
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GoDaddy generously gives customers an unlimited amount of bandwidth to work with. Having bad experiences with this business model in the past, I wanted to ask GoDaddy a few questions about the limitations of this deal. There’s only one way to reach GoDaddy for sales questions, and that’s by phone. It took about 25 minutes to finally get a representative on the phone and when I did, I was referred to GoDaddy’s website for the answer to my questions. Problem was, the answers weren’t on GoDaddy’s website, which is why I’d called in the first place. Sales reps seem rushed and eager to get to the next call, never really answering much of anything. Another downer: GoDaddy does not have a toll-free telephone number.
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Setup
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Signing up for a hosting account is simple business with GoDaddy. After filling out a short online form, customers are immediately sent an invoice and account instructions and details. Very speedy and simple.
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Billing
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I paid for my hosting plan one year in advance and never had any billing issues to speak of. GoDaddy accepts all major credit cards and PayPal, and hosting accounts are auto renewed unless manually cancelled.
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Pricing
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GoDaddy shared web hosting plans all includ an unlimited amount of bandwidth and varying offerings of space. Their smallest plan, the Economy 4GH, runs $4.99 a month, and includes 10 gigabytes of space. Penny for penny, GoDaddy comes up as a fairly good buy.
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Reliability
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My shared hosting hardware was undeniably reliable during my one year stay.
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Help & Support
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GoDaddy gives customers support by email, telephone and an online forum. Telephone support is almost non-existent. Of the four times I called support when my website was offline, three times I was told to wait 48 hours to see if the situation would resolve itself, and once I was left on-hold and forgotten about. I was never given a reason as to why my hosting server was down or when and if it would be back up. Customer support is lacking overall, and much like the phone sales department, support personnel always seem to be in a hurry to get off the phone. On the flip side, the online forum community at GoDaddy is booming and very helpful.
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Uptime
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I have a premium uptime monitor in place to keep track of my domains. That monitor showed that GoDaddy lived up to its 99.9% uptime guarantee eight out of twelve months. The other four months were a crapshoot. I suffered through two months where my website had repeated (almost daily) outages, none of which were ever explained, and two months during which my databases would not load, rendering my website useless.
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Guarantee
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Terms of Service
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You can find the Terms of Service for GoDaddy online. Highlights include:
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Spam forbidden. Offending accounts will be terminated.
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Customers 100% responsible for website backups.
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May not use account for file storage or file sharing.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Inexpensive.
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Good selection of account add-ons.
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One click setup.
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Friendly, helpful forum community.
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Disadvantages
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Must pay at least three months in advance.
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Phone support embarrassingly bad.
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Downtime never accounted for or explained.
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Websites slow to load and suffered from poor performance at times.
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No toll-free telephone support.
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MySQL database size limited.
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