A GoDaddy web hosting review

A GoDaddy web hosting review: I've been a GoDaddy web hosting customer for more than three years now, but as I've been looking around for a private Git hosting service, my eyes were opened to another web hosting company named A2 Hosting. Based on my initial research, I just wrote an A2 Hosting v GoDaddy web hosting comparison/review.

While A2 Hosting looks like they might be more of a "developer friendly" web hosting service, I thought I'd take a few moments to offer my own review of the GoDaddy web hosting service, without taking A2 into consideration.

GoDaddy web hosting - The good news

As mentioned, I've been using the GoDaddy web hosting services for over three years now, so there are certainly some good things about them. Here's a list of the good things that come to mind:

• The GoDaddy web hosting plans are competitively priced, especially their dedicated server plans.
• They offer Drupal web hosting, which is very important to me.
• They recently added a "grid hosting" service, which, in theory, should help your website uptime.
• They have migrated some of my websites at least twice, presumably due to hardware failures, without charge. They simply did this, and sent me an email afterwards saying that they had done it.

Those are the good things that come to mind about the GoDaddy web hosting service. Next, the bad news.

GoDaddy web hosting service - The bad news

Unfortunately there is also some bad news when it comes to the GoDaddy web hosting service. Here are the bad things that come to mind about the GoDaddy web hosting service:

• The GoDaddy user interface is possibly the worst web user interface of all time. Instead of getting better over the years, it keeps getting worse.
• There are "hidden" fees when it comes to domain name registration services. If you don't want your name, address, and email address made public, GoDaddy charges additional fees to hide this information. And to make it even worse, they do this through a separate service, which requires a separate login to a different website, and they send you separate bills for this service.
• My websites on their shared servers often run very slowly. That may not be too important if your website gets 100 hits a month, but when it gets thousands or millions of page views a month, that's a big deal.
• Their dedicated server plan seems to be limited to 2GB RAM. That's a pretty big restriction for very busy Drupal websites (and PHP websites in general).
• As I look around at other web hosting companies, at least one company (A2 Hosting) seems to have a more "developer friendly" approach than GoDaddy. They offer support for more programming languages, databases, and programming tools than GoDaddy offers, at similar prices.

GoDaddy web hosting - Summary

In summary, the GoDaddy web hosting service is a mixed bag. If you're just looking to host a "brochure" website for a small business, and you don't mind dealing with their cumbersome user interface, and the confusion about their "private domain registration", and you don't mind the occasional slowness of your website, GoDaddy is okay. If you get a GoDaddy dedicated web server, and you can live with the 2GB RAM restriction, I've been very pleased with their dedicated web servers, and their price is good.

That being said, as I look around at other web hosting services, I like what I see with the A2 Hosting company, and I've documented what I've found there in my A2 Hosting v GoDaddy web hosting comparison article. For very technical users, I've also documented the A2 Git hosting service in my Private Git hosting services article.