10 Best Web Hosting Services Of 2024 – Forbes Advisor

GoDaddy is the best web hosting service for businesses that need an easy setup and peace of mind with daily backups. Plans start at $6.99 per month for your first year and increase to $9.99 per year upon renewal with annual billing. So while GoDaddy doesn’t offer ultra-low introductory pricing like Bluehost, its pricing also doesn’t skyrocket upon renewal.

Another nice feature of GoDaddy is that, as a leading domain name registrar, it offers unique features, such as the ability to list any domain names you own for sale. While this may not pertain to every user, I have found it to be a helpful opportunity in instances where you end up with domain names you are not using.

Jeremy Garland, founder of Academized, shared his thoughts on GoDaddy: “I have found GoDaddy’s web hosting services to be reliable and user-friendly. Their shared hosting plans provide sufficient resources for my needs, and their platform’s ease of use allows me to focus on creating content. While some additional services can add to the cost, GoDaddy’s solid uptime and responsive customer support make them a dependable choice for my online presence. However, I recommend carefully reviewing renewal pricing to avoid potential increases.”

Types of Hosting Services

GoDaddy offers two main categories of web hosting services: standard performance (starting at $6.99 per month with annual billing) and high performance (starting at $21.99 per month with annual billing). Within each of these, it offers a variety of plans that vary based largely on their storage limit, number of databases and websites. Its high-performance plans include unlimited databases and a free dedicated IP address. These plans increase in price based on the storage limit, RAM, vCPUs and number of websites.

Pricing and Value

GoDaddy plans are feature-rich with the inclusion of all vital website elements, including a free domain, free SSL certificate, free daily backups for added security (and peace of mind) and free business email that uses your own domain name (e.g., yourname@yourdomain.com). While it has an industry-average money-back guarantee that pales in comparison to providers such as DreamHost at 97 days and InMotion at 90 days, GoDaddy does give users flexibility to choose between a one-, 12-, 24- or 36-month contract.

Performance and Uptime

Since GoDaddy offers a variety of plans based on performance level, not surprisingly, its performance varies greatly by plan. Users can expect average page load speeds with its standard performance plans. In my experience, GoDaddy hosting became laggy when I had numerous WordPress plugins activated on my site or on sites that were nearing their storage limits. However, this is to be expected for shared hosting plans.

In terms of uptime, GoDaddy has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. While this sounds high, it’s not the best in the industry. For example, DreamHost has a 100% uptime guarantee. Granted, it’s worth keeping in mind that uptime guarantees do not cover scheduled maintenance, which is the most common culprit of downtime.

Customer Service

GoDaddy’s customer support is available 24/7 by phone, live chat and, interestingly enough, SMS. As a long-time user of GoDaddy, I used to not find its help to be particularly helpful—especially compared to DreamHost. However, more recently, GoDaddy’s support has kicked it up a notch, so much so that DreamHost’s support now pales in comparison.

Who Should Use It?

GoDaddy is ideal for small businesses that want to easily set up WordPress websites with one-click installation and want to lock in low pricing that does not increase upon renewal.

Learn more: Read our full GoDaddy review.