GoDaddy.com is a household name, thanks to a massive ad campaign and a huge web presence. GoDaddy.com is arguably the most popular web hosting service, if only because their name is so well known. Are there web hosting services that offer more features and better service than GoDaddy.com? Of course there are -- but even GoDaddy's best competition lacks the kind of exposure that GoDaddy.com's name gets on a daily basis. GoDaddy.com offers a variety of web hosting options, service packages, and plenty of additional features to keep customers satisfied. GoDaddy.com is perfect for hosting a small personal site or even a small business website. GoDaddy.com is known for their ease of use, and with good prices to boot, there's no reason you shouldn't consider GoDaddy for your next website venture.
There are three basic GoDaddy hosting plans for you to choose from -- Economy, Deluxe, and Unlimited.
Unfortunately, the cheapest GoDaddy hosting plan (Economy, $4.99 / month) doesn't give most users the kind of storage space and bandwidth they want. While it is true than many websites won't need more than the 10 GB in storage space and 300 GB in monthly bandwidth you get with the Economy plan, many people see choosing the Economy package as an unneccessary limit on their website's potential. If you're a particularly ambitious web designer, you won't want to work inside those limitations. Then again, that $4.99 / month fee isn't set in stone. If you buy multiple months in advance, you can get that price down to about $4 even per month of hosting. If money is your main concern, buy a year of Economy hosting from GoDaddy and see how you like it.
if you want a bit more kick from your web hosting experience, you can upgrade to the Deluxe hosting plan. For about $7 a month, the Deluxe plan gives you a ton more features and storage and bandwidth -- but there are still limits. 150 GB of storage and 1500 GB in bandwidth to be more specific. You'll also have access to 500 unique email addresses for your website, should you need that, though 500 addresses is overkill outside of a pretty large web based company.
The reason some website creators want unlimited bandwidth and storage is
that they can't say for sure whether that website is going to really explode
or not. The Internet is a funny place -- one day, your website gets no
traffic and you feel like you're wasting your money with Unlimited hosting.
Then something crazy happens, a video you're hosting goes viral, or a sudden
influx of customers pops up, and your Unlimited hosting comes in really
handy.
That Unlimited plan offers literally limitless disk space and monthly bandwidth, but comes at a hefty price. $14.99 per month to be exact. Here's another secret -- GoDaddy's "Unlimited" hosting isn't fully unlimited. You still only have a certain number of FTP users, email addresses, and even a limit on email storage. Doesn't seem so Unlimited anymore, does it?
It takes very little effort to purchase your little piece of the web through GoDaddy, but there are times when your patience will be tested. When it comes time to install applications or set up your website's databases, you'll face a few day's wait, checking your hosting account and wondering when the heck the work will be done. That takes away from the "user friendly" aspect of the GoDaddy service. Websites make money when their visitors have access to new content, and since time is money, some see GoDaddy's lag in updating your hosting account as a financial drag. Still, GoDaddy is known for being accessible to even the biggest web Luddite. The occasional server overload and lag time are nitpicky problems, minor enough that most users will get over them before they even get mad.
The online support forum and GoDaddy FAQs are well organized and easy to read. Any problem I've ever had with the service, there's been an answer at my fingertips. I started out web hosting with GoDaddy as a beginner, and even without much knowledge of website design, I was able to put together a few personal websites with ease, thanks to the easy access to help.
Go Daddy service representatives are available by phone 24 hours a day, as well as through email communications. I was shocked at the speed with which Go Daddy’s support staff responded to my questions, considering how popular the service is and how many users must be having problems just like me.
In a word: yes. GoDaddy gives you access to all sorts of web editing tools and information. Beginners in the world of web design have their own set of tools, as do more advanced web developers.
GoDaddy can even help you in a more direct way for a fee. They have a wide variety of professional web design options including total site building services and basic formatting and design work. GoDaddy's software is supported by plenty of different programming languages, making it a really adaptable service for people with all kinds of programming backgrounds. The plan I use supports CGI (both Python and Ruby), PHP, Perl, ASP, FrontPage, MySQL, and ColdFusion extensions, and GoDaddy says they're working to add more functionality every day.
The design tools are easy to use, too -- almost every design tool inside the basic "Account Management" toolkit look like regular control panels. Using your basic GoDaddy.com web tools, you can manage your account, manage your email and web security settings, setup databases, and look at your web statistics all from the same page.
Go Daddy has earned their rank as "most popular web hosting service" by providing a quality product at a competitive price. There are a few hiccups still to be fixed -- mainly the downtime required when you install new applications -- but GoDaddy goes above and beyond the task of providing basic web hosting essentials. GoDaddy offers secure facilities at a low price. The web setup process is easy to understand, and GoDaddy seems to have some kind of hosting option for all different levels of web management, whether you're a beginner or an expert.