GoDaddy Shared Hosting Review

GoDaddy was founded in 1997 and has been providing Internet shared hosting ever since. It is also an Internet domain registrar as well as a web hosting company and sells a number of additional other e-business related services and software. As recently as 2010, it reached more than 45 million domain names under its management. It is currently the largest ICANN recognized Internet registrar in the world. 

Features

GoDaddy has a huge range of features available for Linux and Windows servers. These are the following features that you can get form their hosting service: 

Emails 

10GB to unlimited disk space for email storage
100 to 1000 email addresses
Webmail
Forwarding/Autoresponders/Catch-All Email addresses
Fraud/Virus/Spam Protection
Sender ID
Email privacy and protection (military grade 256-bit encryption) 

Databases 

MySQL storage between 10GB to unlimited
Backup/restore database; direct database access 

Domains 

DNS management
External domains
Subdomains
Multiple websites

Other features 

50 concurrent FTP users
Unlimited monthly data transfer
Disk space starting at 10GB to unlimited
SSH Access
FTP over SSL
Premium DNS
SSL Certificate
Cron Jobs
Google AdWords Credits
Forums
Photo Gallery
WordPress
Serendipity
Joomla
Drupal 

Language support 

Frontpage Server Ext.
PHP5
Custom PHP.ini
Perl
Python
Ruby on Rails 

As you can see, the feature list is truly extensive for GoDaddy’s shared web hosting. And these are only some of the potentially available features. The company provides thousands of features and it will take you several hours to make your way through all of them on the website. 

Pricing

GoDaddy’s pricing is in three ranges: Economy, Deluxe and Unlimited. The pricing changes frequently but it can be as low as $5/month for the Economy and $8.50/month for the Unlimited. The difference is in the space alloted — for Economy it’s currently 10GB and for Unlimited it’s as it says, unlimited! Additionally, you can get 100, 500 or 1000 email accounts depending on your service and 10, 25 and unlimited MySQL databases. In addition to the above, you also get Free Premium DNS, Site Scanner and an SSL Certificate with Fixed IP address. 

Pros 

Clearly the best pro about GoDaddy shared hosting is how cheap their prices are. For buying a domain name and the initial hosting it is virtually just pennies. If you know how to use an FTP program to upload then you have the cheapest domain names. 

Cons 

While GoDaddy has literally hundreds, if not thousands of options, it is difficult to navigate them all. Their user interface Plesk is not very intuitive so FTP users are at a clear advantage here. Additionally, you do have to real through all the fine print when you are setting up your domain as some features (such as automatic renewal) are not enabled by default, even though many people expect it. This has led to issues in the past where their domain name was locked and GoDaddy charged users a handling fee to recover it before it was auctioned off again.