*Sigh.* You always remember your first.
My first - that is, the very first hosting provider I signed up to use - GoDaddy. I have many fond feelings for them. In fact, I still host some of my sites there. However, let me tell you why it’s a bad idea for you to host your websites there.
First, though, in the interest of being a fair and balanced badger, I’ll talk about some of the good GoDaddy has going on.
The Good Things GoDaddy.com
Back in the days before your ten year old, your dog, and your hamster had his own GoDaddy positioned itself as the user-friendly place for cheap domains and hosting. Their cheery mascot (pictured above) appealed to the hipster doofus in all of us. Start a website? Sure, why not! With its mass appeal and cheap domain GoDaddy quickly gained appeal and positioned itself as the “Go to” place for hosting online.
Since its hipster doofus GoDaddy has sexed things up. Now when you visit the home page, instead of seeing just the hipster doofus, you now see Godaddy Girl spreadeagled over the page. Well, not spreadeagled, I guess. Spread wide across the page, though. This girl demands to be noticed.
In real life GoDaddy girl’s name is Danica Patrick, and apparently she is an IndyCar Series Star. I have no idea what that means other than she must get to wear lots of cool leather catsuits like the one she wears on the homepage.
These days the site sends a new message. Not only can the hipster doofus get his website going cheaply GoDaddy, but his dating life has improved. Who knows? Danica teases us. Host your website here, and you might even get the girl. At the very least, having your own website will make every hot girl want to date you.
Or maybe
GoDaddy does offer competitive pricing, and after you have registered your first site through them, you’ll constantly receive coupons in the mail enticing you to register more domains and buy additional hosting features for 25% off or more. This works best if you have a bunch of domains to register at once because the savings can add up.
However, as many other Internet marketing types have pointed out, if it’s just cheap domains you’re after, NameCheap.com is usually considerably cheaper. Also Godaddy you have to pay extra for private registration (to keep your registration details private -which is always a good idea.) At Namecheap private registration is free. It doesn’t cost any extra.
That means realistically you’re paying twice as much for domain registration with privacy enabled Godaddy vs. Namecheap. If privacy isn’t important to you, though, then a domain registered Godaddy for full price will run you about $1 more per domain registration than at Namcheap.
The exception is GoDaddy is running some of their special discounts. I’ve seen some where you can get privacy cheaply or even free, depending on the sale.
Anyway, since I’m starting to talk about the negative aspects GoDaddy, it’s time to talk about some other places where they have really dropped the ball.
Number one, their control panel is a nightmare and they keep making small changes to it so every time I go back there - which is about every three months - to fiddle with one of my older domains still hosted there, things have moved around. If you’re familiar with CPanel, which is the default panel most hosts use, you’ll be lost here as you have to click about a hundred pages before you can get anything done.
Also, when you go to buy something there, the pages are chock full of ads and when you go to buy something you’re sent to about ten other sales page trying to persuade you to add more features to your site. Take my word - you don’t need any of their extras, except maybe email.
And that’s another big problem. Email doesn’t come with each website. Email is considered a separate service GoDaddy.
GoDaddy does allow you to host unlimited domains with one hosting plan, which is nice, but that doesn’t include email for each domain. If you want email for each domain you have to pay extra.
But the real dealbreaker GoDaddy is that it has totally dropped the ball with align=”center”>GoDaddy and Blogs Don’t Get Along
For building targeted traffic to your site FAST, nothing works better than blogs. And to keep the search engines interested in your site, you need to update your site regularly. A blog becomes an essential tool unless you’re creating a static web page or microsite.
You can’t install Wordpress blogs there - period. Most programmers who are proficient in installing blogs for people refuse to work on sites hosted GoDaddy. Apparently, due to unique configurations GoDaddy has going on, installing a WordPress blog there manually is next to impossible.
GoDaddy doesn’t offer the famous “five minute WordPress install” through Fantastico either. And you absolutely need to use Fantastico if you’re the non-tech type and don’t want to deal with manually installing a WordPress blog.
Not only Godaddy didn’t offer support for ANY type of blog until last year when they began implementing a really lame blog feature that you could pay to add to your account, only these yucky blogs come with just a few horrible templates and have none of the cool tools, widgets, and other things that more advanced bloggers have come to require from their blog sites.
So in essence, it’s a bad idea to host your site Godaddy if you ever anticipate blogging on your sites. And that’s too bad, because Godaddy could offer Fantastico or if their CPanel wasn’t a horrid beast of a thing, impossible for experienced programmers to work with, they would continue to be an excellent hosting site.
I only GoDaddy to host some old sites that I’m loathe to transfer right now, and these sites don’t have Wordpress blogs on them anyway, and use Godaddy for hosting some microsites that I purposefully designed without blogs.
The host I’m happiest with these days has also been around for a while, and they have quietly been growing and improving customer service over the years to become a real player in the world of hosting. This company is Bluehost.
The most important thing for me is that Bluehost offers Fantastico so you can install WordPress blogs without requiring any technical knowledge about installing them. The second most important thing is that they use CPanel so it’s easy to find features you need. And the third thing I’ve found is that their pricing is really decent for hosting. They only charge $6.95 per month right now for basic hosting, and that is for an unlimited amount of domains. And that comes with more goodies: 1500 GB space; 15000 GB transfer; 2500 php emails; 1000 ftp accounts; frontpage supported; free stats; SSL, SSH, CGI, PHP, MYSQL. All of that plus unlimited parked and addon domains is very good.
Their customer service has always been good when I’ve had to contact them for help, too.
You might want to do as I’ve been doing and combine registering your domain at Namecheap and then pointing it at Bluehost’s servers and using Bluehost for hosting. This is very affordable and fast to setup.
And best yet, you can also have a WordPress blog up and going quickly, too.
I really GoDaddy would get their act together and start using CPanel and offering Fantastico for WordPress installations. They’re a good host in many ways but I’m afraid they really dropped the ball. If they want to remain a leader in the industry over the next few years, they’ve got to step up their game.
Because I’m afraid Danica Patrick, leather clad kitten though she is, just isn’t enough.
So GoDaddy will always remain my first, and it occupies a special place in my heart, I’m afraid I can’t really recommend it anymore for domain registration or hosting. I give it just one badger out of a possible five.
I wasn’t impressed Godaddy and their hosting. Domain names are fine with Go daddy, but for hosting, I wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole. Read my Godaddy review.