If you’re looking for advice on being a racecar driver or shattering glass ceilings, then we highly suggest listening to Danica Patrick.
But if you’re looking for advice on where to host your website, we highly suggest you ignore Danica’s bikini-clad commercials. Instead, you should listen to folks who have decades of experience managing websites.
Folks like us who have been behind the scenes of 100s of websites and have seen the good, bad and ugly when it comes to web hosting.
And, based on our experiences over the years, we’ve collectively seen enough to recommend that you never, ever host a website with GoDaddy. Here’s why…
1. Nickel and Diming
Yeah, they advertise cheap up-front rates for web hosting. But be ready to face a barrage of upsells if you sign up for their hosting.
Want regular backups of your entire site (and, yes, you absolutely do!)? That’ll cost more.
Need help fixing an issue with malware or other common issues that affect WordPress sites? That’ll cost more (sometimes $100s more).
Time to renew? Prepare to pay more, especially if you’re not willing to commit to the long term (3 years) to lock in their lowest rates.
With all the upsells, you may very well end up paying MORE for your hosting at GoDaddy than you would at other web hosting providers for a similar set of features.
2. Underwhelming Support (To Put It Mildly)
Our experiences with GoDaddy support have been pretty bad. We can sum up the standard response we usually get from them in 4 words… “It’s you, not us.”
It seems like the first contact with GoDaddy support is someone literally just copying and pasting off a script. “Well, we fixed the problem, rebooted the server and that should solve the problem.”
Maybe that solves the problem for 15 minutes but then the problem is back again. And again. And, well, you get the picture.
We’ve dealt with issues like this on multiple occasions where clients keep paying us to troubleshoot/fix their website but, due to GoDaddy’s hosting, our hands are pretty much tied. In these situations, we tell the clients they have to change hosts in order to fix the problem.
In fact, in one situation it got so bad we told a client we couldn’t work with them anymore because they wouldn’t leave GoDaddy. It just wasn’t worth the time, money and hassle to deal with the same issue over and over again. One that could be easily fixed simply by going to a better-quality web hosting solution.
3. Your Website Is On a Shared Server With Bad Actors That Can Hurt Your Website
There are a lot of shady websites (and website owners) lurking on the web. Whether it’s spam, malware or other underhanded tactics, the web is chock ‘o block with them.
Bad actors with bad websites flock toward cheap web hosting solutions. Because it’s cheap and, if their site gets banned, they can just move on to a new account.
The problem is that many web hosting companies, including GoDaddy, put your website on a shared server with dozens, if not 100+ other websites on it. And all the sites on that server share the same IP address (which is one way Google and others ID websites).
If there are bad actors on your shared web server, that could impact your website. In fact, we’ve experienced this with GoDaddy. We’ve seen client websites blacklisted by Google (for both SEO and paid ads) because the site was on a shared server with other sites that were up to no good.
In our experience, it’s seemed that other hosting companies that use shared servers do a much better job at monitoring their traffic to weed out the bad actors than GoDaddy.
Having your site blacklisted through no fault of your own (other than choosing a crappy web host) sucks. And is another reason we highly suggest looking elsewhere for hosting.
4. Server Upgrades Are A Mess
We’ve run into issues on client sites because the GoDaddy server their site is on rarely gets upgrades. This can cause compatibility issues, make your site more prone to hacking and results in other issues.
And when they do decide to upgrade things, we’ve had situations where there was no warning the server was going to be upgraded. This also leads to compatibility issues that have caused sites to not function properly or not work at all.
5. Good Luck If You Get Hacked
We’ve dealt with hacked websites before. It ain’t fun.
If that happens at GoDaddy, good luck to you. Especially if you didn’t take the upsell for backing up your website.
If you do get hacked, you’ll either have to pay through the nose to GoDaddy support or a 3rd party solution to get your site back (if they even can).
To be fair, it very well may not be GoDaddy’s fault your site got hacked. So if you need them to help you fix things, you should pay for it.
However, we’ve found that other web hosting solutions, like our favorite option for most people – WPEngine – are much better about this. They are more proactive about monitoring sites on their servers so are more likely to prevent hacks from happening in the first place than GoDaddy is. Also, the support and feature set they offer makes it much easier to recover from a hack if one does occur.
Bottom Line: You Get What You Pay For
At the end of the day, we feel like you get what you pay for with GoDaddy (and other super cheap hosting companies) web hosting. It’s super cheap. And the support and features you get reflect that.
We’ve counselled more than a few clients to use WPEngine or another hosting option and move away from GoDaddy. Some listen. But others don’t.
And it’s not uncommon for the ones who don’t to end up spending $100s or $1000s with us to troubleshoot things. Things that could have been easily avoided by using a better web host.
There are some tech companies out there that love that their clients use GoDaddy. Because they can keep charging high consulting fees to fix GoDaddy’s issues.
There are others who like promoting GoDaddy because they’ve got a decent affiliate program.
That’s not us.
Our best advice, based on a lot of experience, is to stay away from GoDaddy hosting. There are a lot better options out there that will save you a lot of money and headaches in the long run.
