GoDaddy Web Hosting Review: Is It a Scam or #1 Domain Host in the World? – See the Truth!

is godaddy a scam

GoDaddy is huge.

If you are living in the U.S., you have probably seen their commercials during the Super Bowl. GoDaddy claims to be the world’s leading domain registrar and when I am writing this review for you 43,163,218 domains has been registered through their website.

Despite GoDaddy huge success, there are tons of complaints about their services. Is GoDaddy a scam or probably the best domain registrar and hosting service in the world? I’ll give you the answer in this review.

GoDaddy Web Hosting Review


Name: GoDaddy

Founded: 1997, 20 years ago

Field: Domain Registrar, Web hosting, SSL certificates, Website creation

Overall Rank: 80 out of 100.

Have a look at my My #1 RecommendationOverall Rank 98 Out of 100. I have used their services already for over 2 years to create and host all of my websites. They have the best price/quality ratio and they are constantly improving even though the price remains the same.


is godaddy a scam

What Is GoDaddy? – 17,000,000 Customers and 6,000 Employees

GoDaddy is a well-known American domain registrar and web hosting company. It has served over 17 million customers, has 6,000 employees globally and is known for its raunchy, over-the-top advertising, especially during Super Bowl commercials. It manages over 60 million domains, with an annual revenue around $2 billion.

GoDaddy offers website domain registration services, usually at annual rentals. Selling website domains is only their base service, however, as the company also offers virtually every web service you could think of:

  • Domain transfers
  • Web Design—free through an easy-to-use website builder, or you can hire a GoDaddy web designer for a fee
  • WordPress hosting
  • Web security screening
  • Digital marketing services and information on search engine optimization (SEO), local business listings, email marketing and other modern digital marketing strategies
  • Email service, Microsoft Office email compatibility
  • GoDaddy Pro – a service by which the company creates, maintains and manages your website

GoDaddy Products and Pricing – All Possible Services Related to Website Creation

GoDaddy’s pricing is flexible and depends on many discount programs. If you’re a GoDaddy Pro member, for instance, many of the a-la-carte options are free or discounted; same goes if you have the deluxe website builder package, you get WordPress free of charge.

There are a few hard-and-fast prices that they’ve included in their pricing catalog, however:

  • GoDaddy advertises pricing from $.99 per year for a .com domain, but some sought-after URLs can cost into the thousands. I typed in my full name as a test domain and, sure enough, it was on sale for $.99
  • Annual membership: $4.99 – allows customers to bid and purchase GoDaddy auctions, and list domain names on sale at zero cost
  • Basic website: $3.49 per month – gives you access to one website with 100GB storage using WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more; the Ultimate package handles unlimited websites and costs $7.99 per month
  • Web design: If you ask them to create a website for you, GoDaddy will give you an estimate after a few initial questions, and for a fully-built, professional website you can expect to pay over $150
  • Commission: If GoDaddy sells a domain for you, it takes 20 percent of any sale up to $5,000; For a domain worth up to $25,000, it takes $1,000 plus 15 percent over $5,000; for domains valued over $25,000, GoDaddy takes $4,000 plus 10 percent over $25,000

 

is godaddy a scam
GoDaddy Web Hosting services are very cheap but the quality isn’t always the best.

 

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How Does GoDaddy Work with WordPress?

GoDaddy works like a dream with WordPress and offers four-levels engagement with your website: Basic ($3.99/mo), Deluxe ($4.99/mo), Ultimate ($7.99/mo), Developer ($13.99/mo). The higher stages get more storage data and websites to use, but the basics of WordPress are at work here, and it takes just a one-click install a WordPress blog.

There are over 1,000 free themes and plug-ins available for WordPress, free daily backups of all information and blogs posted or in-progress, a 99.9% uptime promise and much more. If you already have a WordPress blog you want to migrate to your new website with GoDaddy, there’s a one-click migration tool that allows you to have your blog up and running on your new website in seconds.

The past few years, GoDaddy has also dramatically improved its customer service. Now, there’s free 24-hour support for using WordPress or GoDaddy in general, so you’ll never get stuck with a problem you can’t fix without assistance.

Is GoDaddy a Scam? – Check Out What Users Say!

GoDaddy has a rather checkered past, but does that necessarily mean it’s a scam? Let’s examine each side of the “is GoDaddy a scam?” question.

In the past, the company has been reluctant to remove less-than-savory websites hosted under its domains, such as “hotmailpasswordreset.com” which existed to help Hotmail email account holders to reset someone else’s password and gain access to their account. Yet another website called “monktech.us” was used a phishing scam, asking users to enter their login information for Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Microsoft, and Kindle and simply stealing their data so hackers could then log in to their accounts.

GoDaddy was informed of these websites by several users but has yet to take these websites down, a tech equivalent to “yes, we do business with warlords.” I expect more from a large, authoritative company like GoDaddy, as instances such as these make me question their dedication to security or propriety in general—what’s next, pornography advertisements greeting customers on my website?

is godaddy a scam
In my opinion, GoDaddy many commercials are inappropriate and that’s one reason why I don’t fully like their company.

But some people claim GoDaddy is a scam simply because it charges for services some people feel are unnecessary. Someone who claims GoDaddy is a scam may mention the company’s charging too much money for things people don’t need: $3.49 per month for a basic website when you just need a domain? $150 for a custom-built website? They’re just ripping people off!

That’s one way to look at it, but I personally believe GoDaddy isn’t so much a scam as it is a less-than-enthusiastic sheriff patrolling its cyberspace. They are in the business to sell domains and web services, not to police the internet. Also, let’s remember that the internet is a completely different beast from, say, radio or television—there are over 60 million websites hosted by GoDaddy alone, so a few scammer, phishing websites falling through the cracks doesn’t necessarily mean the company is a villain, they just have an extremely large and complex network of web domains for which, ultimately, they are still responsible.

Also, as far as the $3.49 fee for a basic website builder goes, that’s a perfectly reasonable rate for someone who isn’t tech-savvy enough to build his own website from scratch. Selling people the tools they need is certainly not a rip-off in my opinion.

GoDaddy Reviews – Overall Rating 1,8 out of 5 Based on 766 Reviews

To be honest, I was quite surprised to see so bad statistics of GoDaddy Reviews on WebHostingGeeks. However, we need to remember that it’s only one website and it has received much better reviews on other websites like HostAdvice and WhoIsHostingThis.

Most of the complaints are related to poor customer service. I understand their frustration because if you don’t get the answer quickly and you’re experiencing challenges with your websites, it can make you mad. 😉

On the other hand, there are also several reviews giving GoDaddy full 5 stars. Let’s have a look at two examples:

is godaddy a scam
Corey has fully been satisfied with the service and products that he received from GoDaddy.
is godaddy a scam
Barbara has used GoDaddy for more than 3 years now and NEVER had any problems with them.

In my opinion, these examples prove that GoDaddy is doing great work.

Pros and Cons of using GoDaddy

I’ll give you a list of pros and cons of using GoDaddy’s web hosting services.

First, the pros of using GoDaddy:

  • It’s a one-stop shop offering both domain registration and website hosting
  • WordPress integrates well with it, in varying account levels
  • It’s cheap at just $.99 per year per domain plus $3.49 per month for a basic website
  • It features several CMS platforms including Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, ASP.NET, etc.
  • It does security well, with an advanced team dedicated to thwarting hackers and rejecting spam, as well as keeping websites secure
  • Their customer support staff is second-to-none and available 24 hours a day via online chat or telephone—GoDaddy was once notorious for having horrible customer support, which the company made a priority to improve before 2013
  • Their uptime average of 99.9 percent is excellent

Now, the cons of using GoDaddy:

  • It has a poor track record of shutting down phishing, low-quality websites
  • The advertisements are a bit vulgar, which may make visitors think less of your website if they know it’s hosted there
  • Your SEO (search engine optimization) score may suffer (through no fault of your own, and without a solution you have control over) if a search engine like Google finds low-quality sites hosted on GoDaddy and decides to devalue all websites on that domain
  • Again, your SEO may drop due to GoDaddy hosting on a custom hosting panel—search engines prefer better domain hosts like Wealthy Affiliate or Bluehost.
  • GoDaddy’s 100GB storage limit for a basic website is pretty small, especially considering some web hosting services offer unlimited storage as standard

Conclusion – Is GoDaddy Worth It?

It’s a fact that GoDaddy offers a reasonable hosting service. It’s not a coincidence that they have served more than 17,000,000 customers all around the world. On the other hand, we can’t ignore all negative GoDaddy Reviews.

If you are looking for something very cheap and maybe not-so-reliable, go for GoDaddy. But if you are looking for a high quality for a great price, I recommend going for Wealthy Affiliate. Their plan includes

  • A great website builder
  • World-class training to make a living online (I have studied it myself and it WORKS)
  • Domain hosting up to 25 websites
  • High-quality support (response comes usually within a few minutes)
  • Support and help from successful online entrepreneurs. You can freely ask any questions related to your websites and making money online and you will find a helping hand.
  • My 1-on-1 support.

What else could you ask? All this costs less than $1 per day and you can try it out for completely free. No credit card required.

=> Get the World’s Best Domain Hosting Services in Wealthy Affiliate! (My 1-On-1 Support Included)

 

Have you ever used GoDaddy products? What kind of experiences did you have?

What is favorite domain hosting platform.

Leave a comment below and I will give you a personal reply.

By Roope Kiuttu

Hello! I am Roope "Robert" Kiuttu, the founder and owner of YourOnlineRevenue.com. I created this website back in 2015 to help you to make money online. You can ask me anything and I'll be happy to help you out. I help people daily to make more money online and I love seeing people succeeding. If you want to get my 1-on-1 support and help to make money online as well, get started HERE.

16 comments

  1. I understand that Go Daddy web hosting site might be doing a great deal by offering clients the opportunity to have a domain name as well as having their website being hosted on their server at a very cheaper rate, but that doesn’t deny the fact that, if they could be unable to do some things such as protecting the visitors to the sites by removing some scam hosted sites that you mentioned above, then it is not the best choice for me. I would rather look for a better and higher quality choice elsewhere.

  2. Very interesting article, but I believe that GoDaddy is an appropriate service for companies or advanced users. Beginner offers the platform without unnecessary options. The access time to the centrifuge should be better. As far as customer support is concerned, I did not complain.

    I personally use GetLark. Very simple client panel, cheap hosting packages (only $5 for one month, the more months the cheaper). Additionally, the hosting is free of charge for 3 months.

  3. I have an account on Go Daddy, however, I have never bought any services and products from Go Daddy. Initially, I was attracted with dot com domain with $0.99. I tried to register a dot com, sadly, Go Daddy did not accept payment.

    In order to buy Go daddy services and products, you need to have a verified paypal and sadly my PayPal was unverified. They say Go Daddy is a Good domain registrar but a bad web host.

      1. I have not tried Wealthy Affiliate domain registration services, in fact I did not even know wealthy affiliate also offers domain registration and hosting (you said you use wealthy affiliate hosting in your other post).

        When I want to register my domains, I usually go to Namecheap. I also have Namecheap hosting account. I friend of mine said it took 48 hours to receive a reply to his question. On Namecheap, I can get within 10 minutes.

        1. Wealthy Affiliate offers domain names for $13/year so it’s a few bucks more expensive than Namecheap where it’s usually around $10 per year. Rare domain names like .life, .xyz, or something else are usually very cheap on Namecheap so I bought one for my friend’s wedding website for only $0,88.

          However, .com domains have the most authority and get ranked the best on Google so I only use them for websites that I want to get ranked on Google.

  4. I don’t live in the US so I have never seen those commercials and I have never used Godaddy. I see it has many bad opinions and I usually check them before buying things and I get suspicious if they are very low. Their prices look great though.

  5. Fantastic article on GoDaddy. I have always wondered about this platform because I see them advertising all over the place. It definitely must be true if millions and millions of people use it daily. I have used many other platforms in the past. After reading your article I will definitely take GoDaddy into consideration. Great website and keep up the fantastic work!

    Thanks,
    Shawn

    1. Hi Shawn,

      GoDaddy is definitely doing something right because they have succeeded so well. However, there are a few things that I dislike which I mentioned in the article.

      Wealthy Affiliate is clearly superior to GoDaddy and I noticed that you are already a member of WA. I recommend just sticking to WA because you will not gain anything by changing to GoDaddy. You have probably noticed that the support in WA is one of a kind.

      In addition, their training and other tools are great. Still, it’s good that GoDaddy exists. For customers like us is good that there is competition in the market.

      -Roope

  6. Thank you for your review of Godaddy. I have been a customer for many years and have mixed reviews. On the URL side, I find it continues to improve and my last experience was a good one. On the hosting side, I felt it was a bit cumbersome and the training was not so good. 

    And, it seemed difficult to cancel, but I have had good support experiences with other things. In the end, Wealthy Affiliate is much easier and user friendly. The community is unparalleled in the industry.

    1. Hi Nathan,

      thank you very much for sharing your experiences with GoDaddy. It’s true that they are doing many things quite well. Otherwise they couldn’t have grown so much.

      On the other hand, there are tons of complaints about their services and it seems that you weren’t fully satisfied either.

      Wealthy Affiliate is created so simple and user-friendly that I can recommend it for anyone unlike GoDaddy.

      Cheers,
      Roope

  7. Personally, I don’t think the GoDaddy advertisements will affect the number of people that visit your own site because they won’t care too much. Those advertisements must be being broadcast in the states because we don’t see them over here (in the UK). The GoDaddy advertisements over here are just a few employees telling us what they offer and how amazing they are.

    I have used GoDaddy previously to host a wordpress website on shared hosting. After a year, we decided to move over to BlueHost because the prices after the first year were just too high and I wasn’t happy with the service. The site was extremely slow and sometimes the site would be inaccessible. The support weren’t too helpful either.

    1. Yes, Bluehost is one of the most domain hosting sites. One of the most famous affiliate marketers in the world, Pat Flynn, is always recommending their services. One reason is, of course, they have a lucrative affiliate program but the main reason is that their products are worth it.

      -Roope

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