GoDaddy Reviews by GoDaddy Customers

GoDaddy is the biggest hosting company in the world, with over 20 million customers (source) and a massive presence. For first-time webmasters, this piece is intended to help you decide if you should host your website on GoDaddy by compiling honest feedback GoDaddy customers have sent us. Here’s the simple query we put out:

For people who have used GoDaddy for domain registration, hosting or anything else, what was your experience like, how’d they compare to other hosts you’ve used (if any) and would you recommend them to others? All comments welcome, positive or negative.

Below are the comment and reviews we’ve received on GoDaddy so far. To summarize: GoDaddy seems to be fine for most customers, and they’re OK if all you want to do is use them for domain registration and host somewhere else, but there’s a fairly high portion of people unsatisfied with GoDaddy in the comments so far. Here are some of the complaints people have brought up against GoDaddy:

  • GoDaddy has a complicated user interface, making doing simple tasks confusing (see here)
  • Only allows 2 days if you’re going to apply for a refund (see here)
  • Unsatisfactory support (see here, here, here, here and here)
  • Slow site speeds or downtime compared to other hosts (see here, here, here, here and here)

Overall, the comments people have sent us on GoDaddy seem to be a bit better than one of the worst hosts we’ve collected user reviews for, Bluehost (see our Bluehost reviews), but the feedback on GoDaddy is definitely worse than many other hosts we’ve covered such as SiteGround (see our SiteGround reviews), WP Engine (see our WP Engine reviews) and Kinsta (see our Kinsta reviews). GoDaddy is also probably worse than Namecheap, which one of us has used for 14 years now (see our Namecheap review).

If you’re thinking of using GoDaddy, therefore, know that it may be fine for your needs, but it’s probably worth taking a look at alternatives before signing up. There’s certainly no shortage of hosts out there.

The very first domain I registered was through GoDaddy, it was probably in the late 90’s. At the time it was the most well known domain registrar but since then there are of course many new registrars available to choose from.

I mirated most of my domains away from GoDaddy and switched them to NameCheap and Google Domains. GoDaddy was too over priced, had an over complicated UI/UX and made simple tasks like renewing domains a mine-field of dodging upsells and confusing checkout flows.

For the average person, GoDaddy is probably a safe bet. For marketers and website developers and anyone who runs a business online – it’s probably a better choice to go with a simpler, cheaper alternative these days.

--Andrew Maule, CodeSigningStore.com

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#andrew

I have used GoDaddy for almost a dozen different domains over the years and it has always been a positive experience. I only use GoDaddy to get the domain and then use a different website to host it and build my website. It has always been easy to change the nameservers and get everything going. I also like that I can set up automatic payments for each of my domains so I don't have to worry about losing them.

--Erik Wright, New Horizon Home Buyers

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#erik

Over the years, OG Media has used a bunch of different hosting providers for ourselves and our clients, including GoDaddy. For what you get with their basic plan, GoDaddy is a bit more expensive than some providers, but their customer service team is typically highly knowledgeable and, in our experience, has been willing to go above and beyond to help troubleshoot issues we’ve run into. The biggest challenge we’ve found using GoDaddy Managed WordPress is there is no file manager or cPanel access and file changes need to be made through FTP—which works for experienced WordPress developers but not most of our clients.

We would recommend GoDaddy, however, our preferred host is DreamHost. DreamHost is easy to use, has a knowledgeable and responsive support team, is fast and reliable, and to top it all off, it’s the cheapest paid option we’ve come across.

We've also used Bluehost, WP Engine, and Liquid Web, for reference.

--Owen Gotimer, OG Media

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#owen

Godaddy has its pros and cons. If you are going to host a small simple website, you can go for any web host and just look at the cheap ones. Godaddy is fine if you have less than 10,000visitors every month and you have no big plans for your site. Godaddy is normally slow ( most of the time deadly slow), but uptime is not bad. They have customer assistance options better than others but if you are looking for positive results from such communication, look somewhere else. Godaddy is fine if you are a first-timer and trying to get the game of blogging. Once you think you have acquired the basics of sustaining a website search around for a good host.

--Jake Smith, Absolute Reg

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#jake

GoDaddy Uptime is nothing less than 99.9%. This represents a great advantage for anyone like me who has a website and has contracted the web hosting service of this company since the uptime of the site will be permanent. On the contrary, when a web portal is absent for a long time, both the profits of your web business and the number of monthly visits will be affected.

Something that I do not like very much about this host is that its monthly plan refund policy establishes that you can only make a refund if you cancel your account during the first 48 hours after the date you made the transaction. Not like other web hosting services that give you 30 days to decide if you want to stay with them or not. This is a disadvantage because it is practically impossible to test a system in two days. So if after this time you notice that the service is not for you, you will have to stay with this host for the whole month.

--Peter Schoeman, The Dog Adventure

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#peter

As the owner of a company, no, I would never recommend it to anybody. Avoid them like the plague. They are so dishonest and unethical. I am shocked that they are allowed to stay in business. If you enjoy doing business with the Mafia, then Go Daddy should be your first choice. The worst decision I ever made was to select them as a hosting company. They make it is difficult to go with another company too. Only through legal action was I able to secure my domain with word press.

--Reda Elmardi, StrongChap

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#reda

GoDaddy hosting offers interesting discounts the first year, but afterward, the prices rise like foam and it ends up being one of the most expensive (shared) accommodations. I like the fact that they don't limit bandwidth and are very generous with webspace. Another advantage is that they have servers in various parts of the world, in Europe as well. However, its performance was not the best we would have liked it to be a bit faster and have fewer interruptions. Keep in mind that the databases are somewhat limited, although if you are not going to create a very large site this should not be a problem. I sincerely believe that there are better options, especially if we consider their price.

--Julien Raby, Thermogears

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#julien

My wife and I own a WordPress Website design and support agency and have used GoDaddy in the past for customers, as well as our own site. Based on our personal experience I would recommend against GoDaddy for hosting, domains, etc. With our business website we had several issues with down time and found their technical support very cumbersome and unresponsive and always took far longer to resolve issues than was required because of their processes.

Since moving off of GoDaddy to a smaller more responsive host our site has not had any major technical difficulties. Another benefit is our new hosting environment is significantly faster. We now recommend that all of our clients on GoDaddy move to one of the better hosting environments. Every customer we have moved off of GoDaddy has experienced an increase in site uptime and site speed. The cost savings of staying on GoDaddy hosting is so minimal that there really i not any excuse to not move to a better host.

--Brian Ott, A Fearless Venture

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#brian

We use GoDaddy for hosting and domain registration. For us it has been the easiest to use in terms of increasing the capacity of the website. We are a Michigan only job board and needed to allow multiple users at one time on the site. Upgrading through GoDaddy was so incredibly easy once we figured out what we wanted. With that dedicated hosting plan, we now have a dedicated support team as well. Never spend more than five minutes on hold with them. We've also never had down time, which can kill an online business if it goes unchecked. Highly recommend them to get your website started. Once you learn what you're doing, what you want, and where you need to go, you may want to change, but for us it's working relatively smoothly. Even though this company is new, I've been a GoDaddy user since 2005. Plan on continuing with them as we haven't had any reason to look elsewhere.

--Jason Verlinde, Get Hired Locally

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#jason

I have used Godaddy to buy hundreds of domains and I have never had a problem with customer service or any problems that I needed help with on the technical side of web development.

I also have a hosting account with them and although it's not the fastest out there (Siteground hosts some of my fastest sites) you can get reliable service and there are never any major delays in load time or downtime.

The reason to purchase with Godaddy is for the customer service and the assurance that you aren't going to wake up and have your hosting company change ownership. They're safe and are relatively helpful despite the premium pricing.

Having said that there are cheaper options for domain registration (Namecheap is amazing) but there's a big drop off when it comes to customer service.

--Christian Carere, Digital Ducats

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#christian

I used GoDaddy for hosting in the past and I would not recommend them to anyone. There are many reasons why your business should never use GoDaddy, the main being incredibly slow servers, customer service takes a very long time to respond, at least that was my experience with them. When you choose your template you have no choice to change it again without losing all your content, terrible mobile hosting that could actually hurt your brand. One of my websites shared hosting with 250 other sites. They are not a trustworthy company and let’s not forget how their CEO killed an elephant and then posted a picture, something worth mentioning as well! My recommendation for domain registration is Namecheap and Linode for web hosting.

--Ruaan Nel, electric-biking

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#ruaan

I saw many ads for GoDaddy and wanted to give it a shot. My experience was overall good, their customer support was helpful and available all the time. I purchased two domains and a business hosting plan for our company and the whole setup process was quite simple. We had a variety of features to use that helped us integrate specific builders and create a strong website. One thing that was a downside is the price. After some research, I realized that other companies have better prices, but they aren’t as reliable. Since the money difference was minor, we decided to go with GoDaddy and have some guarantee of the quality.

--Nick Chernets, Data for SEO

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#nick

I have never had any terrible experiences with GoDaddy. Whenever I have had an issue (for example, the last time I used them - my site was down for a few days because of an issue with my domain transfer), they have been very responsive. However, depending on the services you need, you may be better served with a different host. If you're going to need a lot of storage and bandwidth, the little extra you'll pay to use some other host will be money better spent.

--Larry Mills, The Lizard Lad

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#larry

If I rate my overall experience with GoDaddy, I will give it a 7/10 star. Their plans are a bit pricey, but the platform is fully functional. They got a lot of integrations just like what other domain/hosting provider offers. My main struggle back then is their customer service. You can't get immediate technical assistance when you encounter problems. I have later figured out solutions to my concerns by reaching out to a friend who has been working in the IT industry. So GoDaddy is okay, but not the best.

--Steve Johnson, Boot Mood Foot

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#steve

I have a few websites that I run. I initially went to GoDaddy in order to purchase domains easily as, at that time, around 5-6 years ago, I could not buy .com sites locally in South Africa. I was impressed with the ease of it all and how quickly the nameservers changed as well. Three years ago I moved my main domain over to them and have never had a problem. I have to use another hosting company as, their hosting speed and access to cPanel is not the best for WordPress sites, but if that changed in the future, I would definitely consider moving.

--Shaun Taylor, Moriti Private Safaris

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#shaun

When I first started my website three years ago I started on GoDaddy for hosting. It is absolute garbage. First of all, it's ridiculously slow. As an example, my site speed score was something like a 10 on desktop at a time when I had less than 30 articles. Then, back then you had to pay for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). I can't recall the exact amount because a friend and I shared an account and had two websites but I want to say the upgrade was $99.

After months of struggling to get my site speed up, I got professional advice and they told me it was the hosting. So, I switched to BigScoots. My site speed instantly improved to the high 80's for desktop. Two months friend also switched.

Yes, GoDaddy will get you up and running like Bluehost for next to nothing but the cost of not being able to rank due to speed and user experience is not worth it.

Unless you are running a website purely as a hobby with no intention to monetize GoDaddy needs to be avoided for hosting.

--Nikki Webster, Brit on the Move

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#nikki

I used GoDaddy for hosting up until recently. Here’s my (very bad!) experience.

When I first started using GoDaddy about 10 years ago, I hadn’t heard too many good things about them. However, I still ultimately chose them because they are known for great tech support. I am not a tech person so this was a big plus for me. As my hosting needs started to get a bit more complex though, I started to see why so many people hate GoDaddy. For starters, their SSL certificates are really expensive at around $80 per year. By comparison, many hosting providers give you free SSLs or only charge about $4 per year. GoDaddy doesn’t even let you use an SSL that you bought from a third-party, so you’re stuck paying their exorbitant fee.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I started having an issue with an SSL. The SSL was working fine until it got auto-renewed. Then my website started randomly showing an Invalid SSL warning due to “expired SSL.” Weirdly, it would work in some places and not others: like my sister in Delaware seeing a secure site but my cousin in NYC getting an insecure warning. I contacted tech support multiple times to resolve the problem. Some of the support team actually tried to solve it (like resetting the SSL). Others simply said that it appeared to be working from their end – despite the fact that I showed them dozens of screenshots – so there was nothing they could do.

Ultimately, I switched to A2 Hosting. They don’t have 24/7 live support but I generally like them much better. The SSL is free. They even migrated one of my websites for free (and did it quickly). And my websites’ speed has increased on their hosting too. I wish I would have quit GoDaddy much earlier!

--Diane Vukovic, Mom Goes Camping

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#diane

I have used quite a few website builders and domain hosts. GoDaddy had the best domain purchasing experience: quick, easy and reasonably priced. It’s also the most popular, so a lot of my clients already have a domain purchased through them before hiring me with website services. I also own a few domain names from them as well, so I know how the process works. I used them for the website builder and I didn't enjoy the experience as much. The navigation between pages was a little confusing, the customization was very limited compared to sites like Wix, and basic features were missing. The final motivation for me to change hosts happened when I realized I was not receiving any notifications when I got a new email list subscriber. GoDaddy does not offer that feature for their website builder option. You would have to go upgrade to a full Wordpress site for that, which I thought was silly. I had to check my email list everyday and check the new names (which were not in chronological order, by the way). After some thought I moved back to Wix. So I absolutely recommend them for domain name hosting, but not my first (or second) choice for website.

--Abby Herman, Snap Agency

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#abby

My experience with GoDaddy has had many ups and downs but now it is only going down, mainly because of their customer service. There aren’t many issues with their hosting services, but whenever there is an issue, the GoDaddy support team doesn’t cooperate much. Right now, I have had my account blocked without any reason, and upon asking the customer service person told me that one of my domains had malware, which was a total lie because everything was working fine. I’ve been trying to redeem my account to get both my domains back online but GoDaddy isn’t cooperating at all. The customer support team tries to tell me that I’m wrong and in that case, I haven't got anything from them. Worst customer support ever. I’m now looking for some other hosting service that supports and cooperates with its clients.

--Klaus Meire, Viirastus

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#klaus

I had used GoDaddy for one of my blogs for about a year and a half after I switched from Namecheap (that one appeared to be good as a domain registrar but awful as a hosting). Everything seemed fine with GoDaddy until I started to have some issues with my site and had to use their support. And that support is the most terrible support I've ever seen! I spent hours on hold in their chat just to hear some default responses that weren't helpful at all. They responded in broken English and didn't seem to care what exactly I was asking. After a few conversations like that, I was so frustrated that I started to research other options. I literally switched to Siteground the next day after I found it - and never regretted it! Their support is very attentive and helpful, and my website speed jumped a lot! What I thought was normal with GoDaddy appeared to be very slow compared to an average website. And they don't even offer free SSL like other hosting providers. Wouldn't recommend them to anyone!

--Juliet Dreamhunter, Effective At Home

PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/godaddy-reviews#juliet