Godaddy Host Services For Your Online Goals

GoDaddy is one of the oldest shared hosting providers and is also one of the cheapest on the market. Read on to find out more about their services.

GoDaddy was founded in 1997 and has been providing shared hosting ever since. It is also a domain registrar and provides a number of additional e-Commerce 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 domain registrar in the world. 

Features

GoDaddy has a huge range of features available. Whether you’re looking for the most basic functionality or the most high-end, they’ve got it. These are the following features that you can get from using their hosting service:
 
Emails 

10GB to unlimited disk space for email storage
100 to 1000 email addresses
Webmail
Forwarding/Auto responders/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 basic features – the full list is much, much longer. The company provides thousands of features and it will take you several hours to make your way through all of them on their website. 

Pricing

GoDaddy’s pricing is broken down in to three categories: Economy, Deluxe and Unlimited. The pricing changes frequently but it can be as low as $5/month for the Economy, $8.50/month for the Unlimited, and somewhere in between for the Deluxe. The main difference lies between how much space is allotted — for the Economy plan it’s currently 10GB and for Unlimited it’s (naturally) unlimited! Additionally, you can get 100, 500 or 1000 email accounts depending on your service along with 10, 25 or unlimited MySQL databases. In addition to the above, you also get a free premium DNS, site scanner and SSL certificate with a fixed IP address. 

Pros 

Clearly the best pro about GoDaddy’s  hosting services is how cheap their prices are. For buying a domain name and the initial hosting it will cost you literally several dollars. They have 24/7 support if you run in to any problems and no matter what kind of site you plan to build, the features offered will certainly help you reach your online goals.

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. Additionally, you do have to read 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 became locked and GoDaddy charged users a handling fee to recover it before it became up for grabs to the public.