What is GoDaddy?
GoDaddy has been well-known online for decades as a destination for domain names. Over time, they added web hosting services, and in recent years they have expanded their services to a full suite of online solutions. Today, GoDaddy offers domains, hosting, a website builder, email, and web security and marketing tools. With over 17 million registered domains, GoDaddy is one of the most trusted sites of all time, and has a vast range of features and services.
Why Use GoDaddy?
GoDaddy is one of the fastest, easiest, best known ways to register a new domain name. Once you have registered a domain, the next natural thing you need is hosting. GoDaddy has fast, reliable hosting with a 99.9% uptime, and a huge range of hosting services, including dedicated servers, VPNs, web servers, and hosting optimized for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento.
For people new to website building and coding, GoDaddy offers a simple, visual website builder, along with e-commerce and email marketing solutions.
GoDaddy Features
Domains
You can search and register domains, transfer domains, and generate new domain names. You can also trade domain names on GoDaddy, brokering for domain names you want, appraising the value of your domain, auctioning domains, backordering domains, and building a domain business.
Websites
GoDaddy has an advanced automated website designer, which builds a custom website for you based on your answers to their questions. Your site can further be customized for a unique look that is all yours.
Marketing
GoDaddy offers e-commerce solutions including an online store and email marketing.
Hosting
You can get business or personal web hosting on GoDaddy, along with services like dedicated servers, web servers, premium DNS, email hosting, and hosting for WordPress, cPanel, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. You can also get a dedicated IP address for each hosting account.
Web security
GoDaddy monitors sites for security, including malware removal, and managed SSL services.
Email and office
You can get professional email hosting and services for each of your GoDaddy domains.
Support and help
GoDaddy has a vast online support library, and their long history online has given them an active user base and thriving online community with lots of help resources. GoDaddy and the GoDaddy community can even connect you with professional web developers if you want to hire a professional to create your site.
GoDaddy Review
GoDaddy has professional domain, hosting, and security features, designed for experts who know how to build, manage, and administer websites, servers, and online data. It is compatible with a huge range of CMS systems, has robust administration tools with fast installs of the most popular applications, 24/7 monitoring and security services.
It’s an excellent site to secure your domain and hosting, in just minutes, for an affordable price, whether you are a beginner or an expert, whether you need a simple website or are migrating a large e-commerce site to their platform.
However, GoDaddy’s website builder, marketing tools, and SEO services still need some work. It’s understandable that they would add these services to become an all-in-one platform for every user at every ability level. This desire to offer every kind of every web service to every user creates such a huge range of services and options that it may be confusing for beginners.
And the services that they have simplified to be user-friendly and fully automated, like the site builder and SEO, are too simple. Customization of their design templates is extremely limited, with no access to the underlying HTML or CSS for more advanced site control and options. SEO is done by an automated wizard, with questions and drop-downs, but it isn’t very effective, and doesn’t help a beginner understand how their answers affect their ranking.
GoDaddy Pros
- Great reputation for stability, reliability, and trustworthiness
- Huge range of services and options for every step of your journey online
- The most used and most famous domain registration site in the world
- Robust support from the company and the community
- Decades of online documentation, tutorials, and user guides
- Core features like domain registration, simple hosting, and the site builder are very easy to use
- Admin control panels are simple, powerful, and responsive
GoDaddy Cons
- The huge number of services and options may be too complex for newcomers who aren’t sure what they need
- The website builder is fairly limited in features and functions
- Automated SEO is limited
- E-commerce is more limited than other platforms
- Marketing features are more limited than other platforms
GoDaddy Bottom Line
Oddly enough, GoDaddy manages to be both nearly too complex, and at the same time too simple, for an amateur.
For absolute newcomers, it’s a great way to secure a domain and hosting quickly. Absolute beginners can also quickly create a website with e-commerce, email, and email marketing. But beginners may want to choose a different editor to create their site, one that has a greater range of templates, with more versatility to customize them.
Other site builders give a greater range of design customization options, and other e-commerce providers have more robust features like social media integration and Google shopping. Fortunately, it is easy to start a new online business on GoDaddy, and then later update your site with a more sophisticated design, more marketing options, and greater integrations with other platforms.
For experts, GoDaddy is a fantastic way to secure incredibly robust, reliable hosting with the exact customizations, options, applications, and controls that you need. It’s a fantastic way to host a site, create and manage a domain business, integrate your CMS, and host professional email. GoDaddy has great analytics so that you can make data-driven decisions to manage your online business.
All in all, GoDaddy is an excellent solution for domains and hosting, no matter how large or small your online presence may be. Their other services don’t have as much versatility as available on other platforms, which are either more friendly for beginners, or more advanced for experts.
