For my review of hosting companies, please see Hosting Recommendations.

GoDaddy is like the black hole of hosting companies - because of its aggressive pricing, it sucks clients into an almost inescapable vortex. I have a terrible time convincing my clients to go elsewhere and I'm only lucky that to date I've been able to accommodate them.

I am now taking a more direct stance in my objection to GoDaddy and in recommending other hosting solutions. The reason is very simple - it takes me more time to configure and manage a site at GoDaddy than at any other host and there are some problems with the hosting that I simply do not experience anywhere else.

Here are a few observations.

Ignore the Price

No doubt about it - GoDaddy has been a price leader for a long, long time. But even if another host costs twice GoDaddy's going rate, it's pennies. I'm talking about the difference between $50 per year and $120 per year, which is the difference between 14¢ per day and 33¢ per day.

I realize that hosting is a recurring cost for you, my clients, and I'm sensitive to that. You get what you pay for and I'd like for you to get something better, like business-class hosting.

Please do your best to ignore GoDaddy's siren call. (You don't have to be a customer to visit GoDaddy to watch the "too hot for the networks" Super Bowl ads if that's what floats your boat.)

Control Panel Performance

For me, this is the killer. Everything at GoDaddy takes longer to do than it does at any other hosting company. I factor in a certain amount of time for managing a site into my flat-price quotes, and I'm losing money on the deal because GoDaddy always burns more of my time.

GoDaddy also makes me wait. All hosting control panels usually queue change requests (which is reasonable and technically necessary). But at GoDaddy, "pending" items can pend for a long time, far longer than any other host I've ever used. Waiting two hours for an email address to go live is ridiculous.

If you are considering GoDaddy, you should consider this carefully. All control panels at all hosting companies have some degree of complexity because hosting is complex. However, many control panels are better organized and some of the key panels are easy to find and easy to use. Understand that if you select GoDaddy as your host, its control panel will eat your time, too.

Sub-Domains Don't Work

For most of my clients this is not an issue but for some it is a serious problem. It is a very technical matter but boils down to GoDaddy's failure to isolate a sub-domain unto itself. GoDaddy's sub-domains are related to their main domain. In other words, sub.mydomain.com knows about mydomain.com, which should not be.

I had a real battle with GoDaddy over this one and, to my surprise, support acknowledged the problem by agreeing that my analysis was correct. They won't do anything about it, but at least I know it's a problem. On this matter alone, I reject GoDaddy as a host because sub-domain handling is just wrong.

My policy is to recommend hosts only if they can provide a core suite of features. For example, I always recommend that any hosting plan purchased by my clients includes the ability to add an SSL certificate. You don't need to have a certificate on day one but you don't want to later discover that changing hosting plans is required just to get one. It's the same for sub-domains.

Email Plans Are Limiting

The email plan that comes with GoDaddy hosting boasts hundreds of email accounts. In the fine print, however, you will find a limit of 100MB or 500MB (depending on plan) for all email inboxes. In today's world that is quite spartan; a free Gmail account provides about 7GB (GB!) of storage per inbox.

To improve that storage, GoDaddy will sell you an email plan. For most of the other hosts I know well, more space is provided.

PHP mail() Is Different

I discovered this the hard way and I've recently learned that it has been a problem at GoDaddy for years. It's all technical - the bottom line is that what works at every other host does not quite work at GoDaddy, so sites I build to run at GoDaddy have to be different. As with wasting time with the control panel, maintaining different code for GoDaddy increases my overhead.

Another serious problem with mail() is latency. Where an email sent from my other recommended hosts arrives within a minute, the same mail from GoDaddy can take 30 minutes to arrive.

The mail() function does not work on GoDaddy's Windows-based plans at all without extensive re-coding.

The PHP mail() function is an essential ingredient in the contact forms I create, which is important to just about every site I build these days.

Article Copyright ©2011 by Will Fastie. All Rights Reserved.
Use the suggestions and recommendations herein at your own risk. No warranty, implied or otherwise, is given.
Technology changes rapidly; information in this article could be outdated quickly.