GoDaddy
- From the company
GoDaddy.com is the world's largest domain name registrar and is the flagship company of The Go Daddy Group, Inc.
The Go Daddy Group of companies also includes Wild West Domains, Inc., a reseller of domains and domain-related products and services; Domains By Proxy, a private registration service; Starfield Technologies, a research and development affiliate; and Blue Razor Domains, a membership-based discount registrar.
As an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, Go Daddy has more names under management than any other registrar, offers products at prices up to 70% less than the competition and supports them all with world-class 24/7 live customer service.
We are the sole developer and proprietor of our technology, do not license any products from others, and do not outsource or offshore any of our operations. This enables us to provide better support and ensure the most advanced and competitively-priced products and services available today.
Founded by Bob Parsons in 1997, The Go Daddy Group has grown to include more than 38 million domains under management. We offer a complete product line, including comprehensive hosting solutions, Web site creation tools, Secure SSL certificates, personalized email with spam and anti-phishing filtering, e-commerce tools and more.
Go Daddy is widely recognized for its success, having been ranked #8 on the 2004 Inc. 500 list of the nation's fastest-growing privately held companies; #20 on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (growing 8,274 percent!); and having won the CNET Editor's Choice award in 2001, the Name Intelligence Largest Net Gain Award in 2002, 2003 and 2005; the Name Intelligence Users' Choice Award in 2005 as well as the #1 Best Overall Registrar in 2003. Go Daddy also won the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for fastest growing privately-held company in 2003 and Most Innovative Large Company in 2004.
Go Daddy has become the world's #1 choice for domains by providing innovative, competitively-priced products, delivering the highest quality customer service, and by always appreciating and listening to its customers! From the company
GoDaddy
Expert Review- From the Editors
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14455 N. Hayden Rd.
Suite 219
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
(480)505-8877
GoDaddy has been in the business of domain names since 1997 and has offered web hosting services since 1999. With data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific, GoDaddy supplies shared Linux and Windows web hosting, virtual servers, dedicated servers and cloud services to millions of customers around the world.
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Review
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Sales
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GoDaddy generously gives customers an unlimited amount of bandwidth to work with. Having bad experiences with this business model in the past, I wanted to ask GoDaddy a few questions about the limitations of this deal. There’s only one way to reach GoDaddy for sales questions, and that’s by phone. It took about 25 minutes to finally get a representative on the phone and when I did, I was referred to GoDaddy’s website for the answer to my questions. Problem was, the answers weren’t on GoDaddy’s website, which is why I’d called in the first place. Sales reps seem rushed and eager to get to the next call, never really answering much of anything. Another downer: GoDaddy does not have a toll-free telephone number.
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Setup
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Signing up for a hosting account is simple business with GoDaddy. After filling out a short online form, customers are immediately sent an invoice and account instructions and details. Very speedy and simple.
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Billing
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I paid for my hosting plan one year in advance and never had any billing issues to speak of. GoDaddy accepts all major credit cards and PayPal, and hosting accounts are auto renewed unless manually cancelled.
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Pricing
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GoDaddy shared web hosting plans all includ an unlimited amount of bandwidth and varying offerings of space. Their smallest plan, the Economy 4GH, runs $4.99 a month, and includes 10 gigabytes of space. Penny for penny, GoDaddy comes up as a fairly good buy.
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Reliability
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My shared hosting hardware was undeniably reliable during my one year stay.
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Support
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GoDaddy gives customers support by email, telephone and an online forum. Telephone support is almost non-existent. Of the four times I called support when my website was offline, three times I was told to wait 48 hours to see if the situation would resolve itself, and once I was left on-hold and forgotten about. I was never given a reason as to why my hosting server was down or when and if it would be back up. Customer support is lacking overall, and much like the phone sales department, support personnel always seem to be in a hurry to get off the phone. On the flip side, the online forum community at GoDaddy is booming and very helpful.
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Uptime
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I have a premium uptime monitor in place to keep track of my domains. That monitor showed that GoDaddy lived up to its 99.9% uptime guarantee eight out of twelve months. The other four months were a crapshoot. I suffered through two months where my website had repeated (almost daily) outages, none of which were ever explained, and two months during which my databases would not load, rendering my website useless.
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Guarantee
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Terms of Service
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You can find the Terms of Service for GoDaddy online. Highlights include:
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Spam forbidden. Offending accounts will be terminated.
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Customers 100% responsible for website backups.
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May not use account for file storage or file sharing.
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Advantages
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Inexpensive.
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Good selection of account add-ons.
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One click setup.
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Friendly, helpful forum community.
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Disadvantages
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Must pay at least three months in advance.
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Phone support embarrassingly bad.
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Downtime never accounted for or explained.
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Websites slow to load and suffered from poor performance at times.
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No toll-free telephone support.
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MySQL database size limited.
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