WEBHOSTINGPAD VS. GODADDY

Key Differences

These are some choice differences between these two hosts. Note that this is not a complete list of features offered by both companies, but rather the most useful and popular features requested by clients for their websites.

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Review of Features

Below you will find a detailed feature-by-feature comparison of my reviews for both of these companies. Based on my experience, I strongly recommend WebHostingPad over GoDaddy, but please take a look for yourself:

	WebHostingPad	GoDaddy
PRICE	Yes, I’ve been going on about price in this review already, but it is a point of emphasis here. In my experience working with several other hosting companies, I have learned a lot about how hosts can afford to offer such cheap hosting and still offer a good (or even great) service. WebHostingPad does this in two main ways. The first is that they don’t offer outrageous commissions to affiliates who promote their products. I won’t go into too much depth about this here, but if you’re interested in how that works you can read my article on How Affiliate Programs Work. The second way WebHostingPad saves money for their customers is by offering their basic shared hosting plan as an a la carte type option. Many other hosting companies will offer a bunch of additional features and market them as great tools, thus justifying the higher price. The fact is that most of these additional features won’t be used by 80% of the customers. They are useless to the majority of people who own small personal websites. Instead of adding these on and increasing prices, they offer them as additional features that each customer can pay for individually should they decide that they need the service. In my opinion, this is a much more efficient and cost effective offer.	GoDaddy, like every other company in my list of worst hosts, offers a lower initial price and increases all renewals by at least 75%. While this isn’t as high as iPage’s 402% increase, it is not disclosed anywhere on their website, and not in their terms of service. You won’t know about this price increase until you receive the bill for your renewal. Their initial price is still higher than most companies as it is, starting at $3.99/month for an account where you can host only one website. For an unlimited hosting plan you need to upgrade and pay $4.49/month.
FEATURES	As explained above, you aren’t going to get all of the additional features you may get from other hosts, but this won’t take away from your ability to run your website. WebHostingPad offers the same features as most every other shared web host including unlimited disk space and bandwidth, a free domain name, 30 day money back guarantee, free website builder, and so on. WebHostingPad also provides additional features at a cost like SSL certificates, SSH access, an advanced security scan, and more, but these are more suited for advanced web developers and business website owners. These tools are not going to be used by the vast majority of beginner and novice website owners, so why pay for them? They are an optional extra if you decide you need them at a later date, but this is how they save their customers from high prices.	As explained above, and outlined in the price explanation, GoDaddy’s feature list is relatively restrictive unless you pay $7.49/month for the “ultimate” plan. Their most basic plan restricts your number of websites (1), number of databases (10), number of email addresses (100), and more. What really got me is that they don’t offer a free website builder with their hosting. If you want access to their website builder you need to pay at least $1/month more, and that’s just for the personal builder. If you want access to the business themes be prepared to pay $4.49/month. All in all, the hosting plans lack the features that other web hosts offer.
RELIABILITY	You might expect your performance to be lacking because of how inexpensive WebHostingPad is, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. WebHostingPad’s servers are stable and reliable. After a 7 month test my website had a total up time of 99.942%, which is above their 99.9% guarantee. Server response time is fast and my websites loaded quicker than on competitors servers. This is just a guess, but my assumption as to why the server speed was quicker than other hosting companies is due to the lack of the additional features on every account. Having these features running in the background on every account on a server causes more resources to be used on the back end, which in turn leaves less of those resources to be used on website functionality. Again, just a guess, but it makes sense to me.	Don’t expect your website to be reliable with GoDaddy. During my testing of the economy plan (I wasn’t going to pay more for the ability to host more websites, but I doubt that the service is any better), I got an uptime of only 97.83%. This would be a killer for anybody relying on their website to generate revenue. Keep in mind this was only over the course of 3 months, too. That’s about 47 hours of downtime. I assume it’s because they pack way too many people onto a single server which causes too much resource usage which makes the server crash.
TECH SUPPORT	WebHostingPad’s support team is generally knowledgeable and able to help quickly with easier questions that most beginners would face when starting a new account. The one gripe I have (which is the case with most hosting companies, not just WebHostingPad) is that only level 1 support is available over the phone or through live chat. If you have an issue that needs to be escalated to a higher department then you must submit a ticket. I will say that the response times of the tickets was quick, usually within 1 hour. In any case, the WebHostingPad support staff was able to resolve issues promptly and efficiently.	GoDaddy makes it a point not to outsource any of their jobs. Unfortunately this doesn’t help the quality. While friendly, wait times are far too long and the calls feel rushed. GoDaddy, being as large as they are, experiences high support volumes all day, every day. My average hold time on the phone was about 15 minutes, and when I did get connected it seemed like they were always trying to push me to end the call as fast as possible. Multiple times I was told to send an email to the support team for simple questions. This is not an ideal situation for a beginner who really needs help getting started.
CONCLUSION	WebHostingPad is a great choice for beginners. It is cheap, easy to use, and reliable. You won’t get some of the features that other hosts include, but these features are not useful for customers who are new to web hosting. It is a great starting point for a new customer and it will get you familiar with how to run a website without being too overbearing.	GoDaddy is one of my worst hosts because of the fact that their hosting packages are very restrictive and that their technical support is slow and not very good. While they are just fine for domain registration (although their tactics are a bit of a slap in the face, but that’s for another day), their hosting packages are designed to make you pay more to be able to do much of anything. If you value a company’s public image then GoDaddy is probably not the place for you. They say no press is bad press, and plenty of people talk about GoDaddy in a bad light, but their hosting service doesn’t do them any favors. Restrictive, slow, and expensive, there are plenty of reasons to find hosting somewhere else.

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