what do guys think about that company?
is it good for the European market?
Hi BSeo,
Godaddy has a good reputation for domain registrations but a terrible one for hosting. You were not specific about hosting or registrations. When it comes to registrations you want to use a company that has a good administrations panel, allows for DNS management for the domain, does not have an excessive amount of SPAM to you and has reasonable prices. GoDaddy is a little iffy on the marketing, so if you don’t want that then you may want to look somewhere else.
I personally recommend easydns.com; a Canadian company based out of Toronto Canada. They have excellent management services, reliable DNS services, good backup mail servers (round robin if your mail server goes down), and absolutely no extra marketing. They don’t have the cheapest prices but let’s face it, unless you are buying thousands of domains then it should be more important to find a company that is nice to work with and has excellent online management tools. BTW I don’t work for easydns.com or get paid in any way from them, I just really like their way of doing things.
For hosting you either want to look for a larger cloud provider that has facilities located close to you; Amazon, Microsoft Azure come to mind. You want this proximity so that your customers (if they are based in Europe) have less latency (number of hops to travel) between them and your server.
Steve
I would second to serverstorm. Their domain services is highly recommended. But hosting services plainly worst in the market(amongst big players I mean).
For hosting same company might not have all types of hosting services served well. Some are good with shared, some good with dedicated, some with cloud. You kind of have to make some research on it.
GoDaddy is worst in our view as far as domain registration is concerned. Once they harrassed me for 10 months and not allowed me to transfer my domain. There is support is sluggish.
Good luck.
As per my experience with Godaddy I can definitely say that it is really a good domain registrar and web hosting provider. I have several website which is running on a Godaddy web hosting and all of them are working fine and never got stuck. Also, i purchase many domains from Godaddy and never face any problems. Also, they provide various discounts on both domain and web hosting. According to this, for me Godaddy is best. As it is a multinational company so definitely it is also good for the European market.
Hi brainusa,
Just curious, do you have many custom configurations with Apache, PHP, Databases? Do you customize your sessions or use any non-standard ports or even HTTPS? If so, how was GoDaddy at working with you on these things. The reason I ask as that recently other OPs have fervently complained about these types of things when working with GoDaddy support. Your comments seem to be in the contrary so it makes it hard for anyone to know without comparing Apples to Apples (mainly can you easily do some of the more advanced hosting requirements and how does support work with you when needed?
Thanks ServerStorm, for informing me such things about Godaddy. Actually I don’t use such functionality in Godaddy so I don’t have any idea on this. I am using only its basic functionality and according to that I said that Godaddy is best for me. Yes, I use PHP database in GoDaddy hosting but till date I didn’t face any problem with it.
Yes GoDaddy is nice site for domain booking, I have book 3 domain from this site. It has good and great customer service.
easy to push domains but the ads on the site is very very painful.
If you are looking for solid hosting then Godaddy isn’t the best of choices since it is primarily a domain company. My last understanding was that Godaddy uses it own control panel which isn’t the top of the line industry standard cPanel. This makes it difficult to take advantage of free cPanel to cPanel that are offered by some other hosting providers. Many good hosting providers do exist but Godaddy should really be seen more as a domain provider over a hosting provider.
I am with GoDaddy, and very happy with them. I NEVER have my domain name and hosting with the same company, and never will. For domain registration GoDaddy is recommended, their prices are the cheapest and with your own hosting company you’re able to do what you need.
In terms of other domain company I previously used Gandi.net, and they allowed emails too, whereas GoDaddy requires extra money for email creation if you do not have a host. As such, it all depends what you need. IF you have a hosting service them GoDaddy is good. Their support is also quiet good, I called them several times and they answered everything needed.
I know their interface well now, so I don’t need as much support. For the record I use Site5 for hosting, and I recommend them as a hosting company.
+1 to what is said here. Using one company for both hosting and domain is asking for trouble. I’ve known several people who (almost) lost their domains because the hosting company went under. They got them back, but it’s a hassle for sure. And switching hsots can be a pain when the hosting company owns your domain as well (you may pay for it, but they often list themselves as owner).
GoDaddy is just fine for domain services. I always thought they were overpriced in terms of hosting, so I never bothered, but for domain they are safe. They’ve been around and you don’t/shouldn’t have to worry about them shutting down.
Thanks for the +1, I did have experience with a domain company going under and IT WAS hassle for sure. I would hate for anybody to go through this. It involved going to the main registrar and proving I bought the domain and I am who I say I am, which involves posting my ID alongside with my passport. I also had experience with using the company for domain and hosting, the providers almost blackmailed me to stay with them. They we’re happy with me using another host, but considering they did not provide SSL support I literally had not choice but to switch.
GoDaddy will not go under, as they are fairly established and their support is pretty good. Another place to register your domain is eNom but they are a little more expensive. I also had pleasant experience with Gandi.net, but because of the price I switched providers. Consumers now look at the cheapest options, and if I can save them some money by using GoDaddy then there is not reason why not to use this.
100% gospel truth. I hosted on Go Daddy and it was awful. It was acceptable at first, but got slower and slower as they overloaded the server by stuffing more and more accounts on it. It was taking 20 seconds to generate a SMF forum page according to the PHP script timer, and a total of 30 seconds from the time I clicked on a link on my board to when it rendered in my browser before I left. Go Daddy gave me the runaround such as “clear your browser cache” and “do a traceroute”. They have done this to many other people.
One smallish board I visited had a problem with slow loading and Go Daddy told them it was because their database was too big and that they needed to delete some posts. So, they trashed thousands of posts and it didn’t help. I recommended they switch to another host. They didn’t. So, about 2 years later I just visited their forum and it loaded fast on Go Daddy. Maybe Go Daddy is getting better? I doubt it, but you never know.
Go Daddy was purchased by a private equity firm or something last year. I have read that Go Daddy has not gotten any better. I don’t know since I don’t host there. My experience from 2005 to 2007 on Go Daddy was a painful, frustrating experience and I will never do business with them or any company affiliated with them again.
So long as they don’t raise prices to the point that’s another provider is dramatically more competitive or their service becomes very sub standard I will be staying there. I really have no reason to complain about anything that is a big proportion I am not really interested in things like hosting, but they do fine for my domain names
I changed to Godaddy Hosting late last year because:
- they were within my budget
- PHP 5.3 is available, which is not common amongst the lower price range hosting suppliers
- I already used them to register some domains
Initally I had a great deal of problems mostly due to MySql lost connection errors. The MySQL scripts used were tried and tested on two other servers but produced about a thousand errors per day on the Godaddy server. I supplied logs to Technical Support detailing the failed connections but it was no easy task in trying to convince Technical Support that the problem was there end and not with my script.
Eventually the problem was cleared, maybe due to the comments made when replying to there Technical Support Questionaire. I stated that if they allocated some cash from their vast advertising budget to improve the server hardware then they should get more customers 
One thing I did notice was that their FTP data transmission, on this side of the globe, is noticeably faster and even far better than the expensive Chicago host I used to access.
The server is very fast sometimes but also according to Google Analytics has a habit of dropping about a dozen pages per week. Unfortunately I have integrated a free CDN service so it is not easy to pinpoint the problem.
I do miss the simple Cpanel and curse the complexity of trying to navigate the relatively slow Godaddy backend.
As far as the European market is concerned then you could try their services for a month and if your needs are satisfied then update to a longer period.
So yes I can recommend a Godaddy Starter Hosting Package for personal projects where price is important.
Very nice post John. Some real feedback is such a good thing. All and all your experience has been not too bad, especially when you are targeting a low price point.
Thanks!
Of course not! You don’t really think Go Daddy is going to admit that the problem is with them, do you? No, it’s all your fault, and they will get you to waste your time jumping through hoops you should never have to jump through.
Go Daddy’s customer control panel was awful when I was with them. When I was on Go Daddy, you couldn’t even zip or unzip files on the server like you can with cPanel. That means you had to unzip locally and it takes much longer for an FTP client to upload thousands of individual files than it takes to upload one zip and decompress it on the server. Hours wasted.
For an extra $1 or $2 a month you can get much higher quality shared hosting packages elsewhere. Quality is worth it.
Godaddy domain service is the best as i have domains with Godaddy. But I am not happy with their hosting services that’s why i am using host gator for hosting services.
The entire cPanel vs.the Godaddy control panel is one of the factors that I find most discouraging about the company and its hosting product. Many good hosts offer free cPanel to cPanel migrations. Many novice users may not know how to transfer their own data when they want to move to a new host. The lack of a cPanel product at Godaddy limits the user and discourages or makes it difficult for more inexperienced users to move when they have issues.