Background

Business Name: GoDaddy Operating Company, LLC.

Year of foundation: 1999

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona, United States

BBB Accreditation: Yes

Market Size: > 3 million websites (#1 HRank list)

Growth Status: (by websites quantity): Decreasing

GoDaddy.com was born under another name. In 1997, Bob Parsons, an American entrepreneur, set up his own brand new company. At that time, it was known as Jomax Technologies. For him, it was not the first venture: he used to own a software company selling home accounting programs and named after himself, Parsons Technology, which was founded in 1984 and then sold to Intuit in 1994. The deal brought him $65 million, and the fortune was partially invested into his new endeavor.

For a couple of years, it had its original name, but then a decision was made to find something catchier, something that would make the name easy to remember and appeal to customers. That was when Parsons and his team gathered to brainstorm what that might be. One of the team members came up with “Big Daddy”, but it turned out to have already been taken, and Parsons suggested renaming it “Go Daddy”. In 2000, it was officially registered as the Go Daddy company. And yes – it had a space between Go and Daddy, which was dropped only in 2006.

GoDaddy grew very fast. By 2005, it had already become the largest ICANN-accredited registrar operating on the Net. In 2009, it had 1 million international customers. By 2012, it had attracted 10 million users worldwide and expanded to India, where it set up its first branch outside the United States. According to GoDaddy’s website, in 2017, the number of domains registered by them increased to the whopping 75 million domains, which made it the largest web hosting provider.

Over the years, GoDaddy has partnered with major players, including Microsoft (the Office 365 for Small Business project), and acquired a range of applications, smaller hosting providers, and services, such as Outright, Locu, Media Temple, Elto, FreedomVoice, ManageWP, Host Europe Group, etc.

Today, GoDaddy dominates the industry. It has often become involved in scandals, such as the one that occurred in 2012 when a networking failure resulted in millions of websites being down for several hours, lawsuits filed by rivals, and even the death of an elephant shot by Bob Parsons in Zimbabwe – after that killing, PETA decided to close its GoDaddy account.

Despite controversy and occasional issues, as of this moment, GoDaddy is definitely the most influential player in the hosting industry.

Offers and Pricing

All plans apart from Economy one offer unlimited major features as seen in the table above.

Currently, Godaddy.com offers 4 shared hosting plans. The cheapest option of them – Economy – costs $7.99/mo with the shortest payment subscription of 1 year. The promo price for this plan currently offered is $2.79/mo.

Promo prices are currently offered for all plans.

Also, most plans can be only purchased as a 1-, 2- and 3-year subscriptions, and only Maximum plan has an optional offer of a 3-month subscription.

Other services the company offers:

• Web Hosting,
• Business Hosting,
• Domain registration,
• Email services,
• Online Marketing services,
• Dedicated business phone numbers,
• their own website builder product.

Support

Instant Technical Live Support: Yes

While there are definitely quite a lot of happy customers, however, things seem to get worse when a problem arises: users report myriads of billing issues, difficult-to-contact custom support, and having servers down.

It seems like one is more likely to be satisfied with GoDaddy services if it’s domain registration that one needs; however, as far as hosting solutions are concerned, there seems a lot they can improve.

A live chat, however, is available and answers fast. It offers tech support as well.

Report for 2018

• Probably, a surprise for many: GoDaddy finished 2018 with 5.2 HRank only and appeared on the 92d position.

• Well, there is no surprise, actually, if you have a look at its uptime chart in 2018. Truth to be told, the provider never had a downtime worse than 99%. But it never had 100% uptime in the entire period we monitored either. Another very clear thing about GoDaddy’s performance is that its performance was extremely unstable.

• GoDaddy’s response time was very slow especially in the first period of monitoring: around 1,100ms. Closer to winter months it became a bit faster – 900ms. Yet, this is not the result we expected from such a large and well-known provider.

• GoDaddy’s domains seem to have been gradually leaving the provider in 2018. Since the number of them is so large, it might look not so obvious, as it could in case of some smaller web hosting. However, the trend is quite eloquent: users are not satisfied with the services, or so it appears.