GoDaddy Hosting Pricing Which Of Their 20+ Plans is Right For You?

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GoDaddy is often the first name that springs to mind for buying domain names. But of course, they also offer hosting services — and you’re pretty spoilt for choice with all their options.

In fact, there are so many options that it can be confusing to find the right one. Hopefully, this guide will help you get a clearer idea of their prices, features and additional products.

One important note: GoDaddy prices are often massively reduced in the first year. It’s not uncommon to pay at least 60-70% less for the first 12 months.

So note that in these tables, I’ll only mention the renewal prices. They are less attractive, but also more representative of what it really costs to use GoDaddy.

GoDaddy Pricing: How Much to Host Your Site?

GoDaddy Web Hosting

Web hosting is Godaddy’s name for shared hosting plans. It’s what most users should choose, as it’s enough to host a handful of medium-sized websites. Here’s what you get with their four main plans.

* Only available if you purchase a hosting plan for more than one year for the following domain extensions: biz, club, co.uk, com, net, today, xyz, email, group, company, uk, org, co, info, life, live, rocks, space, solutions

GoDaddy Shared Hosting notes:

• All the plans come with a 30 days refund policy, if you pay for one year. If you pay monthly, you’ve only got 48 hours to change your mind.
• Once again, be careful looking at the prices listed on the websites, they are heavily discounted the first term to attract new users. Compare the prices to other cheap web hosting providers.
• GoDaddy is one of the rare hosting companies to offer Windows hosting. The prices are the same, but there is no Maximum plan. You also get 10 MySQL databases (1GB each) with Economy, 25 of them with Deluxe, and an unlimited amount with Ultimate.

The Economy shared hosting plan should be more than enough for most users, as long as you’re happy with one website. The 25 GB of storage a month is very generous, and you’re unlikely to hit their files limits.

Deluxe would be good for more than one site (and less than 10) and you will be OK with 50 GB of storage.

The Ultimate tier will allow you to have up to 25 sites and 75 GB of storage. It also comes with more performance and allowed databases.

Finally, the Maximum plan is the one offering more performance (e.g. 2 GB of RAM). A maximum of 50 sites can be hosted with this tier, and a total of 100 GB of storage is allowed.

See our full GoDaddy review for more information on thier shared hosting plans, including our speed and reliability tests!

GoDaddy WordPress Hosting

Of course, you can host a WordPress site on any of the plans mentioned above. But like many other providers, GoDaddy also has dedicated plans designed to host WordPress sites. Here is what you get with each of them.

GoDaddy WordPress Hosting notes:

• The plans are slightly more expensive than the standard shared hosting, but are full of extra perks like website protection and free business email.
• However, you can only host 1 WordPress website with each plan, which is why power users might want to stick with regular hosting plans and manage WordPress themselves. If you need more than 1 site, this can get very expensive; check out other options like SiteGround, DreamHost or other cheap WordPress hosting providers.
• In fact, the prices and features are very similar to what you get with GoDaddy’s website builder. If you’re set on using GoDaddy but not sure about WordPress, it could make more sense to use that service instead.
• The “SEO Optimizer” tool is the Yoast Premium plugin. The free version is actually really good too, so not a huge selling point.
• The ecommerce plan essentially comes with a preinstalled version of WooCommerce with premium extensions. The freebies include real time shipping rates and other plugins such as Advanced Notifications (usually $29), WooCommerce Bookings (usually $249) and Follow-Ups (usually $99).

So is there much advantage in using GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting? If you’re only hosting one site and want full peace of mind with managing the installation and updates, it could be worth it.

However, the extra features they bundle in probably aren’t enough to really make it attractive to people who know how to manage a WordPress site already, especially if you need to host more than one site at once.

Having said that, the ecommerce plan does come with a lot of useful plugins included for free, so it’s worth investing if you were going to buy them anyway!

Web Hosting Plus (GoDaddy Business Hosting

Previously called "Business Hosting", Web Hosting Plus offers "the best of both worlds": the power of a Virtual Private Server (VPS hosting) combined with an easy-to-use control panel (cPanel-based). Let’s see how much that extra power costs, and what kind of performance you can expect with GoDaddy Business Hosting.

GoDaddy Business Hosting notes:

So the trade-off seems to be that you get a lot more processing power, but fewer perks like free domain names.

And according to their own documentation, GoDaddy’s Launch plan is good for multiple basic sites that need high performance. Enhance is recommended for high-traffic WordPress or Joomla sites. Grow is best for advanced eCommerce sites that use Magento, for instance. And Expand is recommended for resource-heavy sites that deal with high-quality images or videos.

GoDaddy Self Managed VPS Hosting

Want the best performance and complete technical control? Perhaps a self-managed VPS hosting is what you need. GoDadd’s got you covered with the following four plans.

GoDaddy Self Managed VPS Hosting notes:

• The aforementioned plans are for standard RAM only. You can actually double the RAM with each plan for $9.99, $29.99, $49.99 and $99.99. The high RAM 1 vCPU also doubles the storage to 40 GB and lets you work with Windows 2016.
• Be careful of all the paid options which would normally come for free with a (much pricier) Fully Managed VPS site. So expect to pay a premium if you need help with content migration, package management, email client setup, or MySQL optimization, amongst others.

Self Managed VPS Hosting is great for system administrators and developers who want full technical control and don’t mind setting things up manually. Of course, performance is key there, so you’ll need to ensure your plan gives you the right amount of power to work with multiple sites, a database server, email server or for creating test environments.

GoDaddy Dedicated Server Hosting

Okay, if you want the absolute best performance possible, it’s time to look at dedicated hosting. So you’ll lease the entire server, and will get complete control over the data, security and configuration.

GoDaddy Dedicated Server Hosting notes:

• You can boost your storage to use SSD NVMe on all plans, which is meant to be up to 25 faster. The prices go up to $179.99, $229.99, $379.99 and $519.99. However, storage is reduced to 2 x 500 GB on DS -32 and 64, and to 2 x 1TB on DS-128 and 256.
• The prices above are all for servers with no control panels. It’s also possible to pay around $20-30 extra a month for a cPanel or Plesk Web Host Edition with CentOS 7 and preinstalled software like Apache Web Server, MySQL, PHP and more.
• You also get discounts for 24-month plans, and the discount gets reapplied at renewal.

At this stage, it’s all about tailoring the plan to your technical requirements, so it’s very hard to recommend a plan. But GoDaddy does have hosting specialists available, so it’s definitely worth calling them to ask about precise needs.

GoDaddy Domain Names

This is the area GoDaddy is famous for, and for a long time they were indeed one of the best and most affordable places to buy a domain name. It’s changed a lot now, with the rise of other providers like Namecheap, but let’s see what you get with a few examples.

GoDaddy Domain notes:

• Of course, the introductory offers are super attractive. Keep an eye on renewal prices.
• There are discounts for buying more than one domain name at the same time, whether it’s completely different domain names, or the same name with different extensions.
• Prices indicated vary depending on popularity and registry fees.
• You can also buy domain names at auctions, where GoDaddy resells all the old domain names that people have stopped paying for in the past. Some people even make a living out of it!

GoDaddy Email Pricing

While you get free email for a year with almost every plan mentioned above, you can also purchase different email plans depending on your needs. There are three of them to choose from.

• There are also package deals if you need to buy their Email backup function, which auto-saves everything. It’s $2.99 a month if you need the backup add-on only.
• You can switch your workspace email to Office 365 if you already have an account with GoDaddy. Need to call their support and they’ll help you with the process (for a fee).

I have to say that this seems a bit overpriced to me, you could get Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for a similar price with a much generous storage allowance.

GoDaddy SSL Certificates

Here again, you have three kinds of certificates and multiple options depending on what you want to validate. The prices also vary a lot depending on if you manage the SSL certificate yourself or get GoDaddy to do it all for you.

• Domain Validation (SSL DV) only proves domain ownership.
• Organization Validation (SSL OV) does the same as above, plus organization.
• Extended Validation (SSL EV) does everything, plus shows your business is legitimate.

• All of them come with Strong SHA-2 & 2048-bit encryption
• There are also discounts if you want to protect up to 10 or 15 websites.
• As you should know by now, initial yearly prices are much, much cheaper, with discounts up to 93%.

Most other hosting providers allow you to use Let’s Encrypt for free to SSL your websites. This should be good for most medium-sized websites, a bummer GoDaddy doesn’t offer this option.