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Go Daddy doesn’t offer much in terms of storage space and monthly bandwidth with their Economy Plan.  Most websites likely won’t outgrow its 10 GB in storage space and 300 GB in monthly bandwidth.  However, those numbers don’t leave much room for ambitious pursuits.  Plus, you have to purchase at least 3 months of this plan right out the gate, which is about the time it takes for a site to expand beyond the limitations this plan imposes on it.  When you attempt to upgrade your options, you have the choice of the Deluxe or Unlimited plans.  The Deluxe Plan offers much more as far as features go, but there are still limits when it comes to storage space and monthly bandwidth.  Most users might not have any use for features that don’t have any limits, but I see them as helpful.

When a website becomes more popular than the bandwidth they’re allowed, it often experiences extended periods of downtime.  The Internet is unpredictable.  Your website could be wallowing in the depths of internet obscurity one day and on the front page when someone enters a keyword attached to your website into Google the next.  You never know what’s going to happen.

You could always go with their Unlimited Plan, which offers unlimited disk space and monthly bandwidth, but comes with a $14.99 per month price tag.  Plus, three features in this plan have limits for some reason: FTP users, number of email addresses and total email storage.  Most users probably see the name “Unlimited Plan” and think all of the features with numbers attached are going to be unlimited, but that’s not the case here.  You could get a lot of mileage out of the Unlimited Plan.  Unfortunately, the price tag puts it out of reach for most beginning website entrepreneurs.

Ease of Use:
You will find that the services Go Daddy has to offer are easy to use, but they require patience at times.  For instance, expect long waiting times for requests (such as the installing applications or setting up databases) made on your hosting account.  Many users might have an issue with this flaw because their visitors demand new and fresh content without having to wait for it.  This wait time is understandable though.  When your service is as popular as the one Go Daddy offers, your servers are going to get overloaded every so often.  It’s inevitable.  They should get more powerful servers to eliminate these delays.  Luckily, Go Daddy’s popularity has remained consistent over the years, which means they’re a solid option in the web hosting world.  There are some things that are so minor that you should look past them, but are still worth looking into.  This is one of them.

Support and Service:
Go Daddy has a variety of help and support options available, and they’re accessible all of the time. The online support forum and FAQs section are well organized and contain a wealth of knowledge for beginners and advanced users alike.

Go Daddy service representatives can also be contacted on the phone or through email. Go Daddy is a large company with several thousand users, so personal help would be expectedly slower than other sites. However, Go Daddy’s support team is quick to respond, and the expected response time for emails has significantly decreased since our last review.

Site Creation Tools:
Go Daddy helps beginners easily set up their site, and includes additional tools for advanced developers to work with. Go Daddy also offers a variety of professional site building services and designs for additional fees. Regardless, all Go Daddy solutions support several programming languages. The plan we reviewed supports CGI (Python and Ruby), PHP, Perl, ASP, MySQL, ColdFusion, and FrontPage extensions.

Most functions within the Account Management tool are similar to other control panels. In addition, with GoDaddy.com you can perform account management tasks, email management, web security, database setup and management, and manage statistic tools.

Server Access:
Go Daddy has a ceiling when it comes to how many different FTP accounts you can have.  Even if you were to enter into the Unlimited Plan, you would still have to deal with the fact you can only have 50 different users with FTP accounts.  Again, most websites aren’t going to exceed 10 FTP accounts, let alone 50.  However, most websites don’t include FTP accounts.  For example, a site with a lot of different contributors, such as a blogging site, is going to run into a problem with this limit.  They could send their content to a supervisor of some kind, but that would overload the supervisor.  Adding all of the users to the FTP would free up the supervisor’s workload, allowing them to focus on other pressing matters.  This is another minor issue that shouldn’t scare you away from using their services though.

Marketing Tools:
Go Daddy leaves marketing tools out of its web hosting plans.  It does offer them in a different section of the website, which took a little investigating for us to find.  Their rates are pretty reasonable with the highest level plan (Premium) costing about $2.77 per year.  Sites who want to ambitiously market their site through email are going to have to expand their efforts on their own once they hit their 5,000 emails per year limit.  This service appears to occupy most of the price for the Deluxe and Premium plans.  The problem with emails is you might end up with 5,000 people who look at your site once and then go on to the next one.  You aren’t going to turn everyone who goes to your website into a lifetime visitor.  Everyone has different tastes and your website only caters to a special section of them.  You have to cast your net much wider and wait for the one-timers to drop off, leaving you with the folks that are always going to come back for more.

Reporting and Statistics:
Every plan Go Daddy offers includes the option to look at site statistics and raw access logs.  They don’t provide much information beyond that, such as what data analysis program they use and what you can do with the access logs.

Summary:
Go Daddy is a worthy competitor and worthwhile web hosting service. They provide all the essentials and then some, complete with secure facilities. The setup process is straightforward, and Go Daddy has an option for all levels of management, from beginner to expert. Though not as complete as a couple of our other reviewed web hosting services, Go Daddy has what it takes, and is definitely a great option.