About Go Daddy

GoDaddy Inc. was established in 1997 by Bob Parsons in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. What started as a modest domain name provider has now risen to the position of world’s biggest ICANN-accredited registrar. According to their website, GoDaddy manages a whopping 26 million domain names today. Aside from being a registrar, they also provide good, cost-effective hosting solutions to webmasters. In regards to their tremendous success, they’ve said that it was achieved “by providing innovative, competitively-priced products, delivering the highest quality customer service, and by always appreciating and listening to its [GoDaddy’s] customers!”

Plans and Features

GoDaddy essentially provides three hosting plans, the Economy, the Deluxe and the Premium across either a Windows or Linux platform which you specify beforehand.

The economy plan, costing an insane $3.99 per month (with no long-term contract conditions) comes with 5GB of storage and 250GB of monthly bandwidth. This plan also gives you 25 subdomains and the ability to point up to 25 external domain names to your website. Up to 500 email accounts are also allotted to you. If a Windows interface is selected, you get 1 FTP account, MS Access, 1 MS SQL and 10 MySQL databases, and support for such languages as ColdFusion and ASP (with ASP .NET and AJAX). On the Linux side, you get 11 FTP accounts, 10 MySQL databases, and support for PHP.

The Deluxe plan, providing great value at $6.99 per month comes with all the features of the economy plan but adds a lot more volume. Disk space is bumped up to 100GB and monthly data transfer to 1000GB. You can have up to 1000 email accounts; plus, you can host unlimited websites, subdomains and external domain pointers on your account. On the Microsoft side of things, you get 2 MS SQL databases and 25 MySQL databases. Linux will give you 25 MySQL DBs and support for Java, Ruby On Rails , Python and Perl.

Finally, comes the Premium plan which steps the game up even further. It brings 200GB of storage with 2000GB of monthly data transfer. Email accounts number at 2000 and you get a free SSL certificate which would otherwise cost $24.99 per year.

All plans give you special access to GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection.

Hosting Environment

GoDaddy has its own homegrown Control Panel which you’ll find quite intuitive. This panel can not only help manage your website but also your entire account at GoDaddy. From in here, you can access Hosting Connection, check and configure email, databases, files, and even install numerous applications that come free with your hosting package.

Joomla Features

Joomla!, and many other Content Management Systems, enjoy excellent support at GoDaddy. You can install Joomla on your GoDaddy-hosted sites as a Value Added Application, which is a very simple process.

Tech Support Options

GoDaddy, being a premier web solutions provider, offers a good array of support modes on their website. One is via email, the second through telephone and the third in the form of an extensive FAQ library. Average response time for email queries is hardly a few hours which, for a company of GoDaddy’s size, is an achievement. Telephone is way quicker and more responsive as expected if you’re query needs to be solved right away.

Conclusion

Needless to say, GoDaddy is one of the world’s best providers of registry and hosting services. Their hosting plans are very broad and their price seems nominal at most. With all their excellent customer support and reputation to back them up, GoDaddy should definitely be in your top 5 list when choosing a host for you Joomla site.