The following is my assessment of GoDaddy. This should not be thought of as a definitive review or recommendation, it is just my experience. Please feel free to add your thoughts in this thread.
Pros
Good support, as long as you are not reporting a fundamental issue with their platform, of which there are many.
Excellent marketing team? (This could also go under Cons.)
Cons
Slow, lots of unexplained errors (especially while crawling sites quickly), overloaded servers…
Prices are way too high for what they offer. Free SSL using Let’s Encrypt for the root domain and multiple subdomains is pretty standard these days, but you won’t get it here.
Just to be clear, this isn’t a slight against any marketers. My problem with GoDaddy marketing is it seems to be basically the only place where they invest significant resources, which means people outside of the tech industry associate “GoDaddy == web hosting” but actually they have a pretty awful product.
I totally agree with James. I am a Godaddy customer for 12 years now. To be fair, the page load times for their shared hosting is much, MUCH better what it used to be many years ago, that said though, their prices are way too high for their offerings, and their SSL prices are ridiculous. I will be leaving them by the end of the year, as my main site’s php runs on php 5.6, and after repeated requests to update it to 7.x, I was repeatedly told that the only way for me to do that is to get a new server (the newer ones). Now this website is not that old, only 4 years old, and I have over 40 sites on it (Ultimate hosting - Unlimited disk space and unlimited databases), it will take me days to migrate all the sites to a new server. Having to migrate every 3-4 years because Godaddy refuses to maintain their servers is unacceptable to me.
The support is very friendly but limited in their knowledge when it comes to really technical stuff. That said, they always manage to change the subject and keep pushing you to get more expensive things from them. The sales team are just politicians, always pushing to get more money from you, while giving you bunch of BS. Their pricing does not scare me, as with caching I can get VPS type page loads, but not having php 7.x, and REALLY expensive SSL are deal breakers for me. Unfortunately for me, I have zero experience with VPS hosting, and if I did, I would have moved to Digital Ocean years ago, you ave to learn new things constantly I guess, but I’m swamped with making themes and plugins, so I’m holding the server migration as long as I can…
I had very similar issues with GoDaddy. I was with them for about a decade until all sites began crashing left and right on a daily basis. They refuse to upgrade to PHP 7 with costs being higher than they should for the overall level of service. Switching to a higher hosting required porting all sites over to a new database which of course would be several hundred and then you’d have to pay several hundred for SSL for each site. I went to Blue Host because several of my clients use them and are happy. Again all my sites started crashing but at least now they only crash 2-3 days per month for a few hours, SSL is free, but if I want better hosting, again that several hundred more per month I think and you have to pay several hundred to transfer those sites over again.
