If you’re looking for GoDaddy alternatives, you’re not alone. From high renewal prices to overloaded, less-than-reliable hosting, there are a lot of reasons to be frustrated with GoDaddy. The good news is that some of the best GoDaddy alternatives are less expensive and provide more for your money than GoDaddy does, which leaves you with a lot of great options.
On this page, we’ve listed some of the most fantastic alternatives to GoDaddy in three categories: hosting, domains, and email. Because GoDaddy offers all three of those services, someone who wants to switch from GoDaddy may be looking to replace multiple products.
A quick note before we proceed: if you do buy from one of our recommended alternatives (which are awesome), we might get a small commission from that sale. Rest assured—this doesn’t affect our reviews in any way—we absolutely hate biased sites! With that said, let’s look at the top alternatives to using GoDaddy!
The 3 Best Alternatives to GoDaddy Hosting:
- Bluehost
- HostGator
- SiteGround
The Best Alternative to GoDaddy Domains:
- NameCheap
The Best Alternative to GoDaddy email hosting:
- Bluehost
Now that we know who the best alternatives are, let’s dive in and look closely at what makes each one better than GoDaddy in each category!
GoDaddy Alternatives for Web Hosting: The 3 Best Companies
#1 Bluehost
Bluehost is a hosting company that has really built their reputation on shared hosting and customer service, which are two things that they do quite a bit better than GoDaddy. When you look at why Bluehost is better than GoDaddy, these are really the top two categories that stand out. Let’s look at each one individually…
Support/Service
Bluehost absolutely squashes GoDaddy in the support category as they are one of the only shared hosting companies left that offers U.S. based telephone support 24/7 for all of their products. Yes, if you want phone support for domains with GoDaddy, you can talk to someone in the U.S., but if you need U.S. based phone support for hosting you’re out of luck. You’re stuck on chat talking to someone who’s been outsourced overseas and generally has no idea how to solve any of your problems. Their chat support is absolutely terrible and their ticketing system is very slow from our experience.
Performance/Reliability
We aren’t big fans of GoDaddy’s shared hosting as their servers (in our opinion) tend to be overloaded and quite slow. They’ve also been subject high profile hacking attacks and other various problems. It seems as if they’ve built their reputation on being a domain registrar, and then added hosting as a commoditized afterthought.
Our recommendation? Go with Bluehost as fast as you can!
One last thing—we’ve done a direct comparison on Web Hosting Buddy of Bluehost vs GoDaddy where Bluehost came came out ahead in every category, so if you’re looking for extreme detail about why Bluehost is better, you can visit that page. Also, Bluehost offers domain registration as well, so you can literally leave GoDaddy in the dust if you want to as their renewal prices for domains and $8+ per year for privacy is insane in our opinion.
#2 HostGator
If you’re a WebHostingBuddy.com reader, you know that HostGator is one of our favorite hosting companies. There’s really nothing they do bad and they are super reliable, as shown in our Bluehost vs HostGator comparison where they had a 100% uptime rating over 12 months, which means that they weren’t detected to be down even one time—pretty impressive! Here are two things that make HostGator awesome:
Reliability
When it comes to reliability, you can’t do much better than 100% uptime, and HostGator really edged out almost all the other shared hosting companies we’ve evaluated in that category. In addition to that, their servers always have a “snappy” feeling. We think that HostGator does a great job with managing people on their shared servers and making sure that they don’t hog resources.
Pricing
HostGator has some of the best pricing around when it comes to web hosting, offering what they call as “Hatchling” plan for people who just want to host a single site. This includes unlimited bandwidth, email, and a variety of other bells and whistles making them very hard to beat, and certainly better than what GoDaddy offers.
#3 SiteGround
When it comes to shared hosting, SiteGround is really the king of the hill and they’re in a different universe than GoDaddy. Their implementation of cPanel is top-notch and their support is out of this world! These are the main reasons why SiteGround is an excellent GoDaddy alternative.
Phenomenal Support
Among the shared hosts, we’d have to say that SiteGround really has the best support. Their chat techs are almost instantly available and superbly knowledgeable. Their tickets are answered very fast and they are always willing to go the extra mile in terms of customizations and troubleshooting.
An Amazing Server Platform
SiteGround has some really slick caching features that make them one of the fastest shared hosting companies that we’ve tested. On top of that, their servers are super reliable and just plain work. They really represent the top tier of shared hosting and you just simply can’t go wrong with them.
The Best Alternative to Using GoDaddy for Domain Registration
#1 NameCheap
They are pretty much our favorite registrar. Support is great, prices are great, and they aren’t always trying to upsell you on a bunch of garbage or send you nonsense marketing emails. They are just awesome, and there’s really nothing else to say.
Let’s face it—GoDaddy is not a great registrar. Sure, this is our opinion, but it’s based on some facts that we think are hard to argue with…
GoDaddy Domain Renewals are Expensive!
Sure, they lure people in with .99 cent domains for the first year, but their renewal prices are awful and honestly, it feels a lot like a bait and switch. Unless we win a domain name at an auction where it’s required to go through GoDaddy, we don’t use them AT ALL anymore for registration. They are just plain too expensive, especially if you’ve got a lot of domains.
GoDaddy Charges a LOT for Private Registration
GoDaddy charges a tremendous amount of money for private registration ($8+) when many other registrars charge .99 cents or even offer it for free. NameCheap charges .99 cents with an always available coupon for their “WhoisGuard” privacy protection. Yes, there are other registrars we like such as Namesilo which don’t charge for privacy, but we’ve noticed that customer service tends to suffer a bit when registrars don’t charge for some of these little things, and we think that $1 for privacy is about the sweet spot for a good value and good service.
On top of GoDaddy charging for private registration, they make you create a separate account with their “Domains by Proxy” service and all aspects of private registration is managed there with a separate account and login. This is a huge pain and not worth it at all.
The Solution: Go With NameCheap Instead!
Don’t believe us? Well, take a look at who WebHostingBuddy.com is registered with—that’s right, it’s with NameCheap! Don’t mess around—save yourself time and money, and transfer your domains to NameCheap—you’ll be glad you did!
The Top GoDaddy Alternative for Email Hosting
#1 Bluehost
If you’ve tried to host email with GoDaddy, there’s a good chance that you’ve found yourself frustrated with the complexity (or lack of complexity) of their system and have been looking for alternatives, and honestly, in 2023 there’s no better alternative to GoDaddy email than Bluehost.
You might be wondering—why did we change our recommendation from Rackspace for the last few years to Bluehost now? Well there are a few reasons, but the main one is pricing…
The truth is that Rackspace just gets too expensive when you start adding up inboxes/users, and honestly—they don’t provide that much benefit over a cPanel email solution that comes with a shared hosting account like Bluehost (we’ve been using cPanel email on a VPS for ages and it works great!).
The same thing applies to Amazon WorkMail, etc. and other hosted email providers who charge by the account (including GoDaddy’s hosted email)—it just costs too much once you start adding up accounts. With Bluehost, you have unlimited email accounts all for the same flat fee, which is really nice. Yes, you can use forwarders with Rackspace and GoDaddy for free, but that doesn’t really help if you have users who need inboxes (or you want to separate emails, so Bluehost really wins here. See the chart below for a pricing comparison:
This obviously doesn’t take into account pricing if you need Microsoft Exchange (which Bluehost also offers at competitive pricing etc.) and other situations like if you want to use Gmail with a custom domain (which requires G Suite). We’re going to cover those in a separate breakdown on hosted email solutions specifically.
But, if you’re just looking for plain inboxes to use with hosted email, and you need more than one, it’s a much better deal in our opinion to go with a full hosting account on a shared host like Bluehost and use that for your email (assuming you need a custom domain and can’t or don’t want to use free email). And with our $2.95/month Bluehost coupon, we think it’s a great deal!
Thanks for checking out our page on GoDaddy alternatives! Be sure to check back for more awesome hosting breakdowns, tech tips, and other helpful tricks to help you get up & running and make the most of your website!
Gentry