Whenever I ask someone who they use for web hosting and domain registration, nine times out of ten they say GoDaddy.
Why?
For the last twenty years GoDaddy has been spending millions of dollars each year on advertising and has become the “go to” brand for both domain registration and web hosting.
Nearly $1 Billion Spent On Advertising
Since they’re a publicly traded company, they’re actually required to post their financials which you can see just how hard they’ve been marketing, especially in the last five years, spending nearly $1 billion on just sales and marketing:
That is a tremendous amount of ads but also notice the boost in operating revenue! Holy growth!
GoDaddy Domains
GoDaddy’s “flagship” product is domain registrations. A domain is obviously the first step into getting your own website online regardless if it’s for personal or business use.
Domains are charged on a yearly basis, meaning in order to keep the domain, you have to continue to renew it yearly.
To have GoDaddy register a .com domain with privacy protection the cost is $20.16 per year:
Now if you’ve ever registered a domain without privacy protection you already know why you need it.
Domain-holders are required to keep their registration details on file which are available in a public database called Whois.
As you can imagine, every salesman, scammer, and solicitor has access to this information and are relentless in marketing to you unless you use privacy protection.
Privacy protection masks your information and keeps your physical address, email address, and phone number masked from this solicitation.
GoDaddy Domain Registration Alternative
Since I personally register a lot of domains each month as investments, I built our platform here at NameHero based on my own needs.
It wasn’t until several years later I decided to make it available to the public to register their domains.
For starters, we offer an Instant Domain Search engine that allows you to instantly search the most popular TLDs (i.e. extensions) to see if you domain is available:
We then developed our own privacy protection product called WhoisHero that actually masks your personal information but will still forward important (we filter the junk) emails and physical mail to you:
We provide this service at an affordable $2.98 per year! As I mentioned above, I built this for my personal needs, and know how useful it is to have my personal information protect. And plus, who wants their home address published in a public database?!
GoDaddy Web Hosting
Registering your domain name is just one piece of the puzzle to getting your website online.
If you want to build out a fully functioning website complete with email, you need web hosting.
GoDaddy provides this service for $3.49 per month (36 month billing term), but they fail to mention if you want to have a secure website, including an SSL certificate, backups, and malware scanning it’s going to be about $11 more per month:
Most know that having an SSL certificate is no longer optional as Google is actually penalizing websites displaying them lower in the search results if they don’t have one.
What’s the use in having a website if your target audience can’t Google you? Kinda seems like buying a car without a battery.
GoDaddy Web Hosting Alternative
Since 1998 I’ve been running Internet-based businesses hence I’ve always needed web hosting.
A couple of years ago I became extremely frustrated when I couldn’t find a quality web host to recommend to my customers.
Sure, there was GoDaddy, but I didn’t like the fact that they don’t include many standard features and lacked the overall quality needed.
As with the domains, I decided to launch NameHero with the same web hosting platform I had been using to scale and develop my own businesses. This included offering quality web hosting with free and automatic SSL certificates as well as nightly backups and malware scanning:
As a businessman it doesn’t make much sense to pay GoDaddy more than double for web hosting.
But price aside, all of our web hosting packages are built on top of our high-speed Cloud with LiteSpeed web server utilizing solid state drives with Raid 10.
In plain english, our hosting infrastructure has been built for high speed, redundancy, and security.
The majority of “brand brand” web hosts, including GoDaddy, still use traditional “old school” dedicated servers with Apache and clunky SATA hard drives. This is mostly because of cost, they want to invest heavily into their marketing and advertising vs. their infrastructure.
Best GoDaddy Alternative?
While I’m obviously bias about Name Hero, I don’t want to make up your mind for you.
I welcome you to signup for our services and give us a try for 30 days and see how we stack up against them. We’re dedicated to 10/10 customer satisfaction and really care about all of our customers.
We operate under full and complete transparency with our customers so you can see exactly what they think about our services.
Feel free to comment below with any questions or concerns you may have!
Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.
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