General

GoDaddy is an independently owned and operated web services company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Founded in 1997, they are the world’s largest domain registrar with more than 6.5 million customers worldwide.

Go Daddy offers 24/7 round the clock call center operations with no outsourcing or off-shoring.  They operate 4 physically dispersed data centers, which better equips them to deal with natural disasters, potential terrorist attacks, etc.

Among the many awards and honors listed on their website, GoDaddy received Domainer’s Choice Award for Best Hosting Company 2008.

User Experience

GD offers an extensive suite of account and site management interfaces, all developed in house.  By developing their own interfaces and applications, they can better meet the particular requirements of their customer base and rapidly respond to evolving needs.

GoDaddy's Hosting Control Center presents a very nice and clean user interface. It can sometimes be a little slow though. Painful disconnects on inactivity (when leaving the control center open in a spearate tab for example) require a cumbersome procedure to log in again.

FTP only accepts one single concurrent connection. This makes uploads and site updates much slower than they need to be.

Changes to .htaccess are cached for as long as 30 minutes. That makes testing and troubleshooting .htaccess configurations very difficult.

Customer Satisfaction

GoDaddy offers 24/7, 365 days/year phone support, as well as a comprehensive, searchable Help Center. Email support also available.

Technical Specs

GoDaddy's shared hosting products currently support:

• Languages

  • Linux: PHP 5.2.8, PHP 4.4.9, Python, ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Java, FrontPage Server Extensions
  • Windows: ColdFusion MX 7.0.2, ASP.net v1.0/2.0/3.5/AJAX, PHP 5.2.5, FrontPage Server Extensions
• Databases: MySQL 5.0.67/4.1.22, MS SQL, MS Access
• Pre-installed applications: MS IE Web Controls, WSE 2.0, ASPUpload 3.0, ASP JPEG 1.4, GUIDMaker, ASPCrypt
• mbstring enabled in both Windows and Linux

• Linux-shared-hosting:  Dual Quad-core Xeon, 8GB RAM
• Windows-shared-hosting (IIS6):  Dual Quad-core Xeon, 8GB RAM
• Windows-shared-hosting (IIS7):  Dual Quad-core Xeon, 16GB RAM
• Windows-shared-hosting-grid(IIS7):  Dual Quad-core Xeon, 32GB RAM"

Security

Go Daddy owns, operates, and supports their own data centers. Routers, firewalls, and servers running your site are all best-of-breed, and monitored round the clock. That means all your data is secured as well as the physical systems and structures supporting it.

Hosting Plans

	Economy	Deluxe	Unlimited
Monthly fee (× 3 mo)	$4.99	$6.99	$14.99
Monthly fee (× 12 mo)	$4.74	$6.64	$12.24
Monthly fee (× 24 mo)	$4.49	$6.29	$13.49
Monthly fee (× 24 mo)	$4.24	$5.94	$12.74
Disk space	10 GB	150 GB	Unlimited!
Transfer (monthly)	300 GB	1500 GB	Unlimited
Domain name	$1.99	$1.99	$1.99
Domains per account	1	Unlimited	Unlimited
MySQL databases	10 x 200MB	25 x 200MB	Unlimited x 200MB
b2evo auto install	No	No	No

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General

JustHost is a relatively new web hosting company set out to become a major player in the industry.

In the US, JustHost is based in Gendale, CA. They also have offices in the UK and Australia.

By having started their operations once web hosting technologies were already mature, JustHost has a competitive advantage over older competitors since they can provide state of the art web hosting technology to all their clients. They do not have to deal with inefficient legacy systems.

User experience

Our test site showed excellent response times and very good uptimes.

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General

FastDomain is a newer sister brand to the renowned HostMonster & BlueHost brands (since 1996). It is owned and operated by the same team out of their offices in Orem, Utah.

FastDomain is geared both towards professional and individual sites with a slightly lower price point than its direct competition.

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General

Omnis Network has been hosting since 1999 out of their data center in Chicago. Today they are serving over 200,000 accounts.

User experience

Our Omnis test site showed to be very responsive.

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General

HostUpon was established in 2007 by Alfez Velji who has previously worked for several other hosting companies. They are based in Downtown Toronto, Ontario Canada.

HostUpon leases their servers from SoftLayer and so benefit from their high end data centers located in Dallas, TX and Seattle, WA with a third one coming in the fall in Washington, DC. For optimal response times, clients can choose which datacenter they wish to be hosted on.

User experience

HostUpon announces 100 accounts per shared user which is very good given the specs of their servers:

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