SiteGround vs. GoDaddy

GoDaddy vs. SiteGround is certainly one of our most important duels yet, and it’s billed to be one of the most revealing. GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar on the internet, while SiteGround has the honor of being one of the only three hosts recommended by WordPress, so both hosts have really great things going for them. Both hosts offer roughly the same sort of service, with VPS, Dedicated Server Hosting and Shared hosting some of the services common to both hosts. So how will we decide a winner?

We’ll be checking out security, customer support infrastructure structure, refund policies (if any), security, pricing, and a whole lot more. We’ll see which host comes out on top after each section, and we’ll declare a winner. And how will we do this? Easy! You see,  we’ve bought and used hosting packages from both hosts, so we are in the perfect place to compare the major issues of both hosts (and yes, they do have some really major issues). I mean, if we were proud we would call our opinion that of an expert – but we aren’t, so we won’t. 

In the end, after comparing all these different factors, we’ll decide the best host for you. What’s better, still? You don’t have to take our word for it. You can go through the data yourself and come to your own conclusions.

SiteGround vs. GoDaddy Overview

GoDaddy is one of the biggest names in web hosting, and that name has come with some controversy too. Despite the controversies, though, GoDaddy has managed to be the biggest domain registrar on the internet with over nine thousand employees at the last count. While SiteGround is also big in its own right, it’s over 1.8 million websites do not quite compare to GoDaddy’s 10 million websites. SiteGround has one thing that GoDaddy doesn’t have though, and that’s a stamp of approval from WordPress. Only three hosts are officially recommended by WordPress, and SiteGround is one of those hosts

Founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons in Baltimore, Maryland, GoDaddy is pretty much one of the oldest web hosting companies around. SiteGround, founded in 2004 in Sofia, Bulgaria, is about seven years younger and was founded far away across the Atlantic.

GoDaddy and SiteGround offer roughly the same types of services with the exception of domain registration services. SiteGround does not dabble in registering domains. However, you can still purchase a domain through SiteGround (yeah, we know it’s proper weird). Most other services like VPS, Shared, and Dedicated Server hosting are offered by the two hosts, though.

Both SiteGround and GoDaddy have managed to garner a sort of reputation among webmasters in general. GoDaddy, for one, offers a lot of unlimited specs at very low prices, especially when it comes to Shared and WordPress hosting. SiteGround, on the other hand, is more of a quality over quantity kinda guy, offering limited specs but with outstanding performance, at least that’s what most reviews seem to think.

For the most part, both hosts are pretty much really successful in their own way. But you don’t want to know that, you want to know the best host for you.  So let’s get down to it.

Popularity

Let’s face it. It’s easier to go with the crowd and walk the beaten path than to go against the crowd and walk the unbeaten part. So it’s easy for many users to want to go with the most popular hosts. If you’re someone like that, then GoDaddy is the better SiteGround Alternative for your website. We’ve not reviewed a host more popular than GoDaddy besides Bluehost, and it’s unlikely that we ever will.

But should that matter? Popularity, for the most part, isn’t proof of great hosting, it’s proof of a great marketing department. So while GoDaddy does have better marketing tactics, that doesn’t mean they offer the best hosting overall.

How do we, then, decide the best host? Easy.

Performance Comparison

We’ll be measuring hosting performance with two important metrics; speed and uptime.

Uptime

It’s virtually impossible to have a hundred percent uptime over a sufficiently long period, but the best hosts always manage to have something close to the mark. As we said earlier, we bought hosting plans from both SiteGround and GoDaddy, created our dummy account, and fired it up. We then started to test for uptime over a three month period. Let’s see what we recorded.

Our tests show us that both hosts have great uptime, with SiteGround coming in with an average uptime of 99.99% and GoDaddy coming in with the same result as well.

Uptime guarantee

When deciding how great a host’s uptime is, we don’t like to look at uptime statistics alone as they are quite fickle. Hosts can get bogged down by viruses in the twinkle of an eye, and that could result in hours of downtime. An uptime guarantee, though, ensures that users get something back regardless.

Both SiteGround and GoDaddy offer uptime guarantees. SiteGround has an uptime guarantee of 99.9% on an annual basis. That means if uptime goes below 99.9%, users will be eligible for some compensation. The agreement states that for uptime below 99.9% but above 99%, users will be entitled to a month of free hosting. For every 1% of hosting below 99%, customers are also entitled to a free month of hosting. GoDaddy’s uptime guarantee is more of the same, with the host offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee. For uptime below 99.9%, GoDaddy offers 5% credit off your monthly hosting fee. It’s not that straight forward, though. Let’s see exactly what the service agreement states;

“We offer a Service uptime guarantee of 99.9% (Service Uptime Guarantee) of available time per month. If we fail to maintain this Service Uptime Guarantee in a particular month (as solely determined by us), you may contact us and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month” (For more about their Uptime Guarantee Policy check out the specific section in our GoDaddy Review).

So, not only is the compensation you are entitled to a mere 5% off your monthly hosting fee for that month, only GoDaddy has the power to decide if your claim of downtime is legit. That comes with obvious problems, of course. This contrasts heavily with SiteGround’s policy that offers more compensation and is more transparent.

CDN

Content Delivery Systems are used by hosts to increase speed, and with this installed, content can be delivered to URL quicker and faster. SiteGround makes use of a free CDN (Cloudflare) system for all hosting plans. GoDaddy also offers CDN support, but you’ll have to set it up and activate it yourself. SiteGround’s free CDN is a huge advantage and it makes it be a worthy GoDaddy alternative.

Speed

Some think that speed is a vanity statistic, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Studies have found that faster sites tend to retain more visitors than slower ones. In fact, 40% of internet users claim that they would not revisit a site that has speed problems.

Testing for Speed

We already had our sites set up on GoDaddy’s and SiteGround’s servers, so we started testing for average speed. We first tested for TTFB, that is time to the first byte. You could also call it average response time too. Here’s a snapshot of how our results looked like.

Clearly, our tests tell us one thing; SiteGround is consistently faster than GoDaddy, and this isn’t the full result, as we ran tests consistently over a long testing period. In the end, SiteGround had an average response time of 421ms over our testing period, while GoDaddy came in with an average speed of 510ms. In an industry saturated with hosts posting around 800ms response time on average, this isn’t quite bad.

Full-page Load Speed

We also tried to get a number for average page load speed, and we were impressed to calculate an average page load speed of 781ms for our dummy account on SiteGround’s servers. GoDaddy’s average page load speed was slower still, averaging over a second at 1.2s.

SiteGround vs. GoDaddy for Ease of use & Beginner Friendliness

No one, at least that we know of, wants to spend valuable time fumbling over the controls of a hosting interface, trying to figure out what and what not to do. In addition, most people prefer hosts that actually make the job of hosting easier through more access, more freebies and all that kind of stuff. On that note, let’s see exactly how easy it is to use both these hosts.

User Interface

For us, when it comes to the question of user interfaces, there are only two viable answers; cPanel or Plesk. They are both easy to use and they are both standard interfaces used by most hosts. Anything other than that is tantamount to reinventing the wheel. SiteGround and GoDaddy make use of cPanel, so that’s full marks for them. cPanel is great because, for one, it is user-friendly, and if you’re migrating from a host that had the cPanel interface installed, it would be easier for you to get acclimatized.

However, cPanel is only available for GoDaddy’s Linux based hosting plans. If you want to opt for Windows hosting, you get Parallel Plesk as your control panel.

Sign up process.

Purchasing a plan from both hosts was quite easy, as we didn’t have any problems. One thing that we noticed, though, was that at checkout, both hosts did try to sell a lot of services that we didn’t necessarily need. This is usual with all hosts, though, so we weren’t particularly bothered.

App Integration, Installations and Marketplace

Both SiteGround and GoDaddy support most Content Management System apps, especially WordPress. SiteGround, as we’ve mentioned, is an officially recommended host by WordPress so that tells you how great SiteGround is for WordPress users. For GoDaddy, one-click installation is available for WordPress, so even Shared hosting users can make the transition as easy as possible. With SiteGround, you can easily install WordPress and a number of apps using the Softaculous tool. For even greener users, WordPress can be installed with one step using SiteGround’s proprietary software installation wizard. Users of both hosts also have access to a market place where a number of services, apps and plug-ins can be purchased easily.

Free Site Migration

It baffles us how this remains a thing. But unfortunately, it is what it is, and there are many hosts who do not offer free site migrations. SiteGround, for one, does offer free site migrations, but only on certain plans. Users who purchase the StartUp plan (the lowest Shared hosting plan), are not eligible for free site migration. If you think that’s not fair, wait till you read about GoDaddy’s free site migration policy. GoDaddy doesn’t offer free migration and charges 99.99% per site for migrating your site. So, if you do not know how to migrate your site yourself (a task that is pretty technical if you don’t really know what you’re doing), then you’ll have to fork out almost a hundred dollars to have access to the service. That’s a policy that makes SiteGround’s policy look like a free candy delivery scheme.

Free domains

A lot of hosts offer free domains with each plan. It makes setting up a website far easier than it would have been otherwise, and it’s something that we think all hosts should offer. That, however, isn’t an opinion that SiteGround shares. The host doesn’t do domains at all, and that’s that about that. GoDaddy, on the other hand, does offer free domains for new customers who purchase annual web hosting plans.

Website builder

Most other hosts use third party site builders like Weebly and Wix, but GoDaddy doesn’t. Instead, GoDaddy has a proprietary tool called GoCentral. So if you want to build your site yourself, you can use GoCentral. SiteGround doesn’t have a proprietary tool, but users can make use of the Weebly website builder at no extra costs.

We used both SiteGround’s Weebly site builder and the GoCentral tool, and we were able to notice a few things. Weebly, for one, isn’t as flexible or as sophisticated as we would have liked, but it is perfect for beginners. What stood Weebly out for us, was the clear interface. GoCentral isn’t free, but it is free to start— that is, you get a month’s free trial. If you only want to run one or two sites, that should ideally be enough for you. However, if you are continuously engaging in projects, you might have to subscribe to it for a longer period. With over three hundred themes and templates, GoCentral is a drag and drop site editor that has something for everyone.

Basically, both website builders are very easy to use, but we’re would go with SiteGround’s Weebly because it is free to use, and not just free to start.

Staging environments

For people who are not quite sure of themselves, it’s better to have a staging environment that enables them test out complex changes to their website structure. More advanced users can create one through WordPress by using a plug-in called WP staging or can create one on a subdomain, but new users do not have that luxury. That’s why it’s better to go with a host that supports a special staging environment. SiteGround offers a staging environment on select plans, while GoDaddy offers a staging environment on all managed WordPress hosting plans except the Basic plan.

EASE OF USE WINNER SITEGROUND; At the end, we feel that this verdict really just boils down to preference. On the one hand, SiteGround offers at least free site migrations on select plans, while GoDaddy offers the same service at a price of $99 per site. While on the other hand, GoDaddy offers free domain registration for most plans, while SiteGround doesn’t offer any free domain registration services. However, we feel it’s better to have a free site migration policy, so SiteGround takes this round for us.

Money-Back Guarantee Policy

Long money-back guarantees are great cause they come with less risk. If you don’t like a plan, you can easily request for a refund. Here’s somewhere SiteGround is uncharacteristically basic, offering only a thirty days money-back guarantee, which is the industry standard. For cloud hosting plans, SiteGround offers only a fifteen-day money-back guarantee. GoDaddy also offers the same thirty days money-back guarantee. For plans less than annual plans, GoDaddy offers a 48 hour refund period.

Money-back guarantee; Draw

Both hosts offer the same level of money-back guarantees, so it was hard to decide a winner. While it would have been easier to just pick one winner, we don’t think that would have been particularly honest, so we didn’t.

Customer Support and Reliability

Great customer support is a blessing, while terrible customer support is a headache of biblical proportions. If you ever get into a tight fix, like it’s almost certain that you will, you will need great customer support to help you get back on track. If your host’s customer support isn’t great, well, long may the tight fix reign.

Checking out live support

SiteGround and GoDaddy offer the same channels of contacting customer support with phone, live chat and ticketing support channels.

We use two important metrics to measure the quality of a host’s customer support, and those important metrics are length of average wait time (the time it takes to contact a live support) and the quality of support i.e the proficiency of the live reps we speak to in solving our problems and answering our questions.

Live Chat Support test

We first tested live Chat support of both hosts and SiteGround’s wait time was seriously impressive. Most times we connected to a live rep within a minute, or two at most. In fact, our average wait time was about 55 seconds. It was almost nonexistent. This wasn’t the same with GoDaddy, though, as we had to consistently wait over five minutes to get connected to a live rep. At a point, we even had to wait for over half an hour to speak to a live rep, something that didn’t go down especially well with us. Even though we don’t expect great customer support from large companies like GoDaddy, there is no excuse for putting a customer on hold for over thirty minutes.

SiteGround’s live support— or the live support reps that we spoke to, were friendly and were quite knowledgeable. The questions that we asked them, many requiring above average hosting knowledge, were answered immediately and with even additional information. Asides that, SiteGround’s live chat feature is so advanced that once you connect to a live rep, you immediately have access to a live bio page that shows you a picture and the name of the rep that you’re speaking to, their hobbies and even a short introductory paragraph from them. It made the experience better and more comfortable for us. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the same experience that we had with GoDaddy. While a few of the reps we spoke to answered our questions easily, an overwhelming majority struggled with the more complex questions. It wasn’t all bad, though, all hosts we spoke to were cordial and friendly enough. However, we do doubt that they would be much help if you ran into a serious problem or needed an explanation on very complex/technical issues. On the other hand, we were more confident in SiteGround’s customer support service than we were satisfied with GoDaddy’s customer service.

The phone support of GoDaddy was much better than the live support in terms of wait time, but it was still more of the same regarding quality. SiteGround maintained the short wait time and the quality that was on display in their handling of live chat support.

Knowledge Base

Both hosts maintain a great knowledge base library where most users can find articles and tutorials on solving basic issues and setting up their account. To a large extent, we found the knowledge bases of both hosts to be sufficient for solving minor issues and setting up accounts.

Website Security

Of courses, you want your files and the information on your site to be safe. While most hosts offer general firewall protection, their policies towards other safety tools like spam protection, backups, and site security defer greatly. The best hosts offer more safety protection for less, while other hosts see safety features as an opportunity to drain more dollars from the pockets of users.

Backup Policy

No matter what you’re doing, as long as it’s on a computer, it’s important to have backup files. SiteGround offers a free limited daily backup and restore service of thirty days for Shared hosting plans and seven days for Cloud hosting plans. GoDaddy has monthly backups included in the free Backup tool, while Weekly and Daily backups are included in the premium backup tool that is absolutely free for GoDaddy hosted websites.

SSL Certificates

SiteGround provides SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt for free on all plans, while GoDaddy does not. You can purchase an SSL certificate starting from around $48 per year from GoDaddy though.

Firewall protection

GoDaddy, in 2017, acquired a Web Application Firewall that, in theory, should be able to offer blanket protection for sites hosted on its servers. SiteGround has something like that too, with ModSecurity, an open-source web application firewall.

The technology, bought by GoDaddy and developed by Sucuri, is supposed to protect against cross-site scripting and SQL injection techniques. However just months after being acquired by GoDaddy, Touseef Gul (a website application firewall tester) was able to bypass the firewall and gain access to databases through the use of a rather simple SQL injection string. That doesn’t fill us with a lot of confidence in GoDaddy’s firewall.

Site Security Features

SiteGround offers access to the SG scanner, a security feature provided by Sucuri. The SG scanner helps to detect malware and prevent attacks on your site. It also helps to check if your site has been blacklisted by other sites, and notifies you via email. The service is not free though and costs about $19.80 per year ($1.65 monthly). GoDaddy has a special Website Security feature that goes for £3.99 (this excludes VAT for users in the UK) which performs most of the tasks that SiteGround’s SG scanner performs.

Security winner SiteGround; On a whole, we were more impressed by SiteGround and the services offered for free than we were with GoDaddy. In addition, the fact that v GoDaddy’s firewall protection was breached was a source of concern for us, as that leads to a high risk of data theft.

Plans & Pricing

Of course, the price of a service is important. Equally as important is the service rendered at the price given. We are always on the lookout for the best deals, not just the cheapest, so we’ll be taking note of not just the price but the specs offered at that price to reach our verdict.

We’ll be comparing two sets of plans which are the Shared hosting and Managed WordPress hosting of both hosts. Why? Well, let’s face it, an overwhelming majority of the sites on the internet are hosted on Shared hosting or Managed WordPress servers.

Shared Hosting Comparison

GoDaddy has four Shared hosting server tiers. They are the Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate and the Maximum plans. SiteGround, on the other hand, has three tiers of Shared hosting server tiers and they are the StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek plans.

Basic Shared hosting tiers

GoDaddy’s cheapest Shared hosting plan is the Economy plan and it costs $2.99. The plan comes with 24/7 support infrastructure, one website, 100GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, free emails, and one free domain. This offer sounds real nice, till you discover that $2.99 is a promotional offer and the renewal price actually looks something like $7.99— more than a hundred per cent price hike. SiteGround’s cheapest Shared hosting plan is the StartUp plan and it costs about $3.95 (renews at $11.95) and comes with one website, 10GB of space, unlimited bandwidth, free Cloudflare CDN, free SSL certificate, free daily backups, and unlimited emails.

The number of websites is the same, but GoDaddy offers ten times more storage than SiteGround, something that you should take note if your site is going to be image and video heavy. It is unlikely that you’ll exhaust your ten gigabytes of space for with one website, but a hundred gig of space is a great thing to have. The fact that GoDaddy costs even less must also mean something.

Medium Range plans

GoDaddy’s medium-range plan is the Deluxe plan and it comes with all the features of the Economy plan and has the added advantage of unlimited websites, storage, and subdomains. It costs $4.99 (however, you have to pay $10.99 to renew). SiteGround’s medium-range plan is the GrowBig plan and it comes with all the features of the StartUp plan plus unlimited websites, free SSL wildcard for one year, 20GB space, all 3 levels of the super cacher, staging environments for WordPress and Joomla, 30 backup copies and free restore. The plan costs $5.95 per month for new customers while renewal costs $19.95 per month. A price hike from $5.95 to $19.5 represents one of the steepest price hikes we’ve ever seen. Isn’t this sort of overdoing it?

GoDaddy’s plan maxes out, with unlimited specs of all the important features. At $4.99 it is really great value for money, and even if you put the $10.99 renewal price into consideration, it’s still not too bad. SiteGround’s specs do increase with the second plan, but even with increased specs, it doesn’t try to hold a candle up to GoDaddy’s Deluxe plan. However, the argument could be made that SiteGround has something that GoDaddy doesn’t have, which is free SSL and staging environments for WordPress and Joomla— but that argument doesn’t stand when you figure out that the GrowBig plan costs almost two times the price of the Deluxe plan.

High Range Plan

Since GoDaddy has two high range plans, we’ll be comparing them both to SiteGround’s high range plan. GoDaddy’s second most expensive plan is the Ultimate which can be purchased at $5.99 (The renewal fee is $16.99). It has all the features of the deluxe plan, and in addition, has double the processing power, a free SSL certificate (for a single term) and unlimited databases. So, GoDaddy offers a free SSL certificate at last. You do love to see it. SiteGround’s most expensive Shared hosting plan is the GoGeek plan and it comes with all the features of the GrowBig plan plus unlimited websites, 30GB space with a traffic capacity of 100,000 per month, priority support, one-click Git repo creation, and PCI compliance.  It costs about $11.95 for the initial purchase and $34.95 for renewal. A price hike of $11.95 is significant no matter how you look at it.

The maximum plan, which is the most expensive shared hosting plan that GoDaddy has to offer is $12.99 for an initial purchase and $24.99 upon renewal. It comes with the Ultimate plan features and ×2 the processing power and memory, ×2 maximum site traffic and a free SSL certificate for the full term.

Well, it does appear with even all the specs maxed out, GoDaddy costs less than SiteGround— and considerably less too. If you’re not someone predisposed to spending a lot of money, you should probably go with GoDaddy on account of price.

Managed WordPress hosting

Managed WordPress hosting plans are usually more expensive as they take more effort from the host. SiteGround Managed WordPress hosting package isn’t very different from their Shared hosting packages. In fact, the only discernible difference that we could notice was the base features of the plans which include WordPress optimization and pre-installed WordPress application. GoDaddy, on the other hand, has a whole different Managed WordPress scheme so we’ll be talking about that instead.

Basic Managed WordPress Hosting Plan

All of GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting plans include:

• A free domain (when you sign up for an annual plan)
• Free daily backups (these aren’t offered on their shared hosting plans)
• Malware scans
• Sign up forms that are built-in for capturing client data.

GoDaddy’s Basic managed WordPress hosting plan is called the Basic plan and it comes with one website, 10gb worth of space, and maximum traffic of 25,000 visitors per month. The cost of the initial price is $4.99. The price for Basic plan renewal, though, is $9.99 per month. Which, as I said, is a bit more pricey than the normal basic Economy plan. In fact, the renewal price comes quite to close to SiteGround’s renewal price of $11.95. SiteGround’s plan is basically the Shared hosting StartUp plan but with essential WordPress features like free WordPress migration and free WordPress install. Also, it has a capacity of supporting about 10,000 visitors per month.

The initial price of SiteGround’s plan is lesser than that of GoDaddy’s, so if you want higher performance (as we’ve proven that SiteGround has) you might be tempted to go with SiteGround. However, you should also note that GoDaddy’s plan has a maximum visitors count of twenty-five thousand, while SiteGround’s is a mere ten thousand.

Medium Range WordPress hosting Plan

GoDaddy’s medium-range hosting plan is the Deluxe plan, which comes at an initial cost of $7.99. It comes with one website, maximum of 100k visitors per month, 15GB of space, support of free daily backups, malware scans, built-in sign-up forms, and a free domain. However, the renewal fee is $14.99. SiteGround’s medium-range WordPress hosting is the same as the GoGeek Shared hosting plan and supports monthly visits up to 25000 per month and costs $19.95 to renew.

Once again, GoDaddy is showing that maxing out specs isn’t a problem, and with a hundred thousand visitors per month and free daily backups, GoDaddy’s plan is more attractive than SiteGround’s. It costs less too. However, SiteGround’s plan comes with unlimited websites, and that’s about the most important thing to take note of.

High Range WordPress Hosting Plan

GoDaddy has two high-level managed WordPress hosting plans and they are the Pro 5+ and Ultimate plans. The ultimate plan can be purchased for $9.99 per month and offers 2 websites, 30GB of storage, a free SSL certificate for the first year, a maximum of 400k visitors, and all the features of the Deluxe plan. The cost of renewal stands at $19.99. The next plan is the Pro 5+  plan and it offers 5-50 websites, support of up to 800k monthly visitors, a free SSL certificate per site, 50-200GB of storage and all the other features of the Ultimate plan before it. The renewal price of $27.99 is the same as the price of the initial purchase. SiteGround’s highest plan offers a capacity of 100 thousand visitors per month, something that the Pro 5+ and Ultimate plans exceed by a lot and when we say a lot means a lot. However, neither host offers unlimited websites, so it’s a bit of which spec is more important to you. Capacity or website count?

Pricing winner GoDaddy; This is a section that SiteGround was always destined to lose. In fact, there are only a few hosts who can offer what GoDaddy offers at the price that it is offered.

Extra features

Let’s look at the major features that both hosts offer and see if there’s anything extraordinary.

SiteGround has the following extra features:

• Free Cloudflare CDN
• SiteGround is optimized for WordPress and Joomla
• One-click staging servers
• SiteGround has reseller hosting options
• Unfortunately, SiteGround doesn’t offer a free domain name.
• SiteGround supports Weebly website builder
• A free WordPress Migration Plugin.
• SiteGround offers SSH access with all their plans

GoDaddy has the following extra features:

• GoDaddy offers a free domain name for the first term for every created website.
• An extensive knowledgebase ensures that you do not have a lot of reasons to contact live support.
• All hosting plans have access to a free website builder.
• Access to over 125 apps with one-click installs. This includes the more popular applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
• GoDaddy helps new websites to get their name out on the big worldwide web through $100 worth ad credits for every $25 spent. The credits also include $50 in Bing and Facebook ads.
• GoDaddy also offers managed WordPress hosting.
• GoDaddy has a reward and referral program called Pro rewards that lets you buy upgrades or pay for websites with reward points.
• People with a Deluxe hosting plan or higher have access to the one-click website staging tool. This ensures that you experience zero downtime while updating your website. This tool makes sure that your website is still online while you’re working and a copy. It also allows you to see first hand the results of your updates and correct your mistakes, if any, before going live.
• GoDaddy Pro is an extra feature provided by GoDaddy that allows resellers or people with multiple products to manage their accounts from a single dashboard. This means that you can control all your products with GoDaddy including domains multiple websites via one central panel. You are also allowed to clone your websites, get real-time analytics, perform migrations, and set automatic backups as you deem fit. Users can also manage online stores and/or websites, and make purchases on behalf of others with GoDaddy’s pro client.

Features winner — A DRAW; Both hosts boast of decent features, but none were particularly eye-catching. It’s a draw for us.

Major differences between GoDaddy and Siteground

• GoDaddy offers a free domain on each web hosting plan, SiteGround doesn’t.
• SiteGround has an overall better performance than GoDaddy.
• SiteGround’s customer support is better than GoDaddy’s by about several miles.
• GoDaddy is cheaper than SiteGround by a lot. A whole lot.
• SiteGround offers free site Migration on select plans, while GoDaddy doesn’t
• SiteGround offers free SSL certificates on all plans, while GoDaddy isn’t into such Santa Claus-y shenanigans.

SiteGround vs. GoDaddy: Our Pick

From the moment we began, SiteGround always looked like the winner, winning our Performance, Customer Support and Security sections by a mile or two. Of course, GoDaddy, the patriarchal figure in motion, did try to manage a strong fight back with a strong showing at the pricing section, but that plan wasn’t successful as SiteGround comes out our overall winner.

So, the question GoDaddy vs. SiteGround has only one answer— and it’s SiteGround.