GoDaddy Pricing Breakdown: Is It Good Value for Money?

When looking at a website builder’s pricing plans, one main question guides our research—how much value are you really getting for your money? According to our practice-based research methodology, GoDaddy scores a fantastic 4.1 out of 5 in our “value for money” category (a slight dip from our previous findings).

We gave this downgrade based on the fact that all website builders have increased their pricing in recent years, and GoDaddy didn’t make huge improvements to its feature offering alongside that increase. Additionally, the platform has removed a previous upper-tier plan for the largest sites.

It’s worth checking out GoDaddy’s renewal prices before committing to any plan of your choosing, because each plan renews at a higher price than these special introductory rates.

For example, signing up for the Basic website builder plan will cost $10.99/month if you pay today. A year from now, however, that same plan renews at $12.99/month. While not a huge price difference, these costs could accumulate on the higher-level, premium plans.

GoDaddy also offers a free plan to let you explore if it’s the right option before signing up. Now, let’s take a closer look at what you can expect to pay based on your site’s unique needs.

GoDaddy offers one of the most comprehensive “menus” from which site builders and creators can order up the exact service or product they need.

Although you can buy prepackaged plans, you can also subscribe to different services “a la carte,” such as only buying your hosting or domain from GoDaddy.

This is an important distinction to understand before you start adding extra services or digital products to your GoDaddy cart. It’s also critical for viewing the rest of the unique pricing categories featured here in this roundup. 

GoDaddy also offers bundled packages for businesses as a way to save on website startup and maintenance costs. These bundles may still require additional web hosting fees, so be sure to check what’s included in any bundle or package you select. When in doubt, use the friendly virtual assistant, GoDaddy Guides, to clarify what you’ll get based on your own selections.

In the sections that follow, we’ll dive a bit deeper into four main price offerings from GoDaddy:

• Web hosting services
• Website builder services
• Domain renewal costs
• Email (site administration and marketing)

In addition to being a website builder, GoDaddy is a web hosting service provider. This means that you can run and operate your website on different server options that GoDaddy provides.

In general, GoDaddy provides great value for the money. In fact, that’s why it gets our verified number two ranking on the best web hosting services on the market. Plus, if you’re already using GoDaddy for other domain or site needs, it’s an easy way to get your entire business up and running under one umbrella.

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a fast and reliable entry point for basic web hosting services. GoDaddy’s shared hosting is great for simple websites that run on standard performance. It’s a low barrier to entry, since your site will share a server with other similar sites.

GoDaddy’s shared hosting plans still offer 99.9% uptime, optimized servers with 40% faster run times, and a complementary SSL certificate for every site you run under this plan.

• Web Hosting Economy – starts at $4.99/month for first year
• Web Hosting Deluxe – starts at $6.99/month for first year
• Web Hosting Ultimate – starts at $9.99/month for first year
• Web Hosting Maximum – starts at $12.99/month for first year

Managed WordPress Hosting

For more basic websites, GoDaddy also works seamlessly with WordPress hosting. There are several varieties of WordPress hosting to choose from:

• Managed WordPress Basic – starts at $10.99/month for first year
• Managed WordPress Deluxe – starts at $15.99/month for first year
• Managed WordPress Ultimate – starts at $17.99/month for first year

Managed WordPress hosting includes access to faster load times, more hands-on technical support, tens of thousands of plugins, and much more.

One last thing to keep in mind is that GoDaddy also provides web hosting services outside of WordPress websites. Web Hosting Economy plans start as low as $6.99/month, billed annually for the first year. GoDaddy’s WordPress-specific hosting features are simply an added bonus for users that want to transfer or build their site on the WordPress.org platform

VPS Hosting

GoDaddy’s VPS hosting is uniquely designed for websites that are larger, or need more technical control, than basic websites like blogs. There are four VPS hosting tiers:

• 1 vCPU / 2GB RAM – starts at $8.99/month for first year
• 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM – starts at $17.99/month for first year
• 4 vCPU / 8GB RAM – starts at $34.99/month for first year
• 4 vCPU / 16GB RAM – starts at $44.99/month for first year

Keep in mind that VPS hosting is a major investment for running a high-traffic site or enterprise business. As such, VPS plan monthly charges are a step up from other packages, such as basic shared hosting

Dedicated Hosting

GoDaddy’s dedicated hosting plans are self-managed with high-powered servers and powerful control panel features. This option is best for highly experienced web developers, system administrators, or agencies that require specialized server capabilities. As you can see from pricing, this is a huge step up in terms of investment.

• Dedicated DS-32: $159.99/month, 1-year term
• Dedicated DS-64: $199.99/month, 1-year term
• Dedicated DS-128: $339.99/month, 1-year term
• Dedicated DS-256: $469.99/month, 1-year term

GoDaddy has three builder pricing plans: the $10.99/month Basic plan, the $14.99/month Premium plan, and the $20.99/month Commerce plan. All plans allow you to start building a customizable website, including the ability to select from any of GoDaddy’s user-friendly website themes and templates.

Keeping these things in mind, GoDaddy’s average pricing plans (including its freemium version) makes it one of our top five website builders!

GoDaddy offers many features that make it easy to build a website from scratch. Within each pricing plan, users can:

• Customize the site with menu sections, photo galleries, and store price lists
• Create branded content for social media or email marketing
• Add an online shop section using pre-built shop templates (applies to commerce plans only)
• Manage the site from a simple GoDaddy dashboard

GoDaddy’s website builder heavily emphasizes a “start for free” mentality. While this is appealing, free features will always run into limitations on storage, security, customizations, and domain protections. If you’re planning to continually build, tweak, and improve your website using the GoDaddy builder, consider stepping up to at least the Basic plan to connect a custom domain and access built-in SEO tools to help grow your site.

If you want a more in-depth glimpse of GoDaddy’s highest tier website builder, don’t miss our GoDaddy Ecommerce review.

When it comes to understanding GoDaddy’s domain pricing, you first need to be able to see which domain services the platform offers. There are several:

• Acquiring a new domain – for brand new websites
• Transferring a domain – switching from a previous web host
• Auctioning a domain – mostly a sales process done on the open market
• Brokering a domain – using experts to negotiate and acquire a desired domain
• Finding a domain owner – using WHOIS to pinpoint registration and availability

If you’re a beginner and worried about how complicated this all sounds—don’t fret. Securing and registering a new domain is relatively simple, especially on a reputable platform like GoDaddy. Brokering and negotiating for domains on the open market typically happens in the business of site ownership and flipping websites for profit.

Here’s what you should know: If you’re only coming to GoDaddy for a domain name, prices may start as low as $0.01 for the first year, for a .com site on a 3-year contract paid upfront. If you want to keep your domain after that time, subsequent years may cost more, since you’ll lose the promo offer.  This is clearly a great value if you’re only looking for a domain, but make sure to check out other bundles if you need additional services like hosting or site creation.

Additionally, some GoDaddy hosting packages (such as Shared hosting) qualify for a free domain for the first year of your hosting plan). GoDaddy guarantees free domain privacy forever, for the length of your domain contract agreement.

GoDaddy’s email service options are for busy site owners who want to give their website communications a professional, trustworthy look. This means that you can build trust by sending emails from a domain-based address (something like you@yourdomain.com).

Additionally, GoDaddy helps website owners combine their email communications with Microsoft365 apps like Teams, providing mobile access and accessibility from anywhere. Plans include 10-50GB of storage space for stored messages, contacts, calendars, and more.

The benefit of signing up for email services through GoDaddy is that you can do so all in one place—no juggling multiple licenses through Microsoft.

Here’s our take—GoDaddy offers quite a good value for money, based on other comparable website builders and hosting services. It’s an affordable website builder, hosting provider, and domain provider.

GoDaddy’s free plan even allows you to test everything risk-free, including premium features—and you’re not pressured to upgrade unless you want to keep those extra tools. Additionally, GoDaddy’s unique AI-powered features (including its ADI website builder) let you save time while accessing cutting-edge technology.

Plus, if you’re looking to sell online, GoDaddy has one of the cheapest entry prices for ecommerce sales, with its Commerce Plan starting at $20.99/month, billed annually. This means that you can get selling without emptying your pockets on the backend of your website!

GoDaddy holds its place as our ‘Best Value’ Website Builder!

GoDaddy does offer a free plan that includes a basic free website builder. As you can see, GoDaddy promises that users will never have to pay for websites on the free plan.

There are, however, several limitations that website owners might outgrow as their site traffic takes off. These issues include display or banner ads on your website, which looks unprofessional, and no ability to choose a custom domain—a major hit if you want to identify your site or business.

Explore our complete GoDaddy website builder review to see if it’s right for you.

If you’re still in the early stages of site creation and want to test the waters before committing to a premium plan, you can start with the free version and easily upgrade. GoDaddy makes this process simple so that you never lose sites that you’ve already created.

Hidden costs associated with GoDaddy are usually based on opt-ins or renewals. You may even need to agree to pay extra per month. Although GoDaddy isn’t trying to “hide” these expenses, some users might find them surprising if they don’t know what to expect.

Payment Fees

If you’re using GoDaddy to run an online store or participate in buying and selling, keep in mind that GoDaddy is going to charge minimal fees for those transactions. For eCommerce transactions, GoDaddy charges a flat 2.7% fee.

Expert Developer Help

Occasionally, site owners may discover that they’re knee-deep in technical questions and need more guidance or support. Fortunately, GoDaddy offers this expert help right in the platform. On the downside, website design services are a big investment at once—up to $499 for a one-time site build fee.

On the other hand, you won’t have to worry about finding and hiring a separate contractor. You can trust that your site will be up, running, and styled exactly how you like it.

At Website Builder Expert, we regularly survey hundreds of readers to find out what’s important to them when building, designing, and hosting a website. Our team then spends hundreds of hours researching how the top providers measure up.

Our goal is always to provide clear and honest data that helps you arrive at better decisions for your own website or business. That’s why our research process involves cross-validating authentic sources, confirming information with an in-house team of experts, and keeping up with important industry trends and announcements.

GoDaddy has significantly cheaper pricing plans compared to other web builders on the market, such as Wix, and comes in as one of the best value builders we’ve tested!

Alongside having a free plan, its cheapest web builder plan starts at $10.99/month (when paid yearly). For businesses, we’d recommend the Commerce plan because it unlocks more online product listings, shoppable social posts, and real-time shipping rates.

Its hosting plans, however, are a bit pricier than competitors, with its cheapest shared plan costing $6.99 per month. This is much more than a host such as Bluehost, which costs just $1.99 per month, and means GoDaddy doesn’t currently feature on our list of the best cheap shared hosting providers. That said, if you have room in your budget then there’s plenty to enjoy about GoDaddy hosting.

We’ve taken you through the key costs you’re likely to encounter when designing or hosting a site with GoDaddy. By understanding the platform’s pricing structure and doing your research, you’ll be able to completely plan for what your website may cost up front and in the future.