SiteGround or GoDaddy? Which one should you pick & why?
Read this in-depth siteground vs godaddy web hosting comparison to make a smart decision.
The answer to this is not so simple as it looks. As each site has different needs; each web hosting provider specializes in different aspects.
SiteGround is known for its Shared hosting plans and its WordPress hosting as well. Meanwhile, GoDaddy provides the All-in-one convenience of hosting, website building, and domain registration.
To come to a conclusion, we will dive into different factors, comparing both of them, finally deciding which one specializes in what factor.
To entirely scrutinize each web host, we will compare both of them with respect to their features, hosting options and pricing structure, uptime and speed, and finally customer support.
If you are in a hurry and want to directly reach a conclusion then take a look at the summary below.
Comparison (Quick Glance)
1. Features:
Winner: SiteGround. Even though both the companies offer great features, some of the features of SiteGround stand out like its security, and many others which otherwise are paid add-ons on GoDaddy.
2. Hosting options:
Winner: GoDaddy. GoDaddy offers more hosting options than SiteGround depending on your needs and requirements. But at the same time, SiteGround’s shared hosting plans is one of the most famous and it is also officially recommended by WordPress.
3. Speed and Uptime:
Winner: SiteGround. Siteground offers a perfect uptime along with an average speed. On the other hand, the uptime of GoDaddy is well below average but its loading speed is, below but, near to SiteGround’s loading time.
4. Pricing Structure:
Winner: SiteGround. Although GoDaddy also has an affordable pricing structure, there are several necessary add-ons that you will need to purchase unlike in SiteGround. SiteGround has better features in WordPress for the price it asks for.
5. Customer Support:
Winner: SiteGround. Although they both offer knowledge centers, phone, and call support, SiteGround, without doubt, provides unbeatable support and help.
6. User interface:
Winner: SiteGround. Even though SiteGround won here, we can say that GoDaddy is also not far behind. It also provides an excellent modified custom interface, ease of use, and one-click installations.
Now let’s dive right in.
1. Features
As both of them belong to the ruling group of web hosting service providers, therefore, they are feature-rich.
With SiteGround, you will get free WordPress installation, daily backups, Cloudflare CDN, and free developer tools as well, along with unlimited email accounts, subdomains and parked domains, and 10 to 120 GB of disk space.
On the other hand, GoDaddy although has unmetered bandwidth like SiteGround, but you will have to buy CDN unless you have WordPress hosting. It allows 20 GB to unlimited disk space depending upon the plan.
It also features automatic search engine optimization that will increase the ranking of your website. You can also use the latest PHP version and MySQL for databases, along with which can easily build a website by its sophisticated website builder.
GoDaddy does offer a conditional free domain for the first year but SiteGround does not offer that.
SiteGround offers server-level caching for improved performance, free SiteBuilder, and grants you an option to choose from its five worldwide data centers located in three different continents.
SiteGround allows users to easily transfer or migrate websites. Furthermore, you can easily have WordPress transfer with their user-friendly free migrator plugin.
When it comes to security, both offer 24/7server monitoring and DDoS protection but SiteGround additionally offers access to the Sucuri-developed SG Scanner, web application firewall, and artificial intelligence anti-bot system.
SiteGround also offers a free let’s encrypt SSL certificate helping you in keeping the data protected from potential threats. But this important feature is not offered by GoDaddy except for the expensive plans. Yes, you will have to pay to have it.
Are you worried to have one of them, but afraid of losing your money? Then don’t be anymore. Because SiteGround offers no-questions-asked 30-days money-back guarantee.
This guarantee is although offered by GoDaddy as well that’s pretty confusing there.
This 30-day money-back guarantee can be availed only if you have subscribed for more than a year plan. But if you have less than that like a monthly plan then you will only have 48 hours to try it out.
In conclusion, SiteGround wins the competition here due to its value-added features, especially in WordPress hosting.
Winner: SiteGround
2. Uptime and speed
Uptime is one of the most important factors to be considered as it plays a vital role in a site’s success. When it comes to Uptime; it becomes a distinguishing feature between the two.
SiteGround provides an astonishing uptime of about 100%. To be more precise, through several tests, we found out that its average uptime is 99.997%. This means it’s pretty rare that it would disappoint you or your users by being down.
Contrary to that, GoDaddy is far below average, offering an overall average uptime of 99.90%. With this, it also experiences more downtime than SiteGround.
Next in the race is speed, which is also given much concern. Of course, who wants to see that loading page in front of them. It’s quite irritating.
How much do you think speed is important?
53% of the audience will leave the page if your pages don’t load within 3 seconds.
When we carried out several tests on GTmetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insights, we came to know that the average loading time is 2.10 seconds.
Similarly, these numerous tests carried out on GoDaddy found out that the average loading time is 2.50 seconds.
With the importance of both uptime and speed in mind, we can say that SiteGround is a better option.
Hosting options and pricing structure:
You must be eager to know the amount you will need to cash out. That will depend on your site’s needs along with its respective housing option and the web host that offers it.
For the Shared hosting plans, SiteGround has three plans namely StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek. All of these plans offer unlimited Subdomains, FTP accounts, bandwidth, email accounts, and databases but the max size varies from 500MB to 1000 MB.
As far as storage is concerned, it ranges from 10 GB to 40 GB. You will get only one website with its StartUp plan but the other two plans offer unlimited websites.
When you need to renew, the price will rise to $14.99 per month for the StartUp while $24.99 and $39.99 per month respectively for the other two plans.
On the other hand, GoDaddy’s shared hosting plan comes with four categories: Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Maximum.
All of these plans come up with unmetered bandwidth and 250,000 of maximum files amount.
The database size of 1 GB has different variations from 10 to unlimited inexpensive plans. Likewise, email accounts vary from 100 to unlimited. The cheapest plan offers 1 website while all other plans allow unlimited websites to be hosted.
One thing that is exceptional is its 100 GB storage offered in the Economy plan while others allow unlimited storage.
The price of these plans ranges from $5.99 to $19.99 dollars a month.
And when it comes to renewal prices, it jumps to a range $8.99 to $24.99 a month.
But unlike SiteGround, you will have to buy an SSL certificate for cheaper plans which cost $63.99 to $159.99 annually.
Furthermore, it does not offer free site backup. You will have to pay $3 a month for 5 GB storage and for website security you will have to pay another $5.59 a month.
In conclusion, the shared hosting plan of SiteGround is the best in the market and also our number one recommendation.
Although GoDaddy offers exceptional storage capacity for an affordable price but its altogether price after purchasing essential add-ons will be much more expensive than SiteGround.
Let’s take a look at the next common hosting option.
Both of these offer WordPress hosting plans which are specially optimized and engineered for WordPress.
There is one interesting fact that you must know.
Out of 330,000 web hosting providers around the globe, WordPress officially recommends just 3 of them.
And guess what?
One of those is SiteGround.
Therefore, SiteGround is also specially optimized for WordPress hosting. It also offers automatic WordPress updates and in some of its plans also grants built-in WordPress staging sites. It even features WordPress 1-click installations and a speed optimization plug-in for WordPress. The prices of these plans are the same as those shared hosting plans.
Pre-installed WordPress and auto-installed updates also come with WordPress hosting in GoDaddy. In addition to that, it even offers extra features like a selection of themes available.
Furthermore, it even has 4 plans, namely, Basic, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Pro 5+ that ranges from a price of $4.99 to $24.99 a month depending on the plan you choose.
You get a free domain for the first term in all of GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting plans but this is not the case with SiteGround.
But SiteGround WordPress plans are more economical than GoDaddy.
Furthermore, SiteGround’s single-site WordPress hosting plan might seem more expensive than GoDaddy, but it offers some high-end features which you will get in GoDaddy only if you sign up for Pro packages.
In short, if you want WordPress hosting, SiteGround is the best one around.
These two were the plans which both of these sites had, but now comes the parting of ways.
SiteGround offers Cloud hosting plan and WooCommerce hosting plan as well which are not available in GoDaddy.
With Cloud hosting, you will get greater performance and scalability. The money-back-guarantee is for 15 days.
Siteground comes 2nd in our recommendation for Cloud hosting while Number 1 is Liquid Web.
It offers 4 different plans for it namely, Entry, Business, Business Plus, and Superpower that range from $80 to $240 a month.
When we talk about WooCommerce, it will allow you to sell your products and services online.
It comes with three plans with a pricing range of $14.99 to $39.99
Let’s see what other hosting options are offered by GoDaddy.
Additionally, it offers VPS hosting, Dedicated hosting, and business hosting.
In VPS hosting you will have a virtually separate place with no worry of resources.
It comes with four plans 1 vCPU, 2 vCPU, 4 vCPU, and 8 vCPU that ranges from an after-renewal price per month of $4.99 to $61.99.
Its Dedicated hosting option allows you control over your entire server. This also comes up with four different plans that are DS-32, DS-64, DS-128, and DS-256. This monthly price starts from $129.99 to a maximum of $399.99.
If you are looking for the best-dedicated server hosting then you should choose our number 1 recommendation Liquid Web.
With a Business hosting plan, you will get the power of VPS along with an easy-to-use control panel.
It comes with four plans that are Launch, Enhance, Grow, and Expand having the pricing structure of $29.99 to $99.99 per month after renewal.
With this, we come to an end to the discussion of hosting plans and their pricing structure.
In conclusion, GoDaddy offers more hosting options but when it comes to pricing SiteGround beats GoDaddy.
5. Customer Support:
When we take a look at their customer support, we find out that both of these websites contain detailed knowledge on each and every topic, making it easy for the users to help themselves with all they need to know. These knowledge centers are perfectly organized to make them feasible for users.
Both of these have 24/7 chat and phone support as well to connect you directly to the support agent.
SiteGround agents are really knowledgeable, cooperative, and quick to address your queries.
On the other hand, GoDaddy operates in several countries so they offer support in more than 27 languages. But their support agents proved to be not as helpful as they should be.
Notably, SiteGround stands out with its tech tickets by which will get you professional support for troubles you face. This is really important as many times you might be unable to handle technical issues for which you will require such professionals to assist you.
Moreover, SiteGround guarantees an unusual 10-minute response time too.
In a nutshell, without a doubt, SiteGround provides unbeatable support compared to GoDaddy. It is known for its customer support that it includes its knowledgeable and helpful support agents.
6. User interface
GoDaddy uses a modified cPanel but SiteGround uses its own more advanced and intuitive control panel, SiteTools.
cPanel is the industry standard user-friendly graphical interface that has the majority of the features that you will need to administer your website with the help of easily identified icons.
Moreover, for Windows plans GoDaddy uses industry-standard Plesk. GoDaddy does have all the features that are offered by a regular cPanel but it uses a custom interface.
SiteGround’s hosting dashboard is much more user-friendly and convenient to use and navigate. It’s a huge upgrade after they scrapped their older cPanel interface. It comes with new advancements and features as well.
Keep in mind that this new interface is not yet available for some plans.
Furthermore, GoDaddy also offers one-click install for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and for more than 125 distinguished applications on the internet through its control panel.
Likewise, SiteGround also provides hundreds of one-click applications through Softaculous.
Again, SiteGround won, or you can call it a close win.�?
Final Thoughts
Both of the hosting solutions are great. We cannot base our conclusion on one factor. GoDaddy has amazing features, hosting options, and all-in-one convenience.
On the other hand, SiteGround has powerful performance, unparalleled support, seamless WordPress integration, and better value for money.
Hence, without a doubt, overall SiteGround is a better web hosting provider than GoDaddy.
