Hostwinds vs GoDaddy– Hard to Choose, but I Did 2021

In this Hostwinds vs GoDaddy contest, it all comes down to which offers a better value for money. To make a fair comparison, I evaluated both hosting services in terms of features, performance, security, pricing, and support.

I found that unlike GoDaddy, Hostwinds is cheaper and offers unlimited resources even with its smallest package.

Click here to see Hostwinds’s latest deals or keep reading to see what makes Hostwinds the winner of this comparison.

1. Plans and Pricing

You Get Cheaper Shared Hosting with Hostwinds

Hostwinds and GoDaddy offer pretty much the same hosting solutions such as shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated servers. Hostwinds also offers White Label and cloud hosting, whereas GoDaddy offers managed and unmanaged WordPress hosting.

Hostwinds offers three personal (Budget) and three Business shared hosting plans (Linux only). GoDaddy offers four shared hosting plans for Linux and three plans for Windows.

With Hostwinds, you can subscribe monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, biennially, or triennially. With GoDaddy, you can choose from monthly, annual, biennial, or triennial subscriptions. With both hosts, the longer the subscription term, the more cost-effective it is.

If you look at the prices offered by both hosts, you’ll find that Hostwinds’ packages (even the Business plans) renew at a cheaper cost compared to GoDaddy’s Linux-based shared hosting plans. Hostwinds also offer better discounted rates than GoDaddy.

Hostwinds offers a free domain, free website migration. It also offers 48 hours, 14 days, and 30 days money-back guarantee depending on the subscription period and billing type (first time or renewal).

On the other hand, GoDaddy offers a free domain, free website migration (with WordPress hosting only). You also get a 48-day money-back guarantee with monthly subscription and 30 days with annual billing.

The winner? Hostwinds. Even though GoDaddy sells highly affordable shared hosting packages, Hostwinds has a cheaper package renewal rate and offers more attractive discounts.

2. Features

Hostwinds Offers More Resource Allocations and More Value-Added Features Than GoDaddy

With Hostwinds’ six shared hosting plans (personal and Business), you get unlimited SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, and you can host from 1 to unlimited hosted websites.

All packages are also equipped with free CloudFlare CDN, daily backups, free Weebly site builder, latest cPanel, Softaculous one-click installer, and a free SSL certificate. The Business plans additionally come with LiteSpeed Web Server, optimized MySQL, and unlimited FTP accounts.

With GoDaddy, however, you get from 100 GB to unlimited HDD storage, from 1 to unlimited websites, from 10 to unlimited databases, unmetered bandwidth, and free Office 365 Email (for the first year).

GoDaddy also offers cPanel and an application installer with its plans, doesn’t offer free CDN or a free website builder. Plus, only the higher-tier plans come with a free SSL certificate.

Check out the following comparison table to further compare Hostwinds and GoDaddy:

The winner? Hostwinds. Hostwinds is more generous with its resources across all its shared hosting plans as opposed to GoDaddy, and offers more freebies.

3. Performance

Hostwinds Has Slightly Better Loading Speeds

Hostwinds has three server locations including two in the U.S.A. and one in the Netherlands. GoDaddy only has two server locations – U.S.A. and India. Even though Hostwinds has more locations, GoDaddy’s locations are more globally spread out.

While Hostwinds uses SSD storage with all its plans, GoDaddy only uses it with specific plans. SSD storage performs much faster than the regular HDD storage, in terms of website data processing. This reflects on the website’s loading speed and overall performance.

Hostwinds includes a free CDN with all its plans, but GoDaddy only includes it with its WordPress hosting plans. CDN, or Content Delivery Network is a feature that places your website on a global network of cloud servers hence boosting its loading speeds, among other benefits, from different locations around the world.

Hostwinds promises a 99.9999% uptime guarantee and GoDaddy promises 99.9%. Both hosts have been reported to show very minimum downtimes on the long run.

When testing Hostwinds’ loading speeds from different locations around the world, it showed perfect timings in all locations leading to a perfect global score. The test details can be found in Hostwinds’ full review.

GoDaddy showed the same global score when tested, but it had one slightly slower location. Even though it wasn’t slow enough to bring the global score below perfect, it still counts as a slight difference between the two hosts. Check out the test for yourself in GoDaddy’s detailed review.

Hostwinds offers more performance features and slightly outperforms GoDaddy in the speed tests making it the clear winner in the performance round.

4. Security

GoDaddy Offers More Free Security Features

Hostwinds’ security is not one of its strong points. Most of its security features are available in an optional paid add-on called Windshield. The package includes DDoS protection, firewall setups, server hardening, and security audits.

On the other hand, GoDaddy includes all these features as standard with all its plans.

Hostwinds offers CloudLinux OS as an optional system to be uploaded later while GoDaddy uses it with all its Linux-based shared hosting plans. CloudLinux OS isolates each account on the same server, securely, to protect it against any threats targeting other accounts on the server. It also is responsible for the fair allocation of the server resources among all the plans.

Hostwinds includes free automatic daily backups with all its plans, but GoDaddy only includes this with specific plans.

Despite the difference in automatic backups availability, GoDaddy offers more inclusive security features with its plans than Hostwinds making it the more secure option among both.

5. Support

Hostwinds Has More Support Channels and a More Responsive Staff

Both Hostwinds and GoDaddy have highly comprehensive and organized Knowledgebase sections with countless articles and tutorials covering most major topics.

With Hostwinds, you get 24/7 support via live chat, phone, email, and support ticket. Even though with the live chat I got instantly connected, the representative wasn’t as helpful as I would have expected. This is in terms of providing the correct information. The support team can definitely benefit from more training.

GoDaddy, on the other hand, has only two support channels – live chat and phone. The phone support is available through multiple global call centers serving several regions around the world. Even though both are supposed to be available 24/7, the live chat can sometimes be quite frustrating to get connected to an agent. First of all, the live chat isn’t always online and even when it is, it can take some time to get through to someone. Not the best responsiveness from such a big company.

Hostwinds has a wider range of support channels which are more responsive than those of GoDaddy. Despite the slight lack of training of the support staff, it still beats GoDaddy’s low responsiveness.

Hostwinds Is the Champion

Hostwinds’ plans are packed with generous resource allocations and cover all the important features needed to kick start your business. Not to mention its fast loading speeds and more responsive support team. GoDaddy is also good, but it has some limitations, slower performance, and it’s more expensive than Hostwinds.

That said, Hostwinds managed to snatch a spot on our list of the best web hosting services on the web hosting scene.

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