With all of the options out there, choosing a web hosting service can be difficult. Choosing between good choices can be even more difficult. In our experience, iPage and GoDaddy are the biggest and best web hosting services out there.
Picking one can be a difficult task, which is why we made this web hosting comparison article. Today, we will go over what each hosting provider offers and the advantages/disadvantages of choosing either iPage or GoDaddy.
What do you need from a web hosting service?
When choosing a web hosting service for your small business website, there are many aspects to take into consideration. How much uptime do you need your website to have? Fast and reliable hosting is important for keeping your services available to your customers.
How good is the support? Customer support via text or phone can save you hours of time and frustration down the road.
Customer support, among other aspects, needs to be considered when choosing a web host provider. After reading this article, you should know enough about both services to make an informed decision.
Prices compared
Both services offer economical price ranges with a wide array of features. However, choosing the right plan will save you money in the long run. This is highly depending on what your website is and how many resources it will take up in the distant future.
iPage offers a plan at $23 per year with a full money-back guarantee. While this may seem a little high, keep in mind that this includes a free domain name registration and a few extra features which you can read about here.
iPage also offers discounts up to 80%, which will run you at about $2. How could you pass that up? Typically, you’ll get this discount as an intro offer when you sign up.
Here are a couple of customer reviews about iPage:
Godaddy is cheaper depending on what package you get. They offer three different packages; Economy ($6.99), Deluxe ($8.99), and Ultimate ($14.99). If you go with their cheapest plan, you’re getting a plan that is significantly cheaper than iPage’s base fee.
GoDaddy does offer a 50% intro discount. That will run you at about $3.99. While the economy package offers an abundance of features, spending extra money will get you more benefits. If you feel like you need more features, the deluxe and ultimate package provides extra security and speed.
Price summary
Overall, iPage can offer a steep discount compared to GoDaddy. If you don’t include the discounts, GoDaddy’s economy package will save you more money on a yearly basis, assuming you don’t purchase extra features.
GoDaddy also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, while iPage offers unlimited money-back guarantee.
Comparing hosting features
Both web hosting services offer a good amount of features and benefits such as DDoS protection, one-click installers, and adequate disk/email space. However, iPage seems to offer a bit more features overall.
If the extra features don’t interest you, it shouldn’t impact your decision too much.
Both iPage and GoDaddy offer a wealth of features, but iPage has a few extras in their package. If your business is resource expensive, iPage may be a better option for you. Unlike GoDaddy, iPage offers unlimited disk and email space.
This can be a good thing because you don’t have to worry about exceeding those limits, which can cost in the long run. If you know for a fact that you don’t need much space, limited disk space shouldn’t matter too much.
iPage also offers a free domain name registration. If you plan on purchasing a domain name, you can save a few bucks by going with iPage.
GoDaddy doesn’t provide unlimited disk and email space like iPage, but there is quite a bit of room for whatever you may take up. GoDaddy offers 100GB for both disk and email space.
It’s important to consider how much space your business will actually need. In some cases, 100GB is more than enough. In others, 100GB won’t quite do the trick and can hinder business performance and costs.
GoDaddy also doesn’t offer some extra features such as free domain name registration and shared SSL like iPage. If you already have a domain name registered, this shouldn’t matter too much. If you don’t, domain names can run at about $10 per year, which isn’t incredibly expensive, but it’s still worth factoring into the decision.
Features summary
Both iPage and GoDaddy are feature-rich. Overall, iPage offers a bit more benefits over GoDaddy. If unlimited disk space, shared SSL, and free domain registration would be of benefit to you, iPage would give you a bang for your buck.
In many cases, what GoDaddy’s economy package offers is enough for most small businesses and is always a good option.
Customer Support
Do you ever have problems settings up a domain name? Is there a chance your website will have problems? Questions like these are important to ask whether you know a lot about the web or not.
Sometimes, problems can be easy fixes. Other times, problems are specific to the hosting company and need to be resolved over the phone.
Both iPage and GoDaddy offer video tutorials and articles that help you troubleshoot simple hosting problems independently.
If you’re the type of person who is good at self-diagnosing, you might not use customer support as much as you think. Still, it’s important to have quality customer support on hand in case you run into any complex problems.
If on the other hand, you’re not very computer literate, customer support will be one of the biggest assets when it comes to web hosting. Getting PHP errors and don’t know how to fix them?
Customer support can take care of everything for you. Some website owners don’t consider how important having support is, and it costs them in the long run.
Both, GoDaddy and iPage offer quality customer support and should be able to help troubleshoot any problems you have. After all, no web hosting provider is 100% perfect. You will run into problems, and it’s smart to anticipate them.
GoDaddy, along with iPage, is one of the biggest names in web hosting. As a result, many customers have problems. GoDaddy adapted to this need by providing a team of on-hand, qualified customer service representatives to help troubleshoot problems from simple to complex.
GoDaddy offers 24/7 phone support as well as on-site text chat. GoDaddy has received praise for their knowledgeable staff. Representatives who know how to speak clearly and effectively is the most important factor when it comes to troubleshooting web problems.
Whatever problem you may have, GoDaddy’s staff should be able to get you through it.
iPage’s staff is known to have a faster response time. GoDaddy’s average response time is about 6 minutes. iPage will get back to you in no less than 2 minutes. If waiting is a concern, iPage will save you a significant amount of time when phoning in.
Don’t want to phone in? Text chat can be more efficient than phoning in many cases. Both GoDaddy and iPage offer great text and chat support, but iPage has a 24 /7 on-site chat support. This is important because you never know what time a problem can occur.
If you see yourself needing to get a problem fixed during non-office hours, iPage can get back to you in a quick and efficient manner via text chat.
In general, iPage’s chat support is better than GoDaddy. If you can see yourself using the chat feature more, it’s smart to lean towards iPage. If you don’t mind and can see yourself phoning in more often, GoDaddy offers phenomenal phone support.
Customer support summary
Both providers will give you quality support, but both have their advantages and disadvantages. It’s smart to consider how much customer support matters to you and what methods you’ll use to contact them.
Everybody is different, so I can’t tell you which method of hosting support is better. If you can’t decide, either provider will give you quality support, no matter what way you decide to contact them.
iPage or GoDaddy hosting?
Now that you know what features are offered, the cost, and how reliable the customer support of each provider is, you can decide which web hosting service will fit your business’s needs.
Some of your own blogs and don’t need a wealth of features. Others might own e-commerce shops and need extra security features.
Overall, iPage hosting offers a greater level of support over GoDaddy and it’s cheaper and reliable at the same time. iPage also has more features, including extra security.
We prefer iPage over GoDaddy because of the unlimited disk space, the low-cost plans, and the free domain name.
The best way to decide is to think about your situation and what would best fit the way you run your website.
For the sake of review, here is GoDaddy’s Economy package and iPage’s hosting package.
As a small business owner, iPage offers everything I need plus more. This may not be the case for you, so it’s smart to look at the benefits/features for both providers one last time.
