Finding Good Web Hosting

Next comes the hosting for life, OK, let’s just call it hosting.

I’m going to dissect the GoDaddy $6.99-a-month WordPress hosting package for this post.

Let’s start with 30 GB of storage space. That is a ton of space for the average WordPress site. WordPress itself with a basic install is around 100Mb, but you have to have a theme, photos, and content, so based on what we have on our servers, the average website is about 250-300Mb in space.

So why are they offering 30 GB? To be honest, it is a gimmick, period. Now email does take up space if you are saving every email you have ever received in your life. But the website is not so much.

Now the Free SSL Certificate, which is well, Free with most hosting Control Panels. The free Let’s Encrypt certificate works well for most websites.

They offer a free domain, which is about $10-15 a year so that is a gimmick, but you need to pay attention to who owns your domain name. Since GoDaddy registers the domain through their own domain registrar company (likely Wild West Domains or GoDaddy), they can give it to you at a low cost, but they own the domain name. I’m sure that when fellow Marine Bob Parsons ran the company, it wasn’t this way, but I moved on. If you don’t own the name, it may be difficult to move to a new hosting company down the road. I always put the domain name in your name, that is just good business. But you would be surprised at how many clients I see where their previous web designer or hosting company owned the name, holding it hostage.

You also get a business email with GoDaddy, which means you get an email with an email address at your domain name and a web interface to access your email. Most hosting companies offer this as do I.

You get GoDaddy payments, which is their e-commerce banking gateway, which is a way for them to make more money off you if you have an e-commerce website.

You also get automatic daily malware scans at GoDaddy, or real-time on-the-fly scans 24 hours a day like I do.

If you want to upgrade to a higher-priced package at GoDaddy, you get things like unlimited storage (there is a limit, trust me and if you reach it, they will shut you down, without warning, and there are often fees associated with it.

Unlimited malware removal and hack repair. Hmmm, that is interesting, but that means, that they will simply restore your website from a backup. I do the same thing, plus I repair or patch the hole that the malware or hacker used so it won’t happen again.

You get the GoDaddy SEO Optimizer, which is the free Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.

As you can see, hosting for life isn’t possible, and not all hosting is the same. Many are just full of gimmicks.

In order for your website to be effective, you need reliable and fast web hosting. If it is slow, it is useless, period.

I recommend that you look into Simply Web Services for WordPress hosting, That is where my blog is hosted and I haven’t had a single problem. Tell them that Average Joe sent you.