GoDaddy vs Hostwinds (2024)

By: Laura Bernheim

Editor: Lillian Castro

2/3/2024

Laura Bernheim Hosting Expert

“We tested Hostwinds & GoDaddy — The winner is Hostwinds!”

GoDaddy and Hostwinds offer well-rounded shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting options. Despite these similarities, each web host tailors its services to a unique audience. New website owners thrive with GoDaddy’s beginner-friendly hosting plans that serve solid performance, security, and domain hosting to more than 17 million customers. But Hostwinds is a green web host laser-focused on superior customer service and high-powered infrastructure for more tech-savvy users. Let’s dig into this comparison to see whether you prefer Hostwinds’ advanced architecture and technologies or GoDaddy’s affordability and user-friendly tools.

Overall Rating

4.8/5.0 ★★★★★

Basic Plan: $5.24/month »
Advanced Plan: $6.74/month »
Ultimate Plan: $8.24/month »

Visit Hostwinds »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

Economy Plan: $8.99/month »
Deluxe Plan: $11.99/month »
Ultimate Plan: $14.99/month »

Visit GoDaddy »

Disclosure: When you sign up through links on our site, we often earn referral fees from partners. For more information, see our ad disclosure and review policy.

Overall Hosting Comparison

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

Promising enterprise-grade hosting solutions for prices that appeal to small and medium businesses, Hostwinds delivers the full range of operating systems and server configurations to help customers build and grow an online presence.

With hosting plans covering niches like vBulletin and Minecraft, Hostwinds attracts a customer base as mixed as the server configurations.

After frustrating web hosting experiences of his own, CEO Peter Holden set out to prove that providers didn't need to choose among powerful infrastructure, responsive support, and cost-effective prices. As a 20-year-old, he launched Hostwinds in 2010 to accomplish all three objectives.

Now, the fast-growing company offers the full range of services while guaranteeing complete satisfaction.

We'll put the magnifying glass to the company's shared, cloud, VPS, and dedicated server options later, but we wanted to give a quick shoutout to Hostwinds for its top-notch reseller and white-label plans.

The traditional reseller route operates as you'd expect, with the added perks of being able to set your own prices and capitalizing on Hostwinds's robust product line. For the less tech-savvy reseller or those wanting to offer multiple hosting options to clients, Hostwinds makes its full spectrum of services available under your branding.

The company streamlines deployment and sets up WHMCS for billing management and payment processing. We already appreciate the company's high-powered hardware, so we're naturally supportive of easy-to-configure plans that help customers spread the love.

500% faster speeds via SSDs
LiteSpeed web server performance
FREE dedicated IP address
99.999% uptime guarantee
Datacenters in Dallas and Seattle
Get started on Hostwinds now.

Money Back Guarantee

3 days

Disk Space

Unlimited SSD

Domain Name

New or Transfer

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 4.7/5.0

GoDaddy is exceptionally well-known in the hosting space, typically serving as site owners' introduction to the world of web hosting.

The company makes it incredibly easy and affordable for folks to choose a domain name, sign up for hosting, and start building their online business or personal web property. While known for its domain, email, and shared hosting services, GoDaddy offers options for virtual and dedicated servers as well.

Pre-built templates come with the hosting company's basic WordPress offering, or upgrade to managed WordPress services for top support or help with your online store.

The company makes the migration process as seamless as possible, so you shouldn't shy away from scaling your site as your business needs grow; GoDaddy is a hosting home that will grow alongside you.

The user control options are pretty popular in the hosting space: your choice between the easy-to-use cPanel or Plesk control panels, plus root (administrative) access for more tech-savvy customers.

If you're particularly interested in webmail, GoDaddy offers an intuitive interface for keeping up with the unlimited email accounts you have available to you as a customer. Each email account comes with 256-bit encryption and enhanced privacy protection.

Customer support has been a focus of the GoDaddy team of late. Today, the team has an award-winning collection of experts on staff, readily available to handle customer phone calls and messages 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Luxury services like WordPress Premium Support and Website Security also add support ticketing functionality. While GoDaddy is on hand to talk you through any issues, the team is also keeping an eye on your server (as well as other clients sharing your server).

The hosting provider's around-the-clock security monitoring enables GoDaddy to guarantee uptime rates of 99.9% or better. This uptime rate is by no means outstanding in the industry, but for most end users, it's all that's required.

The bottom line is this: GoDaddy is a go-to domain web host for millions of users worldwide for a reason. The company maintains an ever-expanding network of users by offering blazing-fast load times, award-winning security and support, and a free domain registration when you sign up for a year-long plan.

It's a great hosting deal, particularly for first-timers and small business owners, at a really great price point.

Industry-leading load times
Award-winning support and security
World's #1 Domain Name Registrar
Choice of cPanel or Plesk included
99.9% uptime guaranteed
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

25 GB - 100 GB

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Cheap Hosting Comparison

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.3/5.0

A recurring theme in the Hostwinds product lineup, the company offers multiple configurations to ensure every customer's needs are perfectly met.

Between the SSDs and LiteSpeed web servers, Hostwinds ekes out 500% faster performance compared with typical shared hosting plans. Combined with the bevy of unlimited features (bandwidth, disk space, subdomains, email accounts, databases, and FTP accounts), we love how Hostwinds matches superior services with affordability.

For hosting customers looking to take a small step up without committing to the management requirements and time investment of a virtual private server, Hostwinds offers business hosting plans with an even more souped-up approach to performance.

Virus and malware scans are upped to once per week, instead of monthly for regular shared hosting.

We appreciate that Hostwinds began including a free domain registration with its shared hosting plans, and recognize that the company's 60-day money-back guarantee is twice as long as most others in the space.

Add in the Weebly site builder and instant setup, and the full spectrum of site owners will be well served with Hostwinds.

Unlimited SSD storage, databases, and email
FREE site migration with cPanel and Softaculous
Instant upgrades without downtime
FREE around-the-clock monitoring
Automatic nightly backups available
Get started on Hostwinds now.

Money Back Guarantee

3 days

Disk Space

Unlimited SSD

Domain Name

New or Transfer

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.5/5.0

#10 out of 10 in Cheap Hosting reviews

A major pull factor for GoDaddy's hosting services is certainly the cost. It's hard to beat web hosting for just a few dollars per month, especially when the company includes a free domain name, control panel, impressively fast load times, and unlimited websites with most plans.

The company makes it not only affordable but super easy to get started on a shared hosting plan — for first-timers, bloggers, business owners, and others.

You can choose a GoDaddy hosting plan based on your exact needs, with a range of options for disk space, email, processing power, and other resources.

If your site grows to need scalable and/or dedicated resources, the company's team makes that transition easy — but with most plans coming with unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth, you should have plenty of room.

Virtual and dedicated servers can be provisioned in minutes, with root and cPanel access, and no re-provisioning is required for upgrades.

All GoDaddy plans are equipped with the user control of cPanel (or Plesk, if you prefer). From cPanel, you can easily install and set up popular web applications for blogging and/or ecommerce.

A big name in the budget web hosting space, GoDaddy is consistently improving the performance of its servers, website, and services to offer a great customer experience.

With cPanel control and 1-click installations for standard web apps, you can get your website up and running quickly. The company's 24/7 security monitoring and DDoS protection allow you the comfort in knowing the professionals are making sure your site is online, loading quickly, and hacker-free.

We do wish the web hosting provider would include a free SSL certificate with each shared plan, however. All in all, the web hosting service comes with incredible power and peace of mind, at such a low price point, making GoDaddy quite a value deal.

Manage your domain and hosting under one roof
Choice of cPanel or Plesk control panels
Up to unlimited bandwidth and storage
Microsoft 365 inboxes included FREE for first year
Get 51% OFF by signing up today
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

25 GB - 100 GB

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Dedicated Hosting Comparison

Dedicated Rating

★★★★★ 4.2/5.0

#8 out of 8 in Dedicated Hosting reviews

At the highest end of the hosting spectrum, it can sometimes be challenging to discern which servers reign supreme. Providers naturally put their finest hardware and most luxurious features at the forefront when it comes to attracting customers for high-price dedicated hosting.

Hostwinds, however, somehow manages to eke out ahead of the rest on the strength of the company's incredible range of configurations.

For starters, customers can choose from among 15 Windows or Linux operating systems and equip servers with up to 3TB of hard-disk drive storage per bay (the maximum number of drives is four).

Alternatively, servers can be equipped with up to 1TB of solid-state drives per hard drive bay. RAM scales from 8GB to 128GB, outpacing even the most luxury hosts at seemingly every turn. From there, users can select to use up to 128 IP addresses.

Although inbound bandwidth is free and unlimited, outbound transfers can scale between 10TB to 200TB and more. Depending how many hard drives you opt to deploy, you can configure five different RAID backup options for free.

All told, customers can easily configure servers that cost upward of $1,000 per month — but the performance will undoubtedly be worthwhile.

Hostwinds servers somehow always seem to ring up a few dollars per month cheaper than competitors and come with a superb 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Our only tentative reservation is trusting a smaller, newer company with such a business-critical task at such a large scale. We have absolutely zero evidence to support our fears, just feel the need to mention the company doesn't have the tried-and-true legacy of some other well-known brands.

If the premium hardware and slight savings are worth the tiny gamble, however, we expect large companies will enjoy the payoff.

Highly configurable servers with a choice between Windows or Linux
Fully managed support and nightly backups
SAS Type II and Tier 4 datacenters
99.999% uptime guarantee and DDoS protection
1-hour hardware replacement
Get started on Hostwinds now.

Money Back Guarantee

3 days

Disk Space

120 GB SSD - 12 TB HDD

Domain Name

New or Transfer

Dedicated Rating

★★★★★ 4.6/5.0

GoDaddy dedicated server hosting plans feature managed support options, on-demand resources, and the intuitive user control of cPanel and Plesk.

The company offers plans for Linux and Windows users, with a variety of options for operating systems, RAM, processing power, disk space, and hardware choices. As a bare-metal solution, GoDaddy dedicated hosting gives customers 100% control over their server in a single-tenant environment.

Unlimited bandwidth is always nice, as is the ability to choose between high-capacity HDDs and high-speed SSDs for storage. Site owners can also choose to host their server in datacenters in U.S. or Europe.

With the optional fully managed services, GoDaddy support is not only available around the clock to help you troubleshoot issues with your server but the team is keeping an eye on your server status.

The company offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and premier DDoS protection, anti-hacking services, and other security add-ons. Each server comes with a free year of SSL certificate protection, and GoDaddy fully managed hosting customers benefit from the assurance that the experts will facilitate security patches and bug fixes regularly and on time.

Each dedicated hosting plan comes with Panopta monitoring for your server, application, and network services. Users can easily view uptime and system-level metrics like CPU, RAM, storage, or set up alerts and notifications.

With resource configurations customized to meet your needs, GoDaddy offers dedicated server hosting that you can grow your business with.

The GoDaddy tech support team is available 24/7, guarding your site against malware, hackers, unexpected downtime, and DDoS threats. Meanwhile, the company's support agents are handling any requests that come through the phone lines or chat portal.

With on-demand resources and industry-leading page load speeds, GoDaddy is a dedicated host worthy of your consideration.

Dedicated resources provisioned in minutes
Maximum performance and data protection with RAID-1 disk mirroring
Admin control via root access, cPanel, or Plesk
Choose from semi- or fully-managed services
Get 11% off of your first term
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

500 GB SSD - 1 TB HDD (RAID-1)

Domain Name

New or Transfer

VPS Hosting Comparison

VPS Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

Does any hosting provider have more virtual private server packages than Hostwinds? The company offers 10 configurations — and that's just for managed Linux server partitions.

Hostwinds provides 10 additional plans each for managed Windows VPS and unmanaged varieties of both operating systems.

Virtual servers range from 1 CPU core, 1GB of RAM, and 30GB of storage all the way to 16 cores, 96GB of RAM, and 750GB of storage. Customers can pay roughly $5 per month — or more than $250.

Around-the-clock monitoring of the company's network and devices ensure reliability, but Hostwinds promises a five-minute response to incidents and hardware replacements within an hour. For those wanting even more flexibility and scalability, Hostwinds offers cloud hosting billed by the hour or month.

Create an instance, select your operating system and infrastructure, and enjoy the company's fully managed support. Customers can deploy block or object storage volumes and rely on the company's strict firewall to protect it all.

Add in the company's stellar 99.999% uptime guarantee, high-powered solid-state drives, and the guaranteed 1Gbps port, and customers will be hard-pressed to find a more flexible, performant, and affordable VPS or cloud service.

Managed or unmanaged, in Windows or Linux
Cloud hosting with hourly or monthly billing
Instant upgrades without downtime
FREE around-the-clock monitoring
Automatic nightly backups available
Get started on Hostwinds now.

Money Back Guarantee

3 days

Disk Space

30 GB SSD - 750 GB SSD

Domain Name

New or Transfer

VPS Rating

★★★★★ 4.2/5.0

If you're looking to grow and scale your website, GoDaddy has you covered. Developers and web enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that GoDaddy offers root access, making it easy to install PHP modules, applications, stacks, and various customizations to fine-tune your virtual server for peak performance via the command line or remote desktop.

Plans also include a variety of control panels, led by cPanel and Plesk, so you can easily manage your hosting service with an intuitive graphical interface.

The surprisingly powerful virtual servers can have up to 32GB RAM and 400GB of SSD storage that boasts three times faster page loads. In addition to unlimited bandwidth and KVM virtualization, GoDaddy boasts global datacenters on four continents and tons of modern operating systems.

Choose from platforms like CentOS, Ubuntu, and Windows Server. Meanwhile, the GoDaddy team will monitor your server 24/7 to alert and ward off traffic with malicious intent. Customers will have to patch their operating system as needed, but GoDaddy provides around-the-clock hardware monitoring with failover solutions and snapshots to minimize downtime.

Panopta monitoring is also included with all semi- or fully managed VPS accounts, giving you a window into network and application services via easily configurable alerts and notifications.

The GoDaddy name may not immediately bring VPS hosting to mind. Nonetheless, GoDaddy's virtual server offerings include the security, support, worry-free fully managed services, and value combination that embodies the GoDaddy reputation in the hosting space.

For those who may not quite be ready to make the jump to a VPS plan, the hosting company's Business Hosting packages combine the best of both worlds: the amped-up power of a virtual private server with the ease and simplicity of shared hosting.

Designed to handle traffic with Linux or Windows
Admin access via root access, cPanel, and Plesk
High-speed SSDs and 99.9% uptime guarantee
Unlimited bandwidth and lots of processing power
Fully or semi-managed servers with optional control panel
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

40 GB SSD - 200 GB SSD

Domain Name

New or Transfer

WordPress Hosting Comparison

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ N/A

Hostwinds does not currently offer this type of hosting. We would not recommend choosing this host for this hosting category.

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ 4.4/5.0

#8 out of 8 in WordPress Hosting reviews

As champions of low-cost, high-impact hosting, GoDaddy understandably offers a slew of services geared for all levels of WordPress users.

Starting with the company's basic shared hosting services, which start at $8.99 per month, each GoDaddy customer who signs up for an annual plan receive a free domain name and the power to control their site via the cPanel or Plesk control panels.

From either of these interfaces, you can quickly install and set up the WordPress environment in one click at no additional cost. GoDaddy's improved cPanel is configured with CageFS to protect your content and uses CloudLinux to keep your site's resources truly balanced.

While you're busy adding content, photos, or products to your WordPress site, GoDaddy ensures that your web pages are loading quickly.

More serious WordPress users may prefer to step up to the web host's suite of optimized WordPress hosting plans, which feature an automatically installed SSL certificate, backups, and daily malware scans.

Users can create and launch unlimited websites with most of these packages, and you can choose to automatically upgrade your plan as you need extra resources.

Even higher up, GoDaddy Pro Managed WordPress Hosting starts site owners with a delightful onboarding experience and one-click migration tool to make it easier than ever to get started.

Once you configure your free CDN and built-in caching, you can take advantage of daily backups, automatic core updates, pre-built sites, and a staging environment to ensure your WordPress website is picture perfect.

1-click WordPress installs via cPanel or Plesk
FREE domain from the world's #1 registrar
Experience 24/7 expert support
Award-winning security monitoring
FREE year of Office 365 business email services
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

10 GB SSD - 30 GB SSD

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Site Builder Hosting Comparison

Website Builder Rating

★★★★★ N/A

Hostwinds does not currently offer this type of hosting. We would not recommend choosing this host for this hosting category.

Website Builder Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

GoDaddy uses a custom website builder and easy access to dozens of content management systems to offer a user-friendly site-building solution to customers.

Most of GoDaddy's hosting plans include these options at no additional cost. Plus, if you sign up for an annual hosting plan, this world-leading domain name registrar will include a GoDaddy domain for free.

The company's Websites + Marketing plans combine the GoDaddy website builder with built-in marketing tools to seamlessly integrate your website, social media, and online reviews to attract the most visitors.

Even better, you can get started for free! To unlock the full publishing power, though, plans start around $10 per month.

You can save money by signing up for a shared hosting account, which will point you toward easy-to-use content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. You'll still get a lot of options for customizations and one-click installations but not quite the same drag-and-drop simplicity you'll find on most site builders.

Regardless of which you choose, the GoDaddy team is working around the clock to ensure your site will remain online and performing speedily while you worry about making your website beautiful and professional-looking.

The company's award-winning security team keeps an eye out for downtime, hackers, and other security threats.

The end result is their uptime guarantee of 99.9%, which does the job for most users.

The bottom line is that you can get started with multiple GoDaddy's website builder options for a dollar or less per month and choose from hundreds of theme options to start designing the site of your dreams.

Get started for FREE, no credit-card required
Easy-to-use interface with tons of customization
GoDaddy InSight™ provides tailored action plans
99.9% uptime with an award-winning support team
Built-in marketing tools and expertise
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

Unlimited

Domain Name

New or Transfer

Hostwinds vs. GoDaddy - Our Conclusion

Laura Bernheim Hosting Expert

“We tested Hostwinds & GoDaddy — The winner is Hostwinds!”

This host comparison showed us that choosing between GoDaddy and Hostwinds should be pretty straightforward. Each host caters to a specific niche, so your choice should be clear if you know what you’re looking for out of a web host. For users looking to start a personal blog or an online store for their small business, GoDaddy is just right. But If your site grows significantly, Hostwinds may be a fitter fit to allow scalability. Regardless of your plan, rest assured that both hosts are trusted providers.

Overall Rating

4.8/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit Hostwinds »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit GoDaddy »

About The Author

Laura has spent more than 12 years crafting engaging and award-winning articles that share the passion behind organizations' products, people, and innovations. As a long-time HostingAdvice contributing expert, she combines a reputation for producing quality content with rich technical expertise to show experienced developers how to capitalize on emerging technologies and find better ways to work with established platforms. A professional journalist, Laura has contributed to The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, the Sun Sentinel, and the world's top hosting providers.