Network Solutions vs. GoDaddy (2024)

By: Ryan Frankel

Editor: Lillian Castro

2/4/2024

Ryan Frankel Hosting Expert

“We tested GoDaddy & Network Solutions — The winner is GoDaddy!”

Network Solutions is roughly 20 years older than GoDaddy and is one of the original web hosting providers. Acquired by Web.com in 2011, Network Solutions continues to provide affordable shared hosting with stellar uptime to its customers. GoDaddy may be 20 years newer than Network Solutions, but it brings an impressive suite of feature-rich hosting plans to the table for an affordable price. Each web host has strengths, but only one can cross the finish line first. Check out our comparison below to see which host wins the golden cup.

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

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

Visit GoDaddy »

Overall Rating

3.0/5.0 ★★★★★

Starter Plan: $3.79/month »
Essential Plan: $9.96/month »
Premium Plan: $34.95/month »

Visit Network Solutions »

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Overall Hosting Comparison

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)

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 3.0/5.0

As perhaps the longest-surviving brand in the website hosting industry, Network Solutions certainly has staying power. However, some odd business practices have left the brand behind many others.

Tracing its roots all the way back to 1979, Network Solutions operated the first domain name system (DNS) registry as a subcontractor for the U.S. government in 1991. The company continued building out domain registration tools as the World Wide Web became increasingly accessible, and the brand was the sole registrar for .com, .net, and .org domain names, as well as the maintainer of the WHOIS database.

Over the years, price gouging and domain censoring soured the industry's relationship with Network Solutions, which has been rebuilding ever since. Now owned by Web.com, the company now offers modern, cloud-based hosting plans that specialize in helping small businesses create well-rounded online presences.

From a do-it-yourself website builder and professional design services to specialized WordPress and ecommerce offerings, Network Solutions aims to serve a wide range of entrepreneurs. The company offers tons of options and guidance for online marketing and email messaging, but site owners can find many similar services for less money.

Dozens of 1-click installations for popular apps
FREE domain name from a longtime registrar
Extensive support for programming languages
Virtually unlimited email accounts
Ample disk space and unlimited data transfers
Get started on Network Solutions.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

15 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Cheap Hosting Comparison

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)

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 3.0/5.0

Network Solutions is a large, popular registrar with solid — if not exciting — hosting packages. The company's cheapest shared hosting plan is priced above the bargain-basement hosting providers and more in line with top-tier affordable hosts.

Although there are ample storage and unlimited bandwidth to be had, we're not sure customers will find the best deals through Network Solutions hosting packages — particularly beyond the entry-level plan.

The brand's second and third-level packages are prices among high-end VPS providers, with the Premium Plan topping $20 per month.

Although Network Solutions promises an above-average 99.99% uptime, we'd like to see other premium features like high-performance solid-state drives, automatic backups, and DDoS protection. Network Solutions offers support for the most widely-adopted programming languages, including PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Ruby on Rails, and many others.

The hosting company provides dozens of one-click installations for popular applications, which is always helpful, but keep in mind the company's competitors typically measure their install scripts by the hundreds.

With a 99.99% uptime and 24/7 phone or email support, Network Solutions' shared plan is very reliable. All things considered, Network Solutions offers a decent hosting package; however, the web hosting company's feature list is pretty short compared to other hosts.

Huge open-source library and language support
FREE domain registration from a longtime registrar
Above-average 99.99% uptime guarantee
24/7 technical support via phone, chat, and email
Pay only $3.79 for month-to-month plans
Get started on Network Solutions.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

15 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Dedicated Hosting Comparison

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

Dedicated Rating

★★★★★ N/A

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

VPS Hosting Comparison

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

VPS Rating

★★★★★ 3.8/5.0

Aimed at tech-savvy users, Network Solutions offers reliable (yet minimal) semi-managed VPS services. Although costing a little more for equivalent hardware on competing plans, each VPS solution is backed by the Network Solutions name, excellent customer support, and great uptime.

Each plan is built on a Linux distribution and includes ample disk space and email accounts. Network Solutions offers a free domain name registration with most plans, harkening back to the company's days as the only domain registrar.

Although we found the entry-level VPS plan to be a little lacking, Network Solutions includes helpful features like SiteLock security and a free Network Solutions SSL certificate at the higher tiers.

Network Solutions VPS hosting is an upgrade from standard shared web hosting and allows you to install applications and gain direct root access to the underlying operating system.

If you want all of the benefits of a dedicated web hosting service, without the associated hardware or maintenance costs, and require a veteran name in the industry, consider giving Network Solutions VPS a chance.

Scalable, reliable cloud-based environments
FREE malware scanning and removal via SiteLock
Extensive library of developer tools and support
Add-ons available for SSL certificates and backups
Reliable infrastructure with 24/7 support
Get started on Network Solutions.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

15 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

WordPress Hosting Comparison

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)

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ 3.8/5.0

Network Solutions has a good reputation and solid support, though the company's feature list is quite short and outdated. The price tag may seem a little daunting at first glance but reflects the rare month-to-month plans Network Solutions offers by default.

You can find much lower rates by committing to at least one year of hosting for your WordPress hosting. Offering 50GB of disk space should satisfy most needs of the average WordPress blog. However, in a sea of hosts with so-called unlimited offerings, Network Solutions seems to be lacking.

A free domain from one of the most prevalent registrars is included with most service offerings — but not all. Network Solutions boasts and above-average 99.99% uptime reliability, but nothing else about this host screams WordPress-specific perks.

Installation, themes, and plugins are all up to you, as is security and performance optimization. We love to see hardware, infrastructure, and included software be more WordPress-centric in our specialized web hosts.

In a nutshell, Network Solutions has solid technical support options and decent beginner tools in its WordPress plan. The company's ease of use could certainly be improved, perhaps with the addition of more current features, in order to help offset the higher cost.

1,000s of free themes and plugins for SEO-friendly sites
FREE SSL certificate and domain registration available
FREE on-demand cloud backups
Pay $7.99 for month-to-month plans
Price reductions available for longer contract terms
Get started on Network Solutions.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

50 GB - 200 GB

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Site Builder Hosting Comparison

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

Website Builder Rating

★★★★★ 3.8/5.0

Aimed at individuals or small businesses new to the wacky world of web design, the Network Solutions website builder and hosting package should get you online reasonably quickly and have your online presence looking professional in no time.

Similar to many other drag-and-drop website builders, there isn’t too much originality to Network Solutions' website building tool. However, the company does focus on creating a professional site at a very reasonable and affordable rate.

Network Solutions is a big name in the domain registrar business, and as such, it includes a one-year domain registration with signup. Aspiring site owners can also choose premium packages to unlock tools for online marketing and ecommerce stores to further grow their brand.

For those in need of a nice, professional site who want to get online quickly, Network Solutions should have what you need.

Simple, wizard-driven site builder
Templates tailored for personal use or small business
Customize with your own logos and colors
FREE domain and email from a longtime registrar
Upgraded plans for online marketing and ecommerce
Get started on Network Solutions.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

GoDaddy vs. Network Solutions - Our Conclusion

Ryan Frankel Hosting Expert

“We tested GoDaddy & Network Solutions — The winner is GoDaddy!”

The race is over, but you’re just getting started. The best hosting provider for your website will depend on your goals and objectives. GoDaddy offers beginner-friendly web hosting solutions that are ideal for small businesses. But Network Solutions VPS plans are a fantastic choice for tech-savvy website owners needing a little more space than a shared plan can offer. Now go forth with confidence as you select a hosting provider.

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit GoDaddy »

Overall Rating

3.0/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit Network Solutions »

About The Author

Ryan Frankel has been a professional in the tech industry for more than 20 years and has been developing websites for more than 25. With a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida, he has a fundamental understanding of hardware systems and the software that runs them. Ryan now sits as the CTO of Digital Brands Inc. and manages all of the server infrastructure of their websites, as well as their development team. In addition, Ryan has a passion for guitars, good coffee, and puppies.