InMotion vs. GoDaddy (2022)

Written by: PJ Fancher

Edited by: Lillian Guevara-Castro

Updated: September 3, 2020

PJ Fancher Hosting Expert

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

Consistently among the most reputable and well-known hosting providers in the game, InMotion and GoDaddy both provide great services to a massive number of customers. GoDaddy is great for budget-minded shared, domain, and email hosting customers, while InMotion caters to consumers looking for reliability, performance, and support. GoDaddy’s ultra-affordable hosting plans don’t scrimp on features, but InMotion backs even their base-level shared hosting package with top-notch Dell servers and SSD drives. Keep scrolling to evaluate how these two hosts might meet your needs.

Overall Rating

4.9/5.0 ★★★★★

"Launch" Plan: $3.99/month »
"Power" Plan: $5.99/month »
"Pro" Plan: $13.99/month »

Visit InMotion »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

"Economy" Plan: $2.99/month »
"Deluxe" Plan: $7.99/month »
"Ultimate" Plan: $11.99/month »

Visit GoDaddy »

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Overall Hosting Comparison

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 4.9/5.0

Offering a wider range of services than most — including shared, dedicated, VPS, and even WordPress-specific plans — InMotion Hosting features a great combination of industry-leading hardware, always-there support, and mass scalability for all hosting needs. InMotion Hosting has nice SSD drives on its shared plans, which give an added speed boost to your site. The company's customer service and reputation are excellent in the shared space, though InMotion tends to be a bit higher priced than some competitors. If a little extra speed is worth a few dollars more a month, then InMotion is a good choice for you. In testing InMotion servers and account backends ourselves, there are a few things InMotion does that we especially appreciate. First and foremost, we like to see free and automated backups included with each plan, as data security is vitally important. The company also offers zero-downtime site transfers, which makes switching to InMotion or between its hosting plans a breeze. Finally, multiple datacenters and the ability to choose which will house your site appeals to speed freaks like us. Regardless of your hosting needs, InMotion seems to have your bases covered. If you value great hardware and support, all at a reasonable price, we highly recommend InMotion as your next host.

FREE SSD drives included with all hosting plans
Zero-downtime website transfers and migrations
FREE data backups, SSL certificate, and DDoS protection
Choice of East Coast or West Coast datacenter
Multi-language support, including PHP, Ruby, and Perl
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

90 days

Disk Space

unlimited

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

100 GB - unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Cheap Hosting Comparison

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.5/5.0

#9 out of 10 in Cheap Hosting reviews

InMotion Hosting offers an excellent business-class shared hosting plan. While carrying a higher price tag than some other cheap hosts, it has a very nice list of features to help justify the extra cost. For the IT crowd in the audience, you’ll appreciate SSH access, as well as support for PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, WP-CLI, and other popular languages. You’ll also appreciate the 20-times faster speed, which comes from all-SSD storage and your choice of datacenter locations. You needn’t worry about data security, as InMotion plans include automatic data backups. For the rest of us, we can appreciate the convenience of the free website transfers and 24/7 US-based support. A free domain registration and WordPress website builder with eCommerce support are also appealing. The overall package and business-class hardware make InMotion’s shared hosting a great choice for businesses or those looking for a little higher-end hardware. And, as one of the few remaining independently owned hosting providers left on the market, InMotion has taken every effort to remain cost-competitive.

FREE BoldGrid site builder and templates
FREE website, domain, and cPanel migrations
SSD storage makes your site load up to 20x faster
Security suite includes SSL and hack protection
Unlimited bandwidth and email accounts
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

90 days

Disk Space

100 GB SSD - unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.6/5.0

#6 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.

Get a free domain from world's #1 registrar
Industry-leading page load times for your site
Unlimited bandwidth and up to unlimited storage
Choose between cPanel or Plesk control panels
Award-winning support on hand 24/7
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

100 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Dedicated Hosting Comparison

Dedicated Rating

★★★★★ 4.5/5.0

#9 out of 10 in Dedicated Hosting reviews

InMotion Hosting offers amazingly fast and reliable dedicated hosting on market-leading hardware — making it an easy choice for anyone seeking a premium dedicated server host. From free SSDs to a fanatical support team, InMotion has all the bases covered for both small-scale and large-scale operations. Unlike some hosts, InMotion gives SSH and root access to its servers. Each plan is fully managed and comes with between two and four hours of dedicated time with a system administrator, which is an excellent help in getting your site configured to meet your needs. Each server is also set up with free cPanel and WHM for easy management. Plenty of CPU power, RAM, and storage come with each plan, as well as lots of dedicated IP addresses. Perhaps our favorite feature of InMotion is the company's zero-downtime, rebootless kernel updates, which are partially the reason for InMotion's superb 99.999% uptime. InMotion has a 30-day money-back guarantee on their dedicated plans, which is fairly rare and just another reason you can’t go wrong selecting the company as your dedicated host.

FREE server management and security updates
1-on-1 time with a server administrator
99.999% uptime via Smart Routing™ technology
Tier 1 network with redundant bandwidth
Up to 44% OFF for HostingAdvice readers
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

1 TB SSD - 2 TB NVMe

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 45% off of your first term
Get started on GoDaddy now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

400 GB SSD - 8 TB HDD

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

VPS Hosting Comparison

VPS Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

#4 out of 10 in VPS Hosting reviews

Boasting market-leading VPS hardware, slick management software, and free SSD drives and backups, InMotion Hosting competes to win when it comes to managed VPS hosting packages. The host initiates its VPS customer relationship with free website migrations and up to two hours of launch assistance from an experienced SysAdmin. Customers then enjoy highly available servers, seamless scalability options, and premium support — at a fair price. Enjoy SSD storage arranged in a RAID-6 array, DDoS attack prevention powered by Corero, and routine server snapshots and rollback options. Performance and security are clearly priorities for this hosting company. When it comes to bandwidth, disk space, and other usage allowances, we found these VPS packages to be competitive with other industry leaders. All plans run on the CentOS Linux operating system and feature a license for cPanel and WHM, making it super easy to resell some unused server resources, too. Ultimately, InMotion Hosting's reputation for uptime is second-to-none. With a solid track record as a large-scale host, the company's sweet spot is found in its virtual, cloud, and dedicated server offerings. Should you get stuck, the support team is available 24/7. Based on our experience, we'd highly recommend InMotion to those seeking flexible/easily configurable and cost-competitive virtual private servers backed by equally available support.

HostingAdvice readers get 73% off the first term
FREE site migrations and 2 hours of Launch Assist
2 - 3 dedicated IP address options
FREE cPanel/WHM licenses included
Highly available servers with real-time redundancy
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

90 days

Disk Space

45 GB SSD - 300 GB SSD

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

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 - 400 GB SSD

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

WordPress Hosting Comparison

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ 4.9/5.0

#4 out of 9 in WordPress Hosting reviews

InMotion Hosting, long known for affordable and high-performance shared hosting options, entered the WordPress space with a solid option built upon the company's reputation for great support and reliability. Costing a small premium over other budget-minded options, InMotion does include some nice features to help justify that cost difference. Build on an all-SSD infrastructure, the company's speeds are very good. We would have loved to see options like integrated staging included in order to help take full advantage of the nice, modern hardware, but ample server caching tools is still a good perk. The choice of datacenters (East or West) is nice, as well, as it allows you to target your local audience with better load times. InMotion offers three different levels to its WordPress hosting offerings, which allows you to tailor the hosting to your needs or budget. For those needing eCommerce support, the company's middle or top offerings have you covered, while all three include InMotion's drag-and-drop BoldGrid page editor. Each hosting package InMotion offers comes with a free domain, unlimited disk space, unlimited emails, and free data backups for data security. If you need it, each plan also has support for PHP, Ruby, Perl, and Python, and includes SSH access. InMotion Hosting has made a name for itself on support and reliability. While not the cheapest of the budget WordPress hosts out there, the packages offered are solid in performance and feature sets.

Up to 12x faster WordPress hosting
FREE SSL certificate and SSD storage
Automatic WordPress plugin, theme, and core updates
Features a FREE drag-and-drop WP page editor
Premium themes and plugin subscriptions
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

90 days

Disk Space

50 GB SSD - 200 GB SSD

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

WordPress Rating

★★★★★ 4.4/5.0

#9 out of 9 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 $2.99 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

100 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

Site Builder Hosting Comparison

Website Builder Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

If you're aiming to build a dynamic, user-oriented website — an active blog, a photo gallery, an eCommerce store — check out InMotion Hosting. The InMotion team is extremely knowledgeable in the hosting industry, and they're attuned to the ever-evolving needs of the end-user — from the ultra-novice to the über-experienced. Evidence of the team's attention to user needs can be found in BoldGrid: the in-house-built website builder platform that was received so well by the market that InMotion decided to spin the web builder off into its own company. BoldGrid functions on top of WordPress, bringing intuitiveness and ease of use to a content management environment notorious for bringing beginners frustration. With hundreds of templates and a nice WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, getting started with a new site is a fairly quick and easy process. You can play around with the plethora of site templates, preview the site that could soon be yours, and get a feel for which look most closely matches your intended design or brand. Ready to start selling online? Stress-free integration with PayPal, Authorize.net, and 2Checkout makes starting that online store a simple endeavor. BoldGrid comes free on all of InMotion's shared hosting packages, which come with all the essential hosting goodies and some of the best support money can buy. Each plan offers powerful hardware, a free domain name, and free data backups — that last one being an extremely valuable feature. InMotion does have lengthy signup periods for their best deals, but they offer a 90-day money-back guarantee to help you feel confident that they are the right host for you.

FREE WYSIWYG builder: BoldGrid sits atop WordPress
FREE domain, with tons of options to customize and scale
500+ easy-to-edit blog, gallery, and eCommerce themes
Choice of WordPress, Joomla, or PrestaShop pre-installed
FREE SSL certificate
Get started on InMotion now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

unlimited

Domain Name

new or transfer

Website Builder Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

#4 out of 10 in Website Builder Hosting reviews

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

100 GB - Unlimited

Domain Name

FREE (1 year)

InMotion vs. GoDaddy - Our Conclusion

PJ Fancher Hosting Expert

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

There you have it. You saw our ratings — do you agree? As with so many host comparisons, you should base your decision on the features that most closely match your needs. If you want a big-brand host that perhaps sacrifices some performance and support to give you feature-rich hosting for a price that can’t be beat, go with GoDaddy. InMotion customers might be a bit more nuanced in their hosting requirements and more likely to value computing power over the number of sites or email accounts they can have.

Overall Rating

4.9/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit InMotion »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit GoDaddy »

About The Author

PJ Fancher is a professional web developer with more than 20 years of experience. His background began with writing small web applications using Perl, PHP, and MySQL in 1998. He has well-rounded experience with all aspects of web development, from server and database configuration to scripting, styling, design, and SEO. Today he brings his passion for web development to the team at Digital Brands Inc., helping to develop unique, high-quality, highly-optimized websites. He is ready to share his extensive knowledge and experience with the world of web hosting.