Liquid Web vs. GoDaddy (2024)

By: Alexandra Anderson

Editor: Lillian Castro

2/4/2024

Alexandra Anderson Hosting Expert

“We tested Liquid Web & GoDaddy — The winner is Liquid Web!”

We’re comparing some high-powered providers today: Liquid Web and GoDaddy. Depending on your needs, you may be better suited to a provider with lightning-fast dedicated servers or perhaps an affordable shared plan with a free website builder. Each of these hosts excels in its own arena: Liquid Web for its VPS and dedicated hosting and GoDaddy for its shared and WordPress plans. Before you decide which package you need, check out our comparison to review the pros and cons of each host.

Overall Rating

4.8/5.0 ★★★★★

Essential Plan: $16.00/month »
Advanced Plan: $26.00/month »
Professional Plan: $37.00/month »

Visit Liquid Web »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

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

Visit GoDaddy »

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Overall Hosting Comparison

Best Overall Rating

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

We've gotten to know a few key members of the Liquid Web team personally, and let us tell you: The passion they put into talking about their products hints that this is a company worth checking out.

Liquid Web boasts supreme uptime, always-there-for-you support, and a constant commitment to building out more functionality for the customer. Liquid Web has a redundantly built, multi-tiered network with four datacenters in the United States, plus one more in Amsterdam.

The company takes advantage of all the latest technologies on the market and owns all of its hardware, giving Liquid Web more control over the options it can offer clients.

Liquid Web has three main tracks for managed hosting, not including managed WordPress and WooCommerce solutions. You pay a small monthly premium for managed hosting, but the peace of mind you get in exchange is priceless.

With Liquid Web taking over the infrastructure management, you're free to focus on what really matters: your content and/or your customers. Customers can easily install popular blogging software and eCommerce tools through the ever-popular and easy-to-use cPanel.

Users get unlimited email accounts, secure access with SSH, and really fast page loads thanks to SSD storage. Should disaster strike or questions come up, you are never alone.

Within minutes, you can be on the line with a highly trained technician who will be well-equipped to walk you through any hosting dilemma. Liquid Web's best-effort support policy means the company will try to help any way possible, even if it requires work outside of traditional services.

The bottom line: If you're ready for the real deal in web hosting — high-powered hardware and a team you can count on — you should consider Liquid Web. Based on our experience, it's really no surprise customers consistently vouch for Liquid Web managed hosting.

Heroic Support® and fully managed hosting
Linux or Windows options with cPanel, InterWorx, or Plesk
Industry leader in customer loyalty and NPS score
Servers proven faster than AWS and Rackspace
100% uptime guarantee plus built-in backups
Get started on Liquid Web now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

40 GB SSD - 200 GB 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

★★★★★ N/A

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

Cheap Rating

★★★★★ 4.5/5.0

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

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0

#3 out of 8 in Dedicated Hosting reviews

Liquid Web's strong suit is managed dedicated server hosting. The company owns and operates five state-of-the-art datacenters in the US and Europe works tirelessly to build and maintain custom solutions for added performance and security.

Liquid Web offers single- and dual-processor servers with fully, core-, or self-managed plans. Each machine comes with at least 250 GB of high-performance solid-state drive storage and a 1TB SATA drive for backup.

The company's allocated RAM and bandwidth outpace competitors and give customers luxurious environments primed for speed. Site owners can further upgrade RAM and disk size, as well as capitalize on add-ons for a cPanel Premier 100 control panel, advanced DDoS protection, and enhanced security.

Featuring top-of-the-line Cisco equipment, the Liquid Web n+1 network is redundantly built to allow routing devices to quickly self-heal. They're designed to bounce back and correct system failures without interrupting the customer's connection.

With the integration of premier providers, Level 3, Verizon, Comcast, Cogent, and Equinix, the Liquid Web network is optimized for rapid and fault-resistant performance.

If you want feature-rich dedicated resources and relentlessly reliable technical support, Liquid Web should be on your shortlist.

The company is known for strong managed service offerings, but the drawback to managed hosting is usually the cost, but Liquid Web's monthly rate for managed services is quoted as low as $20, which is a steal. Plus, a 24/7 support team and in-house solutions keep the cloud-level flexibility and performance up and the cost down.

Linux or Windows with choice of 3 control panels
100% network and power uptime guarantees
Custom configurations and instant provisioning
Auto-migrations, backups, and real-time monitoring
Block/object storage and load balancer add-ons
Get started on Liquid Web now.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

480 GB SSD - 960 GB SSD (+ 2 TB SATA)

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

★★★★★ 4.5/5.0

#9 out of 9 in VPS Hosting reviews

It's no secret by now that Liquid Web is known for best-in-class technology and reliability that exceeds expectations. The company's cloud VPS environments embody that reputation to its fullest — including managed WordPress and WooCommerce products.

Liquid Web offers a high-powered cloud VPS solution backed by the company's popular SLAs promising high uptime rates and highly reliable help from the Heroic Support® experts.

With high-powered SSDs and, of course, the Heroic Support® team, the VPS platform shines among the managed services offered at Liquid Web.

You'll pay a bit of a premium for managed hosting, but there's a reason customers rave about Liquid Web's hands-free management, incredible SLAs, and excellent uptime rates.

RAID-protected SSD storage, which decreases latency and keeps your page loads fast and secure, comes standard for Liquid Web VPS users. The company offers a range of management plans, as well as the choice of popular control panels and API access, so you get the perfect level of infrastructural management support for you and your site.

The Liquid Web VPS infrastructure was engineered with customer priorities in mind. These solutions are ideal for users who want cloud-like flexibility. Customers can instantly provision and deploy their virtual server, then easily upgrade, downgrade, clone, or resize.

If you want easy scaling, screaming-fast speed, custom functionalities, and unparalleled support, look no further than Liquid Web for your VPS. The company owns all the hardware and boasts large development team, so the technological possibilities are pretty much limitless.

High-speed hosting that's faster than AWS, Rackspace, and Digital Ocean
FREE backups, CDN, and DDoS protection
Up to 16 processors with all-SSD storage
Choice between cPanel, Plesk, or InterWorx
Real-time monitoring and 100% uptime guarantee
Get started on Liquid Web now.

Money Back Guarantee

N/A

Disk Space

40 GB SSD - 200 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

★★★★★ 4.6/5.0

Among the latest additions to the company's product portfolio, Liquid Web's managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting solutions is delivered by the WordPress specialists at Nexcess.

The fully managed support rids site owners of the responsibility of maintaining core installs and updates, as well as monitoring the server infrastructure. You run your WordPress blog or business, Liquid Web and Nexcess will run the rest.

Unlike other premium WordPress hosts like WP Engine or Flywheel, Liquid Web does not build packages around bandwidth usage or monthly visitors. Each package is allocated ample SSD storage and bandwidth to more than power the number of sites allowed.

There are no upcharges for increases in traffic, and site owners can quickly add resources with just a call. Instead of WP MultiSite, Liquid Web partnered with iThemes to provide site owners with iThemes Sync Pro.

Site administrators can oversee multiple sites from one intuitive dashboard, gaining insights from uptime and downtime, Google Analytics, and SEO performance. WordPress is a favorite recommendation of ours for both personal and professional websites.

When you combine the flexibility and intuitiveness of WordPress with the best-in-class infrastructure and support of Liquid Web and Nexcess, you've got a match made in hosting heaven. The company's managed WordPress and WooCommerce hosting plans are going to give you all the performance and customization you want without the frustration.

If you're thinking of building a WordPress site, you should consider letting Liquid Web and Nexcess help you do it.

Speedy WP-optimized hosting delivered by Nexcess
FREE Object Cache Pro, image compression, and CDN
Unlimited page views and no overage charges
Automatic plugin updates and performance monitoring
FREE premium plugins and advanced PHP support
Get started on Liquid Web now.

Money Back Guarantee

30 days

Disk Space

15 GB - 800 GB

Domain Name

New or Transfer

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

Liquid Web 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

Liquid Web vs. GoDaddy - Our Conclusion

Alexandra Anderson Hosting Expert

“We tested Liquid Web & GoDaddy — The winner is Liquid Web!”

GoDaddy and Liquid Web appeal to different customers. Not everyone will need the resources and speed supplied by Liquid Web’s dedicated and VPS servers. Unless you’re looking to power a large, high-traffic site, you can save on your monthly hosting bill by going with an affordable shared hosting plan with GoDaddy. We’ve chosen a winner for this comparison, but we can see the benefits of either option. Be sure to look closely at your website’s requirements and budget when deciding where to spend your money.

Overall Rating

4.8/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit Liquid Web »

Overall Rating

4.7/5.0 ★★★★★

Visit GoDaddy »

About The Author

Alexandra Anderson’s interest in website administration was sparked in her teens, priming her for a fast-paced career in managing, building, and contributing to online brands, including HostingAdvice, Forbes, and the blogs of prominent hosting providers. She brings firsthand experience reviewing web hosts, perfecting website design, optimizing content, and walking site owners through the steps that add up to a successful online presence. With a master's degree in information technology from Virginia Tech, she combines her extensive writing experience and technical understanding to unpack some of the most complex topics that daunt novice website owners, as well as the subjects that excite veteran technologists within the HostingAdvice readership.