Review of: Webhosting Service GoDaddy.com
GoDaddy.com is the most-used service overall to find out the availability of your chosen website name and to secure registration of that domain name. In doing the research to initiate a website for my daughter’s wedding photography business, I found numerous other site-hosting services that actually recommended GoDaddy as go-to place for obtaining your domain registeration.
Getting your domain name: it’s a simple process, and costs about $10 if you just get your (single) domain name registed there, and then take your business across the cyberstreet to have your website hosted elsewhere. Maintaining the registration is no more complex than renewing a magazine subscription; they will bill you when it’s time to renew. However, If you stay with GoDaddy for your website, they give you the domain registration free the first time.
I decided, why not keep everything in one place? This particular website we wanted to create was mostly to be used as a place to refer people who ask her for a business card and would like to see their work, so we are talking about keeping it very simple–no need for SEO, etc. Perhaps there will come a time when she wants to branch out and do this full-time, but for now she’s happy with the amount of business she gets by word of mouth, so it’s just there for show, not really for marketing.
What I found out: putting the site together, segment by segment and page by page, is not particularly intuitive at GoDaddy for the technically handicapped such as myself; however, once you’ve learned its idiosyncrasies by trial and error, you get to know how its processes work–so in spite of my innate ineptitude, I was still able to poke around and whip together a decent-looking site:
We went with a 5-page site (you can have as many pages as you like in the Photo Gallery and it still only counts as one page.) Because this site is specifically for a photography business, it needed a good-sized capacity for photos, and also an expedited means of loading them, so we purchased their Photo Album option, adding about $20 to our annual costs.
What I paid: We just paid a little over $100 for the coming year’s service fees, including the photo-upload feature; and about an additional $20 to renew the registration for the domain names (we have 2) for the coming year.
Extra bonus: GoDaddy has excellent telephone service–call them up, and you’ve got somebody on the line who will troubleshoot whatever you’re having a problem with and walk you through the solution, no matter how long it takes. And –this is important–they don’t laugh at how lame you are. The only downside is that, because their reps give each customer enough time to really resolve an issue, sometimes it can be a pretty long wait on hold. (Small price to pay–file your nails or pluck your eyebrows while waiting.)
Score: Out of 5, only because of the long wait time for their help desk, I would give GoDaddy a 4.5. The site has been very stable, I’ve never had it be in any other than perfectly-running state whenever I’ve checked. Imagine what you could do there if you were tech-savvy. Maybe even something like Factoidz!
