There are many alternatives to GoDaddy hosting available in today’s world, but the one I want to focus on is likely one of the best out of all of them. It comes from a program/service called Wealthy Affiliate and I’ll tell you 5 reasons I moved to it in this post.
Obviously one reason is speed, but the other reasons are just as important, both for the service itself, as well as the price. It’s all basically tied together. But before I do that, I want to share:
My history with GoDaddy’s hosting services (before I moved to the alternate option):
When I began making websites in 2005, GoDaddy was the main service I was using for both my domain and hosting needs, and for a certain period of time, it was good to me, so I owe them a lot of gratitude.
- I made successful 1 page websites through GoDaddy that earned me $100,000’s.
- I’d gotten a lot of help when I had technical issues from their support.
- I had run numerous hosting plans on their service for years.
Back when I started using them, there were no alternatives go GoDaddy that could even come close.
GoDaddy was the king of marketing themselves with hot girls and funny commercials to boot, and anyone who wanted to make a website didn’t even know there was anything beyond GoDaddy (other than Name Cheap) for domains and hosting, so naturally, most people, including myself went there.
But over the years, my opinion of GoDaddy services, particularly it’s hosting has diminished and I’ve began a sort of “exodus” away from it to a far better alternative that frankly not only beats GoDaddy, but just about every hosting service out there and this is the hosting I get from a program called Wealthy Affiliate.
In this post, what I want to do is compare the hosting from both of these places and explain why Wealthy Affiliate is just far better, and whether you’re someone who:
- Already has domains and hosting at GoDaddy and is thinking of moving.
- Or you haven’t begun with GoDaddy yet and are seeking a different alternative service.
I can tell you that Wealthy Affiliate will likely meet your needs and exceed them in just about every realm of hosting and beyond.
The 5 reasons I’m moving from GoDaddy’s hosting and over to Wealthy Affiliate (the best alternative in my opinion):
- Cheaper hosting for multiple sites (no incremental price increase!)
- Site support is far greater.
- Added bonuses and tools are included vs upsold to me in GoDaddy.
- Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting is far better quality (faster).
- Wealthy Affiliate makes moving to their services easy.
To fully grasp why Wealthy Affiliate’s services (particularly it’s hosting) are superior to GoDaddy’s, I want to detail every one of these reasons.
One thing that should be noted is that not all of the benefits are exclusively related to hosting, but for anyone that has ever bought a domain or built a site, you’ll know that like a chain, it’s all connected.
Hosting doesn’t mean much without having a domain name, or privacy protection, things like SSL and other features and tools, and these things are necessary to be included on this list, because you do get them all from Wealthy Affiliate, without paying extra. But anyway:
1) Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting is cheaper for multiple hosting accounts over GoDaddy:
GoDaddy’s costs: If I were to get 10 hosting accounts from GoDaddy, my starting price would be close to $100 a month, and it would rise incrementally over a few years.
Normally, the cost per a “Deluxe Hosting Package” is $9.99 per domain and thus times 10, it would be $100.
Wealthy Affiliate’s costs: If I were to get 10 hosting accounts from Wealthy Affiliate, my FLAT price would be $49 a month.
Conclusion: I save at least $50 every month with Wealthy Affiliate and there are NO incremental price increases with Wealthy Affiliate as there are with GoDaddy so that $50 flat means just that: FLAT price.
Now if you’re hosting 1 site, you may think that GoDaddy offers a better deal, but remember:
The hosting price will incrementally increase and with the other reasons I state in this article, you’re far better off hosting that 1 site on Wealthy Affiliate for the additional cost savings.
2) Site support at Wealthy Affiliate is better than at GoDaddy:
How GoDaddy does it: You can actually call up their support and get help, which is great, but very often (in my case) I found that they usually try to upsell you to some better service of theirs when you just need regular help.
In the past, GoDaddy has helped me solve some serious problems with quality and empathetic customer service, but in recent years, I haven’t seen that experience. I have seen a mix of good service and upselling which I don’t like.
For example: One of my websites I still run on GoDaddy was outdated with it’s WordPress version and this made it impossible to make major edits without breaking the site. I needed help from GoDaddy to fix this, but they could only offer me a more expensive package to get this done, so I refused to buy it.
Now this is one negative example and I do have a number of positive experiences with their tech support, but like I said, in recent years, I feel the quality of GoDaddy across the board has gone down.
How Wealthy Affiliate does it: They don’t have phone support but their messaging support is fast, gets to the solution and doesn’t upsell you! This support is included in the $49 package.
3) Added bonuses and tools from Wealthy Affiliate are included vs sometimes upsold on GoDaddy:
GoDaddy: When you get hosting with GoDaddy (and a domain), certain things come equipped with it, such as installing WordPress, but for many other services and tools, you need to pay extra and while many costs at GoDaddy START low, they incrementally rise, which is ultimately why for the sake of my wallet, I had to move to Wealthy Affiliate.
Extra costs such as SSL, better hosting services, miscenalleous tools, ect… could cost you extra for each thing and I don’t want to pay that.
Wealthy Affiliate: For your $49 a month service you get:
- 10 hosting accounts (for up to 10 domains).
- SSL included (for up to 10 domains too). Normally $50 a month with other services.
- Very fast hosting speeds.
- Tools and services included.
- Speed reports for all your pages.
- Privacy protection.
- Virus protection.
- Hacker protection.
- Restoration of website services.
Some of these services I just listed would cost you extra at GoDaddy to get. At Wealthy Affiliate, you get all of that as part of your $49 plan.
4) Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting itself is generally better/faster than GoDaddy:
For this comparison, I took 2 websites I still host at GoDaddy (which aren’t very active) and 2 I host at Wealthy Affiliate (also not very active).
The size of these 4 sites is around the same. They have numerous blog posts, images, and plugins installed (all WordPress sites) so it’s a level playing ground more or less.
The speed test (how good is the hosting?):
I ran these 4 sites through Google Insights which tells me the page speeds of each website, and the scores are rated on a 1-100 scale, with 100 being the best and the categories separated into mobile/desktop.
Obviously the faster my site’s speeds, the better it will load for users, the better it will rank on search engines and the better it will be for my business. And so here is what my experiment showed:
GoDaddy: I ran 2 websites through Google Insights and here is what I got:
- Website 1: 73 mobile. 96 desktop (Pretty good).
- Website 2: 73 mobile. 84 desktop (Not bad).
Proof (website 1):
Proof (website 2):
Note: Mobile speeds are generally slower than desktop regardless of which hosting service you use.
Now this brings me to Wealthy Affiliate and the 2 sites I host there:
Note: Wealthy Affiliate has a feature of running multiple pages through Google Insights simultaneously, so you actually get to see reports without having to test each and every single page. I also included the domain names of each site so you can test it for yourself.
Website 1:
All of the scores are great except one (72).
Website 2:
All of the scores are perfect.
While hosting speeds do bounce around from time to time on any service you use, I generally find the one at Wealthy Affiliate to be pretty reliable and quick for my needs and I host at least 10 sites on this service.
5) Wealthy Affiliate makes moving to their services easy.
Since I began my “exodus” from GoDaddy, I’ve moved about 50% of my domains and hosting from that service over to Wealthy Affiliate and the process has become much more expedited and easy. I used to be reluctant to do it because the process was pain staking and long, but today it’s not really that bad.
I still keep a number of websites and hosting accounts at GoDaddy, but not for long as the prices for both keep rising, not to mention the extra prices I pay for privacy protection for certain domains.
This is the kind of stuff I can save tons of money on at Wealthy Affiliate and why I am continually moving more and more sites and hosting accounts out of GoDaddy and into Wealthy Affiliate.
I estimate I could have saved $100’s if not over $1,000 by now if I had done it sooner.
Just a few final thoughts on GoDaddy in general:
GoDaddy in my opinion is still a pretty decent service overall but the times are very different today than when I began using them:
- You have more competitors in the domain and hosting world.
- I still think GoDaddy’s quality of service went down a bit since I started using them.
- I have no doubt I save more money through Wealthy Affiliate on services I’d need to buy and/or pay extra for at GoDaddy.
More benefits of Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting services:
Note: There is a Premium Plus upgrade though for $99 a month which includes even more, and also has many more benefits added on top of the $49/month hosting package:
Added training to build online businesses:
One thing I didn’t mention about Wealthy Affiliate is that it is not just a hosting and domain service provider, but also a training manual for things such as:
- Affiliate marketing.
- Webinar training on online businesses.
- Coaching and help on starting online businesses.
- Pay per click help and advertising.
- Blogging and SEO.
- Email marketing.
- Pinterest training and more.
And yes, this training comes as part of your $49 a month membership.
And the $99 expands on that by a lot too but this article’s focus is really on the hosting and domain benefits you get from Wealthy Affiliate, not it’s training, which is another topic you can find out more about here:
- Wealthy Affiliate, the full review.
- Wealthy Affiliate’s Premium Plus membership review ($99 a month).
As you can see from the screenshot to the right, the hosting at Wealthy Affiliate, for a flat fee offers a ton and if you plan to run multiple websites and want to learn online business, this place offers much more for it’s cost in my opinion over GoDaddy, which is why it is the best alternative I recommend to it.