Best GoDaddy Alternatives

This shared hosting company is nearly as old as GoDaddy, and has built its reputation on great customer support, excellent service and great prices. They host over 2 million websites worldwide and have a robust help system that includes tutorials, guides and much more. 

For people who are looking for a WordPress website, Bluehost is a great option, because, you will be pleased to know, they are officially recommended by them. Bluehost is owned by Endurance International Group, a hosting conglomerate that also owns over 80 companies that include HostGator, Hostnine and iPage among others.

Customer Support

Bluehost is one of the few companies that takes pride in providing 24/7 telephone support that is based in the United States. Compare this to GoDaddy’s customer support services and you’ll find that most of their support services are based overseas where their executives have little or no idea about the products and services. 

Bluehost’s chat and ticketing support system is excellent and apart from that, they have an excellent knowledge base that covers many vital topics, has a clean interface and is easy to navigate. The section is comprehensive, and the pre-answered queries are of great help. If you cannot find your answers here, the company also has a that offers a host of tutorials on WordPress and a host of other topics.

Their combined support effort is reason enough to consider them as a Godaddy alternative. And, of course, they have other services on offer. 

Cloudsites

Uptime is something that every potential customer looks for in a provider. The higher the uptime, the more the chance of them being noticed. If the downtime is noticeable, there is a high chance of loss in revenue and the customer jumping ship to a better, more reliable platform. 

To counter this, Bluehost has Cloudsites, that has been designed from the ground up for high availability and redundancy. Cloudsites offers many great features such as scalability, which means that the user can add memory and CPU power on the fly without the need to reboot, great performance thanks to the built-in content delivery network, automatic failover and the fact that it is fully managed is a bonus.

CloudFlare

This is a content delivery network (CDN) that acts as a proxy between Bluehost servers and the user. It caches the static content for the website, which, in turn, lowers the number of requests to the site. CloudFlare is very useful in terms of page load improvements, stopping malicious threats, alerting visitors that they may have an infected computer, low CPU usage and much more.

Pricing Plans

Bluehost offers 4 plans for their shared hosting — Basic, Plus, Choice Plus and Pro. These are some main features of these plans, in no particular order:

Siteground was founded in 2004 and is based out of Bulgaria. This independent company provides its services worldwide. The company has more than 1,900,000 domains and more than 400 employees and claims that it processes thousands of chat, ticket and phone call requests per day. Siteground offers to host your websites on the fastest web servers with extremely fast load times and on the best hardware. 

SiteGround offers proprietary software to boost your server performance and give you more functionality. They may not be the cheapest, but they provide their customers with top security and one of the best customer support services in the hosting industry. They also provide highly available networks which are supported by redundant electrical systems that prevent electrical outages by using the latest technology and are provided high-end physical security, 24×7. 

Customer Support

Among shared hosts, as we stated earlier, SiteGround offers one of the best customer support. They claim that they always overstaff all their shifts so that there is always someone to pick up the phone and the customer does not have to wait for more than a few seconds to be serviced. They also say that they evaluate each employee’s performance as an individual and that of the team on a regular basis. They are also known to answer their tickets very fast.

What’s more is that they put up the technical profiles of their employees, so every time a customer gets in touch with them via their support center, they can see their number of years of experience, specific areas of expertise, technical background and so on. This process, they say, makes the whole process a bit more human. 

Apart from the human side, SiteGround also has made available a whole section of tutorials which cover numerous topics such as getting started, WordPress, Joomla, CloudFlare CDN, cPanel, resellers, staging, SSH and much more. The tutorials are exhaustive and are of great help for those who are self-hosting. Complementing the tutorials is their knowledge base which is neatly divided into many sections such as billing, cPanel, applications and others, and is easy to navigate.

Incredible Server Platform

While maintaining a website, speed is of utmost importance, since it improves the visitor experience and is also important when it comes to search engine standings. SiteGround claims that the hardware for this purpose is handpicked by their system administrators and they used the latest in software and hardware to boost a website’s performance.

For their cloud and sharing platforms, SiteGround uses SSD drives and the latest PHP releases with a built-in opcode cache. To speed up the delivery of the static content, they use Nginx in conjunction with their web server software. They have also partnered with CloudFlare to provide a free CDN. 

SiteGround has developed the SuperCacher technology, a website optimization technology to improve the performance of websites. It is also quite compatible with popular CMS applications such as Joomla and WordPress.

Pricing Plans

SiteGround provides 3 plans for their shared web hosting; StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. Here are some of the main features of these plans, in no particular order: 

Dreamhost is one of the oldest hosting companies in existence and was founded by friends Michael Rodriguez, Dallas Bethune, Sage Weil and Josh Jones (while they were still undergraduates) in 1997 in Claremont, California. The company hosts over 1.5 million websites and WordPress blogs and applications for small businesses, designers and developers. Since their inception, their customer count has risen above 400,000.

The company has multiple data centers and a number of products and services such as DreamPress (it is one of the few hosts recommended by WordPress), DreamCompute (cloud computing service), and DreamObjects. Dreamhost also offers 4 types of web servers, such as VPS, shared, dedicated and cloud. Dreamhost is an OpenStack Foundation Gold Member and has stood hand-in-hand in the development of OpenStack.

Customer Support

Dreamhost offers many support options that include trained staff that is available 24/7 to its customers. Existing customers can raise a ticket request through their control panel, or they can use a form available on the website. They also have chat functionality, but unfortunately, it is only available to existing customers and mostly available when their ticket system is not available. 

This chat functionality perpetually available to paying customers and they claim that no problem is too basic or too complex. They do offer phone support, but only in the form of a callback for a small fee. 

Their excellent customer forum can be used to virtually find a solution to almost any problem you may come across. The forum is well maintained and active and has been in use for many years, and has a lot of members, quite a few of them experts in their fields. 

Remixer

This is Dreamhost’s click-to-edit site builder tool to create ready-to-publish websites in a few simple steps. The user is not required to have any knowledge of coding and is optimized for mobile use. 

ZenCart

Dreamhost offers this fully-featured shopping cart that can be customized to modify the way it looks and various modules can be quickly installed to modify the functionality of the cart. ZenCart is an open-source system that is written in PHP, is user friendly, and most importantly, free!

100% Uptime Guarantee 

Whether you are a new website owner or a seasoned one, you know the importance of uptime, and the company guarantees it. Dreamhost’s terms of service state that failure to provide a 100% uptime will result in customer compensation of one day of service for each hour the service is down.

Pricing Plans

Dreamhost offers a full refund on shared hosting plans if you cancel your plan within the first 97 days of opening your account. They have 2 plans; shared starter and shared unlimited. These are some features of these plans: