Totally new at this website thing. I want a website for a small business with an email feature so people can reach me, plus a counter so I know how many visitors I have. First, tell me the good and bad of selecting GoDaddy when I purchase a domain name? If they build my website, etc? Have other newbies found the online chat “folks” at GoDaddy helpful to answer their questions and get them started? What about that “Help Me Choose” feature? Did it help, or steer you to the most expensive product? Is GoDaddy flexible to meet many needs, or are you penned in and restricted on what you can do?
Most important, does GoDaddy host your website? Is it done in such a way that others can find you through major search engines? I hear some host you in such a way that your website name is like a webpage under their main page’s URL…making it harder for customers to find you. What else should I be asking and/or aware of?
GoDaddy is probably the best domain registrar around (for general purposes). They are indifferent in their hosting and other services, and it’s nickel and dime, upsell, add-on city.
Register your domain with GD. Use another hosting-specific company for your site and email hosting. I highly recommend WebQuarry and SiteGround. You can go with their cheapest package for a single site with few frills, and they won’t perpetually try to sell you other services.
WQ is fast and supports nearly everything. SG is heavy on “platform” support like WordPress and Joomla, but they support plain HTML/CSS sites well too. Both have autoinstallers for most packages and features.
Missed the edit, but I’d strongly recommend against the “free” web hosts like Wix and Weebly. Too many strings and limitations and hidden aspects for even light commercial use.
GoDaddy has almost as many ethical critics as Microsoft. Yes they offer hosting.
Not especially good hosting; but probably no worse than most other shared hosts ( many customers on one drive ), all of which will have hiccups — as will dedicated hosts: which over-excites customers immensely, who should just roll with it: it’s a complicated little internet.
As AB says find another host who will help you at first. Generally, the more you pay a year the faster the speed etc. — but in actuality that matters less than you would think for blogs and stuff, but is important for businesses.
I would suggest a proper registrar: mine is NameAlerts. All domain names cost the same from whichever registrar, whether they are expensive names or ordinary names: at first. But some, and GoDaddy has this reputation, may charge you more once you’ve expressed an interest in a certain name; and some, in this age of domain name speculation, will instantaneously register the name you want for themselves and hold it for ransom against you ( they can hold it for a week at small cost ).
We had a domain registered at GoDaddy. They did not notify us it was expiring. By the time we found out, it was because emails were bouncing and they wanted to extort 80 bucks to get it back.
Fast forward 5-6 years and the domain has been parked all this time. Supposedly NOT owned by GoDaddy any more. I actually was able to repurchase it from its current owner (at more than 80 bucks but not as much as 80 bucks plus 5-6 years of registration). I tried to transfer it to another registrar as part of the purchase and it failed numerous times, so I wound up leaving it with GoDaddy for the time being.
From what I’ve seen, their web hosting fees aren’t the best. On the other hand, they offer fairly good email forwarding services for the annual fee compared to the place we wanted to host our web server, so we’ve left it with them for the moment as we don’t actually run a web page.
I’ve used GoDaddy. I wouldn’t recommend them. They constantly try to nickle and dime you, trick you into signing up for extra offers during the purchasing process, and send you a ridiculous amount of emails notifying you that your domain will expire, as far in advance as 4 months ahead. Their costs for the new top level domains are simply atrocious and double what any other reputable registrar charges. Their backend is unprofessional and wasn’t easy to naviagte.
I recommend Dreamhost. When you sign up for hosting with them you get a normal TLD (.com, .net, or .org) for free along with the hosting, WITH privacy included so your name and address isn’t floating around for anybody to look up. You only need the simplest form of hosting to start. It will come with email service. I have not used their customer service however as I knew how to manage all this as soon as I signed up with them.
It honestly sounds like you’re very new to this website game so do a lot of research. Only free services will make you use what is called a “subdomain” where the site name is something like: yourname .tumblr. com instead of www. yourname. com. Subdomains, however, have little to no effect on your google search ranking so it’s a moot point to your question. They simply LOOK unprofessional. Google search ranking is determined by how useful your page is to customers, which comes mostly from keywords within your page content and how often your page updates. If you try to game the system by putting in non-relevant keywords, google will smack your website down their listings for misleading customers. Google will find your website eventually, no matter what, simply because it exists. It does this by sending out robots to search the web for new pages constantly, 24/7 and it will eventually find your page, no matter how obscure.
Also, a hit counter on your website is not what you need and is very year-2000. What you want is invisible tracking, and the best free ones are either Google Analytics or StatCounter. I can recommend both as both are quite good. I think StatCounter is slightly easier to navigate and understand but has a limited log size while Google Analytics offers a huge log size for free.
Just so you know, hosting and a domain does not come with a website unless a builder is offered during the sign-up process. If you consider the hosting a house, and the domain it’s address, it doesn’t come with any furniture, which is the website. You have to make your own website. If you don’t know how to do this, general business hosting may not be for you. You would be better off using Squarespace, which is advertised as an all-in-one solution for small business owners who have no idea how to build their own websites from scratch.
Interesting. I should check into other sites’ registration fees - GoDaddy has definitely gone up since we first used them; for some reason I think it was 10 bucks a year and now it’s 19 or so. This is just to dock the domain, mind you, plus some email forwarding.
I don’t mind the reminder emails well in advance - though as I learned recently it helps if one actually NOTICES them: I have my emails going to a folder in gmail, and just didn’t glance there… and my domain actually expired by several days. The only reason I spotted it was they actually tried to phone me, it showed on caller ID, and Nomorobo wished it into the cornfield before I could answer. That twigged me to check my emails, at which point I went :smack:. I was a few days away from having to pony up that huge reconnect fee. And I’d have done it - as it was my own damn fault (unlike the time we owned the domain before, where GoDaddy did NOT notify us).
Having the hidden registration would be nice - GoDaddy as you said wants extra ca$h to do that. It’s like the phone company charging more to not list your phone number in directory service. Nice little scam.
Has anyone ever moved a thoroughly-prepaid registration to another hoster? I paid 5 years worth this time around AND set up a google calendar reminder for the renewal in 5 years. But if I move to another host, is most of that hundred dollars just gone? Again, we’re just using it to own the domain and have email forwarding, no servers or anything.
For domain registration I started using Hover. Slightly more expensive than GoDaddy, but includes private registration. For hosting I use 1and1.com. Actually, I get 2 domains free with the housing package there, so they do have those. They include pretty much everything other hosts do, WordPress, site building program, store set up.
GoDaddy’s hosting, and them as a registrar, both suck, in my opinion. I am all about 1and1 now for my domains, and I use x10hosting for my hosting needs.
Most notably, as stated by Lok 1and1 offers free domain privacy, while GoDaddy charges you for that. If you don’t want your home/business address visible by anyone who knows how to plug in your domain into WHOIS, it’s amazing.
I’ve parked my domain name with RackSpace; it’s a little more expensive but they do a superb job of handling email. I’ve been with them for about five years with never a problem and since I hate problems I’ll stay with them.
I came back around to check in (finally) on postings. I want to thank everyone for sharing their experiences and advice. Macca26, you got me pegged. Although I don’t follow how one can have a website registered one place but hosted elsewhere, I follow most of what you say. I’ll look into your recommendations, especially Squarespace.
Can someone elaborate on this “invisible tracking” as a counter. How does it work? And, why would one want it to be invisible? If the number of hits is substantial and may attract bigger fish to your business, why would one want the tracker to be invisible?
I will second the recommendation above for Hover for domain registration. They have a super-clean and easy-to-use site, which makes it really easy to manage registrations (I currently have 4 names registered with them).
As for your confusion about separate registration and hosting, I can offer a simple explanation, because that’s the level I understand it. One way to understand it is by analogy to a brick-and-mortar business. The domain registration is like the name of your business, and the hosting is the physical address of your business. You usually register the name of your business with some incorporating authority, get a tax ID from the IRS, etc. Then you actually go rent space for your shop. IRL, you then create marketing materials, stationery, business cards, etc., that associate the address with the business entity. If your business takes off and you need more space, you can change your physical location without changing the business name, but you need to notify your customers where they need to find you now.
It’s more or less the same with domains and hosting. The internet works by having directories (Domain Name Servers) that associate domain names with addresses (IP addresses, to be precise) that allow communications to be routed to the proper physical machines. When you register your domain, you create an entry in the DNS system over which you have some control. In particular, you can edit the information in your record to point to the correct address for your site, which will be provided by the hosting service. If you move your site to a different host, you edit your domain record to point to the new location.
I am extremely happy with LunarPages. They have different plans and may be slightly more expensive than others, but I pay much less than $100/year for high traffic, very large diskspace, domain registration, e-mail, support for server-side scripts, etc. etc. From time to time they offer free site-building software but I never tried it. When I’ve had problems, their e-mail response has always been prompt, friendly and helpful.
I recently migrated several sites to managed Wordpress hosting with SiteGround. They’ve been fantastic.
It sounds like you need a very simple site setup and they have several options at various hosting packages and tiers. I’ve found he support resources to be fantastic, including handling a bunch of tricky domain redirects to helping me configure my SSL, integrate my own CDN and more.
I’d look into a Wordpress based site, especially if you are thinking about some type of automated marketing or e-commerce. There are some very powerful & easy to use tools available once you get comfortable with the basic platform.
I’d avoid GoDaddy hosting. I have several domains through them, but I am slowly moving to Siteground and/or Hover as renewals come due. Also Fat Cow, I had several sites there for a few years and they were great but they didn’t scale well as traffic and needs increased. If you’re not looking at huge traffic they might be an affordable option to consider.
I’ve worked with 1and1 and they’re pretty solid as well.
