5 Best GoDaddy Alternatives for Domains, Hosting & Email in 2024
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If you’re looking for GoDaddy alternatives, you’re not alone. From high renewal prices to overloaded, less-than-reliable hosting, there are a lot of reasons to be frustrated with GoDaddy. The good news is that some of the best GoDaddy alternatives are less expensive and provide more for your money than GoDaddy does, which leaves you with a lot of great options.
On this page, we’ve listed some of the most fantastic alternatives to GoDaddy in three categories: hosting, domains, and email. Because GoDaddy offers all three of those services, someone who wants to switch from GoDaddy may be looking to replace multiple products.
A quick note before we proceed: if you do buy from one of our recommended alternatives (which are awesome), we might get a small commission from that sale. Rest assured—this doesn’t affect our reviews in any way—we absolutely hate biased sites! With that said, let’s look at the top alternatives to using GoDaddy!
The 3 Best Alternatives to GoDaddy Hosting:
The Best Alternative to GoDaddy Domains:
The Best Alternative to GoDaddy email hosting:
Now that we know who the best alternatives are, let’s dive in and look closely at what makes each one better than GoDaddy in each category!
GoDaddy Alternatives for Web Hosting: The 3 Best Companies
#1 Hostinger
Hostinger is a hosting company that has really built their reputation on shared hosting and ease of use, which are two things that they do quite a bit better than GoDaddy. When you look at why Hostinger is better than GoDaddy, these are really the top two categories that stand out. Let’s look at each one individually…
Ease of Use/Transparency
Hostinger is insanely easier to use than GoDaddy. Why? Well one of the biggest reasons is GoDaddy’s horrible user interface. At every turn, they’re trying to upsell you on some new product, or hiding page you want behind what seems like a thousand clicks. And in our opinion, they aren’t fully transparent about this either. Just trying to change simple settings triggers various popups trying to get you to subscribe all sorts of other services you don’t likely need. You’ll experience none of that with Hostinger.
Performance/Reliability
We aren’t big fans of GoDaddy’s shared hosting as their servers (in our opinion) tend to be overloaded and quite slow. They’ve also been subject high profile hacking attacks and other various problems. It seems as if they’ve built their reputation on being a domain registrar, and then added hosting as a commoditized afterthought.
Our recommendation? Go with Hostinger as fast as you can!
One last thing—we’ve done a direct comparison on Web Hosting Buddy of Hostinger vs GoDaddy where Hostinger came came out ahead in every category, so if you’re looking for extreme detail about why Hostinger is better, you can visit that page. Also, Hostinger offers domain registration as well, so you can literally leave GoDaddy in the dust if you want to as their renewal prices for domains and $8+ per year for privacy is insane in our opinion.
#2 Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the oldest, most reliable names in the shared hosting world, which makes them a great alternative to GoDaddy if you’re currently hosting your website there (or considering other companies before you move forward with GoDaddy). Below are some reasons why we think that Bluehost makes an excellent GoDaddy alternative.
Great History and Reputation
Bluehost has been around forever, and they’re one of the oldest and best-known shared hosting companies, with a solid reputation over time (which is something that’s hard to come by in the hosting world). They have US-based telephone support too, which is something that most hosting companies don’t offer anymore, and can be really helpful if you’re in a jam and need to talk through a problem with someone.
Very Low Pricing
With Bluehost’s most recent pricing update, they are now available for $1.99/month which is a crazy, almost insane deal for this quality of hosting (we’re honestly not sure how they can do that and still be profitable, but they did). If you’re looking for a cheap alternative to GoDaddy, it’s extremely hard to beat Bluehost on the pricing front.
#3 SiteGround
When it comes to shared hosting, SiteGround is really the king of the hill and they’re in a different universe than GoDaddy. Their implementation of cPanel is top-notch and their support is out of this world! These are the main reasons why SiteGround is an excellent GoDaddy alternative.
Phenomenal Support
Among the shared hosts, we’d have to say that SiteGround really has the best support. Their chat techs are almost instantly available and superbly knowledgeable. Their tickets are answered very fast and they are always willing to go the extra mile in terms of customizations and troubleshooting.
An Amazing Server Platform
SiteGround has some really slick caching features that make them one of the fastest shared hosting companies that we’ve tested. On top of that, their servers are super reliable and just plain work. They really represent the top tier of shared hosting and you just simply can’t go wrong with them.
The Best Alternative to Using GoDaddy for Domain Registration
#1 NameCheap
They are pretty much our favorite registrar. Support is great, prices are great, and they aren’t always trying to upsell you on a bunch of garbage or send you nonsense marketing emails. They are just awesome, and there’s really nothing else to say.
Let’s face it—GoDaddy is not a great registrar. Sure, this is our opinion, but it’s based on some facts that we think are hard to argue with…
GoDaddy Domain Renewals are Expensive!
Sure, they lure people in with .99 cent domains for the first year, but their renewal prices are awful and honestly, it feels a lot like a bait and switch. Unless we win a domain name at an auction where it’s required to go through GoDaddy, we don’t use them AT ALL anymore for registration. They are just plain too expensive, especially if you’ve got a lot of domains.
GoDaddy Private Registration Is ow Free (but the Cost Is Baked Into High Reg Fees)
GoDaddy used to charge for private domain registration, and it was cumbersome, annoying, and expensive having to buy this separately, but this isn’t the case anymore. Which would make you think that since it’s now “free” that GoDaddy is cheaper than other registrars like NameCheap, right? Wrong!
While GoDaddy doesn’t overtly charge for the cost of private registration anymore (it is technically free), their domains are consistently way more expensive than other registrars, so the cost is essentially baked into the reg fee now. We think they are just too expensive for everything, even with the free private registration, and that you can definitely do better.
The Solution: Go With NameCheap Instead!
Don’t believe us? Well, take a look at who WebHostingBuddy.com is registered with—that’s right, it’s with NameCheap! Don’t mess around—save yourself time and money, and transfer your domains to NameCheap—you’ll be glad you did!
The Top GoDaddy Alternative for Email Hosting
#1 Hostinger
If you’ve tried to host email with GoDaddy, there’s a good chance that you’ve found yourself frustrated with the complexity (or lack of complexity) of their system and have been looking for alternatives, and honestly, in 2024 there’s no better alternative to GoDaddy email than Hostinger.
You might be wondering—why did we change our recommendation from Rackspace for the last few years to Hostinger now? Well there are a few reasons, but the main one is pricing…
The truth is that Rackspace just gets too expensive when you start adding up inboxes/users, and honestly—they don’t provide that much benefit over Hostinger’s own email solution that comes with a shared hosting account.
The same thing applies to Amazon WorkMail, etc. and other hosted email providers who charge by the account (including GoDaddy’s hosted email)—it just costs too much once you start adding up accounts. With Hostinger, you have up to 100 email accounts all for the same flat fee, which is really nice. Yes, you can use forwarders with Rackspace and GoDaddy for free, but that doesn’t really help if you have users who need inboxes (or you want to separate emails, so Hostinger really wins here. See the chart below for a pricing comparison:
| 2 Accounts | 5 Accounts | 10 Accounts | 20 Accounts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | $2.69 | $2.69 | $2.69 | $2.69 |
| Rackspace | $5.98 | $14.95 | $29.90 | $59.80 |
| Amazon Workmail | $8.00 | $20.00 | $40.00 | $80.00 |
This obviously doesn’t take into account pricing if you need Microsoft Exchange, and other situations like if you want to use Gmail with a custom domain (which requires G Suite). We’re going to cover those in a separate breakdown on hosted email solutions specifically.
But, if you’re just looking for plain inboxes to use with hosted email, and you need more than one, it’s a much better deal in our opinion to go with a full hosting account on a shared host like Hostinger and use that for your email (assuming you need a custom domain and can’t or don’t want to use free email). And with our $2.69/month Hostinger coupon, we think it’s a great deal!
Thanks for checking out our page on GoDaddy alternatives! Be sure to check back for more awesome hosting breakdowns, tech tips, and other helpful tricks to help you get up & running and make the most of your website!
