There are many places to register your domain names, but you can’t beat GoDaddy for price and ease of use. They are the largest domain registrar on the internet and are based in Scottsdale Arizona. The GoDaddy website does present some challenges to some users. The user interface is confusing. Not for us veterans of the internet. We appreciate the tools they provide. For the newly initiated, all they have to do is call GoDaddy’s free tech support for help with domain registration or any of their many web products.

However, no company can be good at everything. So, while they are a great digital partner for your domain name needs, they lack proficiency with other common web services.

Web Hosting at GoDaddy

For many years most businesses had only needed simple websites based on static html web pages. GoDaddy provides very inexpensive web hosting with lots of bells and whistles. This is great for the bottom line for the small business.

These days even small business are requiring web sites that run with content stored on a database. This is due to the emergence of Content Management Systems that allow the web site owner to interact with their website to edit and add page content. Wordpress and Joomla are both very popular systems to base your database driven website.

Unfortunately, database driven web sites put a lot of demand on servers. With so many thousands of web sites being upgraded from static pages to dynamic systems with blogs, forums and photo galleries, the load drives down performance. This means that pages load slower on the browser and editing content becomes very frustrating when have to wait for the server.

We are not bashing GoDaddy here. We love the company and we are quite aware of all the negative posts all across the web about service and performance. Most are unfounded. Our point is that business is business. As a business owner, knowing where and why to spend dollars is crucial to your web site expectancy.

Unfortunately there is too much server load on the GoDaddy servers for database driven sites. I invite anyone to prove me wrong because as a veteran web developer for over 12 years, I publish sites on a variety of web hosting servers and the difference is very apparent.

Google will also penalize you if your pages load slowly. So, if search engine traffic matters to you then you might want to consider using GoDaddy for domain registration (which they are very good at) and using a different web host for your web site that is not overloaded and can render your web pages quickly. You can easily point your domains to serve up pages on a different server. In this way you have the best of both worlds.

Email on GoDaddy

When you host a web site on a server and you want to use domain oriented emails, these are emails like this: bob@mydomainname.com, the hosting server also hosts the email account.

This can be changed via MX records. This is short for Mail Exchange. Here is an example: When you have your domain registered at GoDaddy and you have your web site hosted on a server outside of GoDaddy, but you want to have GoDaddy host the email account, you can point to the mail server on GoDaddy via MX from your web host server.

GoDaddy email is wonderful and can be combined with file storage and online fax services with little cost. However, I get a lot of calls from my clients saying their email is down and that they can’t get their email. There maybe other 3rd parties involved which could be contributing to the problem. For example: an Internet Service Provider like Cox.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do about that. We build web sites, we do not control the flow of email. A good rule of thumb is this: if your email worked yesterday and you have made no changes to your email account or your computer, all things being equal, it is probably a temporary situation.

From my experiences, email services at GoDaddy are down quite often. There are many factors involved, but my experience as been much better with other web host servers. Which is too bad because GoDaddy does have a great web mail product.

This is another reason why many people prefer to use 3rd party email programs like AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail.

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Use a variety of internet venders for precisely what they do best.