Scores
-
Interface
-
Domain pricing
-
Domain transfer
-
Domain settings
-
Email, Hosting
-
Customer Support
Summary
GoDaddy is a great choice for beginners and professional domainers as well. Since it is the largest registrar, domainers all possess GoDaddy account and it is easy and free to push domains to other users. Many additional features are available such as Cashparking and redirection. Availability of hosting and email service makes setting up a website and an email address easy for beginners.
The interface of GoDaddy is relatively user-friendly and easy to handle. Relatively, since they have many products in order to meet their costumers’ specific needs – and the different products’ page is not fully integrated, differing both in design and structure. E.g. CashParking, Discount Domain Club, GoDaddy auctions and Backordering are for domainers’, whereas Photo Album, Workspace email is rather designed to meet the needs of a regular internet user. Their help pages are hard to understand and often are not updated.
Main menu of domain managament at GoDaddy
Registering domains at GoDaddy is usally cheap. There are a number of coupon codes and promotions. You can also get further discount by becoming GoDaddy Discount Domain Club member.
GoDaddy Discount Domain club is for those who frequently register domain names. The Discount Club members are eligible to savings at domain registering, domain renewal, and you are eligible to Cashparking and Domain Auctions.
Discount Club Members can be sure to get the lowest prices E.g. in 2012 a .com registration was 11.99 USD, and Discount Club Members got it for 7.69 USD.
Bulk Domain Editing mode is available for bulk setting of nameservers, contact infomation, setting locks.
Bulk editor of domain properties at GoDaddy
Every single domain has its own control panel as well for individual settings fof different settings such as DNS records or CashParking. Here you can also list your domain for sale, initiate account change. It is important that if you change whois information of a domain, GoDaddy automatically sets a 60 day lock and you cannot sell or transfer your domain within this period without contacting GoDaddy.
GoDaddy is proud of its award winning customer support. They have a rule of answering a ticket within 72 hours, which sound great. However, sometimes only meaningless response is given and the ticket is closed. E.g. when I submitted a ticket because they did not pay for my sold domains, I got a response:
Apparently, there has been a delay in payments, and we are aggressively working to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your patience in this matter.
Regards,
And they still did not proceed the payment 3 weeks later.
In summary, GoDaddy account is inevitable if you want to do anything with domains. They have many products to ease the life of regular internet user and domainer at the same time – and it is a very hard task to integrate the different specific needs, which they carried out at a sufficient level.
