I’ve put together this web hosting comparison to offer some GoDaddy alternatives as admittedly a lot of webmasters questioned their accounts with the company when GoDaddy.com was hacked in its entirety a couple of weeks ago and subsequently every hosted site was down for a few hours. This was an isolated incident which you can read more about the cause of that below, but here is a table to compare web hosting costs and other important stats so that you can compare hosting options. More information follows below the table.

Web Hosting Comparison

[table]
Name,GoDaddy,HostGator,FatCow,NameCheap,JustHost
Year Founded,1996,2002,1998,2000,2008
SiteBuilder,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes
FTP,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes
Free Domain,Yes,Yes,Yes,No,Yes
Shopping Cart,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes,Yes
Minimum Plan,”3 Months”,”1 Month”,”12 Months”,”1 Month”,”1 Month”
Regular Price (Monthly),”$4.99″,”$7.16″,”$4.67″,”$3.95″,”$6.95″
Best Price (Monthly),”$4.24″,”$3.96″,”$3.67″,”$3.45″,”$3.75″
Coupon,20% Off,25% Off (Use Coupon Code Below),40% Off,N/A,N/A
Link,GoDaddy,HostGator Site,FatCow Site,NameCheap Site,JustHost Site
[/table]

Enter Coupon Code “convertingcopy25off” to Receive 25% Off Your HostGator Hosting.

*Note that the “best price” refers to paying for the greatest length of hosting plan offered, meaning opting to pay for a 1 year plan versus paying month to month, though this varies between providers. Also note that these plans and prices reflect the minimum/basic packages offered by each company. Consult their sites individually for details on their premium plans which offer more in terms of what you’re allowed in the way of number of websites, email accounts, MySQL DB, Disk Space, and BandWidth.

Generally the basic plan offered from each of these hosting providers is more than enough for a small business owner looking to host up to a handful of websites.

GoDaddy Alternatives

Millions of GoDaddy hosted webmasters’ websites were inaccessible one day a couple of weeks ago due to a hack from a member of the Anonymous group. Details have subsequently emerged that Anonymous was opposed to GoDaddy’s stance and values concerning SOPA and the hack was meant as a retaliation or so we’re led to believe. While this is the only outage which I’ve experienced in terms of my GoDaddy hosted sites in the last 5 years of using them as a provider and I don’t see one anomaly as a reason to jump ship, it obviously sent a lot of people panicking and packing, looking for GoDaddy alternatives.

While I have a lot of my sites on GoDaddy, I use a few different hosting providers for other sites of mine such as HostGator and FatCow, so combining that experience with a little research I’ve put together this hosting comparison table to see how GoDaddy and its alternatives all stack up against one another.