Blogging is now easily accessible for anyone. If you have ideas you would like to share, you just need to find a web host and start building your blog.
You can find affordable web hosting for any budget.
Some popular options include GoDaddy and Flywheel.
Is one of these web hosting platforms right for you?
Let’s explore them to help you decide as we compare GoDaddy vs Flywheel.
This GoDaddy vs Flywheel comparison starts off with how GoDaddy got its start.
It began as Jomax Technologies when Bob Parsons launched the company in 1997. They changed the name to GoDaddy in 1999 with a goal to give people an easy and affordable way to get their ideas onto the Internet.
Today, the company has more than 20 million customers, 7,000 employees and has purchased many others companies over the years in the following areas:
Their headquarters where the main infrastructure, data centers and network operating centers are located is in Phoenix, AZ. GoDaddy also has data centers in:
Let’s expand our GoDaddy vs Flywheel discussion into the GoDaddy features you need to know about.
Any business owner or marketer can take advantage of what GoDaddy provides:
GoDaddy is known mostly as a domain name registrar and hosting company. They provide quality website hosting services and 24/7 customer support.
Their Economy plan is the introductory shared hosting package that provides:
The Deluxe plan included everything from the Economy plan and adds in more features such as unlimited websites and unlimited storage. The Ultimate plan then adds in 1,000 emails and a one-year free SSL certificate.
WordPress Hosting
GoDaddy also specializes in shared WordPress hosting plans. If you use WordPress, then this is an option to get optimum performance out of your WordPress website.
Bonuses are available in this area for staging areas, themes and premium plan support.
You can upgrade into VPS and dedicated plans.
Shared hosting means you’re sharing web server resources with other websites. VPS (virtual private servers) simulates the experience of a dedicated server because you’re sharing processing power, memory and hard drive space with fewer users.
If you need a dedicated server, then GoDaddy can outfit you with up to 20TB of monthly data transfers, 1TB of storage and up to 32GB of RAM.
You’re getting dependable uptime with GoDaddy that rivals most all other major website hosts. Their uptime is 99.97%.
This means you’re assured that your website has a very small likelihood of being unavailable when people visit it.
Load times are fast due to GoDaddy’s various global centers.
The Phoenix data center is equipped with uninterrupted power supply. They’ve equipped their infrastructure with fiber cabling, power protection and cooling systems that keep server equipment running properly.
The company has also invested in a large security team. Your servers are protected by CCTV surveillance and a 24/7 technical staff that monitors the entire operation 365 days a year.
GoDaddy provides adequate security right from the start with its Economy plan. This introductory hosting plan includes email and control panel spam detection, as well as a secure shell.
It’s more advanced hosting plans add on additional security features and also offer SSL (Secure Socket Layer) support.
You can pay for more security with features such as SiteLock. This service provides app scanning, site-verification certificates and malware/spam monitoring.
Daily malware scans and backups are performed by GoDaddy. You can generate copies of backups whenever you need to or pay a little extra for cloud-based backups and storage features.
Any online entrepreneur is a good fit for GoDaddy’s services. You can have your online store or website up in a matter of hours. Get live chat or phone support for any questions. Optimize local or global SEO with simple site tools.
Launching a WordPress website? GoDaddy provides clear and simple step-by-step instructions for you.
Are you new to all this and starting your very first website? GoDaddy gives you the following resources:
You’ll find everything you need if you’re a local brick & mortar business. GoDaddy has the necessary SEO tools that help with local business listings. You’ll find email marketing tools and videos or articles about improving your local SEO results.
GoDaddy Website Tools
The platform gives you its GoCentral website builder if you need to create your website inside your hosting portal. It’s a drag & drop site builder and comes with hundreds of customizable templates.
You’ll discover 50 to 300 templates, depending on the plan you’re using. These templates are categorized into 20 different areas that range from real estate to education to entertainment.
Setting up an e-commerce store is possible using the GoCentral builder. It gives you everything you need for an e-commerce site:
I briefly mentioned WordPress hosting above. Let’s go a little deeper about that based on the fact that WordPress is so popular.
Your managed WordPress hosting support includes things that you’d normally need to handle by yourself, like software or plugin updates.
Here are other important features of the GoDaddy managed WordPress hosting support:
It’s likely that you’ll need support or technical help at some point, no matter how experienced you are online. GoDaddy provides this help and gives you access to support experts through email, phone or live chat.
Their support people are knowledgeable, friendly and available 24/7 to handle any problem you’re dealing with. You can expect response times that get your issues handled within a matter of minutes.
As I transition into talking about Flywheel inside the GoDaddy vs Flywheel comparison, it’s important to point out that Flywheel provides a specific type of website hosting.
Flywheel doesn’t include many of the features that GoDaddy does, such as general VPS or shared hosting plans. Instead, Flywheel offers WordPress VPS hosting specifically.
It’s a good idea to think of GoDaddy as a solution that caters to a wider audience, while Flywheel caters to WP users only and, more specifically, website designers and developers building sites for clients.
The company was founded in 2012 by Tony Noecker, Dusty Davidson and Rick Knudtson. They’re based in Omaha, NE and their mission is to make the lives of WordPress users better.
Flywheel offers many features for website developers and designers:
Flywheel uses the Google Cloud Platform. The big benefit to you is a more stable hosting environment and faster loading times.
Cloud hosting is superior to regular hosting because storage, memory and processing power is more limited when stored on a physical server with a fixed set of resources.
The “cloud” is basically a set of many different physical computers. This group of physical computers and their computing power is divided into virtual servers. Your website’s processing power and memory is drawn from all of these varied computers existing in the cloud network.
Using the Google Cloud Platform means that Flywheel is offering almost endless resources.
The reason websites slow down over time is because they outgrow the resources available on physical servers. Periods of unavailability, slow loading times and other performance issues are the result.
You can solve the problem by migrating to a better-equipped physical server. The challenge with this is that you might experience downtime while the files get moved. Plus, you may need to do it again in the future as your site continues to grow.
Cloud hosting provides resources that can automatically scale as needed. This means you won’t see slower page speeds as visitor numbers grow or marketing promotions cause sudden traffic spikes.
Your website goes down if the physical server it’s hosted on goes down. If a server fails inside a cloud network, the entire network still operates because it can rely on the other working servers. A cloud-hosted website won’t see downtime as a result.
Flywheel has combined its use of the Google Cloud Platform with improved caching technology. The bottom line is that Flywheel-hosted sites are using the same infrastructure that Google uses for its suite of end-user services.
Creating Demo Client Sites
As a developer, Flywheel makes it easy to build out demo websites for your clients. This demo site doesn’t require a new domain and gets hosted on a Flywheel subdomain.
You can password protect a demo site so that both you and your client know that only authorized users have access to the files.
Each demo site is set up for free. You can eliminate the password protection after your client approves the work, purchase a Flywheel hosting plan and then the site is publicly launched. Flywheel gives you the option to transfer billing responsibilities for the site over to your client.
Another way to work with clients is to create a staging version of the site. This allows multiple people to work on it while in development and then push it out “live” after completion.
Staging sites are password protected just like demo sites and make sure search engines can’t index content until after the site is pushed out live.
You can give other people collaboration rights on your website. This is a useful feature for developers and any general website owner.
For example, if you started building your site by yourself and now have advanced design or development needs that you don’t know how to do, you simply give your third-party developer the ability to collaborate on the project.
Do you have an existing WordPress website that you want to migrate over to Flywheel? You can have Flywheel’s migration team create a copy of the site and then transfer those files over to their servers.
This service is free. The added advantage to the way it works is that you can view the way your site looks on Flywheel before completing the migration.
View the site and choose your hosting plan prior to the site going live on Flywheel servers. This ensures little to no downtime.
Flywheel’s dashboard looks modern, is quite simple to navigate and provides a quality user experience.
This is important to note if you’re moving from a host using outdated cPanel software and understand how complicated those dashboards can look.
It’s easy to create a new site from within your dashboard by clicking on the Create a New Site button. The next screen allows you to assign an owner and enter a temporary domain name and site name.
If you haven’t done so yet, you can then select your hosting plan and provide payment.
Flywheel doesn’t add anything extra to WP software or install preloaded plugins like other hosts commonly do. This makes your website creation clean and allows you to start each site fresh regarding plugins and tools.
All of your WordPress websites are viewable inside the dashboard. You’ll see features such as:
Flywheel gives you three options for your hosting plan:
The company provides 24/7 professional support so that you can get questions answered at any time.
Use the help box within your account to access real-time support. Create your ticket, reply to answers and close it out all within the easy-to-use interface.
After reading through this article on GoDaddy vs Flywheel, you should now have a better understanding for each hosting company.
You should be knowledgeable on what each hosting provider offers and be able to distinguish between them.
With this information, you should be able to determine which web hosting service is right for you.
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