Hostmonster and GoDaddy are two hosting providers that have been in the game for a while. Hostmonster has the first-in-the-game advantage as a dedicated host while GoDaddy evolved from a domain registrar into a website solution with a full suite of services.

So which one should you choose – Hostmonster or GoDaddy? I compared each host and GoDaddy was the winner. Still, Hostmonster may be better suited to your needs so read on so you can decide for yourself!

Overall Comparison Hostmonster vs GoDaddy

Winner: GoDaddy

Overall, GoDaddy trumps Hostmonster in most categories – out-of-the-box security features, hosting options, speed, support and server footprint. Still Hostmonster is a decent GoDaddy competitor. Read on to see what makes each hosting provider stand out:

About Hostmonster and GoDaddy

Hostmonster is a US-based hosting provider / domain lookup provider founded in 1996. The company provides shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting services to individuals and businesses around the world and is headquartered in Provo, Utah (U.S.A) which is also where its main data centre is located. The company is currently a subsidiary of Newfold Digital, the parent company of other hosting providers like Bluehost and HostGator.

GoDaddy is an all-in-one web hosting provider that’s even more popularly known as the biggest domain registrar in the world. GoDaddy was founded just a year after Hostmonster in 1997 and has grown into a behemoth that serves 21 million customers worldwide and hosts over 84 million domains.

Round 1: Hosting features – Key Hosting Features and Services

Key Hostmonster Features

Hostmonster provides a free domain and SSL certificate on all their plans, including their shared hosting. For smaller websites sharing resources, they don’t expect you to use a lot of traffic so they dare to offer unmetered bandwidth and for their dedicated hosting, you get up to 1 TB of webspace.

You also get all the essentials – free daily backups and restore – and their ‘SAN’ storage that doesn’t specify whether it’s HDD or SSD on their website.

Migrating your website to Hostmonster is only free for 1 WordPress website but has strings attached. If you’re designing your website from scratch, they offer a domain lookup tool to help you find your first domain and an out-of-the-box website builder for your convenience.

Key GoDaddy Features

GoDaddy, Hostmonster’s fierce competitor, offers everything you’ll need to get a basic website up and running right from the most basic plan.

You get unmetered bandwidth too on all its shared hosting plans and Shared hosting Plus plans. They offer a hybrid of HDD and SSD plans for their dedicated plans – up to 2 TB SSD and 16 TB HDD plus RAM-specific VPS plans.

Like Hostmonster, you get the freebies – a free domain and SSL, free and hands-free website migration done by their support, and free daily backups and restore. GoDaddy also gives a website builder out-of-the-box if you want to build your website afresh.

And the winner is… GoDaddy

GoDaddy trumps Hostmonster in the ‘overall features’ round. It offers more features out-of-the-box and a free website migration that’s not as constricting as Hostmonster.

Round 2: Prices & Plans

Hostmonster Pricing Plans

Hostmonster offers shared hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated hosting. It doesn’t offer WordPress hosting or specialised cloud hosting plans that are becoming the industry standard. However, its current plans are best suited to:

• Shared hosting – Best plans for entry-level websites and business directories with just a few pages
• VPS hosting – Hostmonster’s VPS plans are designed for mid-sized businesses that need more power and somewhat dedicated resources, on a bargain
• Dedicated hosting – Big-boy plans where you get your own server and dedicated resources to handle large data and traffic, and be protected from shared attacks.

GoDaddy Pricing Plans

GoDaddy offers more versatile plans and pricing than Hostmonster – shared hosting, shared hosting plus, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, and a specialised Reseller hosting plan. These are best for:

• Shared hosting – Plans designed for newbie and small websites
• Shared hosting plus – Shared hosting on steroids – shared plans powered by VPS servers for more power
• VPS hosting – Full-blown VPS hosting for businesses that need scalable resources
• Dedicated hosting – Enterprise-level plans for large corporate websites and businesses that handle sensitive data
• Reseller hosting – Middleman plans for hosting and domain provider businesses
• WordPress hosting – Plans tailored for websites powered by the most popular CMS in the world – WordPress

And the Winner Is… GoDaddy

GoDaddy is the clear winner once again with its more versatile plans and pricing. Hostmonster’s most basic plan, however, is slightly cheaper than GoDaddy’s on a 3-year basis.

Round 3: Website performance (Uptime & Speed)

Higher uptime and speeds mean your website loads quicker and stays online consistently, and in the end better SEO performance, higher rankings, better customer satisfaction, and more money for you. In reality, the uptime of a host cannot be 100% but the industry standard is 99.9%.

Hostmonster Uptime & Speed

To test the performance of Hostmonster, I ran the host’s domain (should be hosted on their servers ideally) through two popular testing tools – GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights – to get its Time to First Byte (TTFB) and overall performance.

On GTMetrix, Hostmonster had a decent 999 ms TTFB and an overall performance of 65%:

On PageSpeed Insights, Hostmonster took slightly longer with a TTFB of 1.5 s but had a better overall performance of 94%:

GoDaddy Uptime & Speed

I performed the exact same tests for GoDaddy at the same time for fairness.

On GTMetrix, had an excellent TTFB of 175 ms and an overall performance 89%:

On PageSpeed Insights, GoDaddy had a slower TTFB of 1.7 s and a great overall performance of 82%:

Note: These values can vary wildly depending on the location of the test tool’s servers and how close they are to the host’s servers. These are just for comparative purposes and you may have different results based on your location. I ran these tests from Malaysia to get unbiased results.

And the Winner Is… GoDaddy

GoDaddy performs slightly better than Hostmonster in the speed tests. Its results on GTMetrix outperformed Hostmonster while on Google PageSpeed Insights, Hostmonster was faster and had a better performance overall.

Round 4: Customer Support – Who Has the Best Support System?

Hostmonster Customer Support

Hostmonster offers a healthy support system – phone, live chat, and email, plus a quite vast knowledgebase where you can figure things out on your own.

Their phone support is especially handy if you have an urgent issue you need help with:

Their knowledgebase is a nice addition and has a built-in search engine so you can find what you’re looking for quickly.

I tried using their live chat with one of their agents and it initially directed me to sign up for their basic plan. However, after a second attempt, a chat portal came up:

To help quickly resolve inquiries, the Hostmonster bot appears first. I was impressed with how intelligently it replied to my prompts. And once it couldn’t figure out what I was asking, it directed me to a live agent:

Then the wait began…

I wasn’t impressed with how long it took an agent to respond. I waited for over 20 minutes and still no reply.

Eventually, an agent responded and she was knowledgeable, I’d say. However, she still took too long to reply:

It was fair overall.

GoDaddy Customer Support

GoDaddy also has an impressive support system but I’d have liked to see more. GoDaddy offers phone support (backed with a global directory I especially liked), a community, video guides, and a vast knowledgebase.

GoDaddy’s phone directory is great, giving you numbers to call in different countries. I couldn’t place a call though from Malaysia:

GoDaddy also has a thriving community where you can see FAQs many other webmasters like you are asking and expert answers to them:

And it is so splendidly designed.

If you are a visual learner like me, GoDaddy also offers a big gallery of ‘how to’ and help videos:

And a link to its YouTube channel:

Its knowledgebase too is quite impressive and is just as great as you’d expect:

I was pretty disappointed that they didn’t have live chat and that I couldn’t call from my location.

And the Winner Is… Hostmonster

I’d give Hostmonster this round by a very slim margin. However, I still love GoDaddy’s support UI and how they offer more support options.

Round 5: Ease of use – Which Platform Is Easier to Use?

Hostmonster Ease of Use

Hostmonster belongs to a class of hosting providers with very straightforward user interfaces and you can quickly find your way around right from the homepage:

I also like that you can access the cPanel right from the homepage if you are already a customer:

Plus Hostmonster’s cPanel looks very modern and if you are an old-school cPanel fan, you’d love it.

The Hostmonster dashboard is also pretty intuitive for webmasters who are new to the world of hosting with less intimidating controls that allow you to figure things out easily:

I personally love the colour themes of the user dashboard and feel it looks far better than their homepage theme.

I wasn’t particularly impressed with Hostmonster’s knowledgebase theme as the text just seemed to be lost in all the colours – the odd green and black:

Hostmonster also offers a website builder – but it’s only free for the first 6 pages and you’d have to pay for more pages.

GoDaddy Ease of Use

GoDaddy is incredibly easy to use and everything is straightforward. They offer a clean, uncluttered homepage, a modern cPanel, and an appealing dashboard:

GoDaddy cPanel:

GoDaddy also offers a free website builder but you’d have to pay to keep using it after the first month.

And the Winner Is… GoDaddy

I prefer the way GoDaddy looks overall plus they did a good job in designing their knowledge and help centres properly which was the flaw in Hostmonster.

Round 6: Security – Which Platform is More Secure?

Hostmonster Security

Hostmonster offers the security essentials out-of-the-box – a free SSL, DDoS protection, and daily backups and quick restores. When I contacted the agent, she informed me that you also get access to a free backup tool, CodeGuard plugin plus you’ll have access to 80% discounts on all SiteLock Security plans as a Hostmonster customer.

Hostmonster is also CloudFlare compatible allowing you to cache portions of your website’s data across the CDN’s worldwide network of servers.

GoDaddy Security

GoDaddy also gives you all you’ll need to keep your website secure out-of-the-box. Free SSL certificates on all plans, DDoS protection, and daily backups and restore. GoDaddy also features a built-in malware scanner that runs automatic scans.

Like most great hosts, GoDaddy is CloudFlare compatible. However, the company’s standing with SiteLock is somewhat shaky as they’ve been having an ongoing lawsuit. GoDaddy still provides a Web Application Firewall (WAF), its own CDN, and specialised security plans:

And the Winner Is… GoDaddy

GoDaddy just provides more security features with its most basic plans. On Hostmonster, you’ll have to pay extra for security features like SpamExperts, Domain privacy and protection, and apparently, the CodeGuard in their middle and highest shared plans.

Round 7: Server locations

Your host’s server footprint plays a crucial role in your website performance – the more widespread your host’s servers are globally, the more reliably your website will load quickly to a global audience.

Hostmonster Server location

Hostmonster has servers in its main headquarters in Provo, Utah and a secondary data centre in Orem, Utah.

GoDaddy Server location

GoDaddy has a server footprint in eight U.S. cities, Amsterdam in Europe, and Singapore in Asia.

GoDaddy also allows you to select your preferred data centre to enhance your user experience.

And the Winner Is… GoDaddy

GoDaddy has more servers across the globe than Hostmonster and therefore, wins this round.

Hostmonster vs GoDaddy: final recommendations

When to Choose Hostmonster

Hostmonster is a great web hosting company that provides different hosting tiers for small and large businesses. In all, go for Hostmonster if:

• You don’t need WordPress-specific plans
• You don’t need cloud hosting
• You want reliable support
• You target a U.S.-based audience
• You want SiteLock security

Go for GoDaddy if you:

GoDaddy is an even fiercer Hostmonster competitor with more versatile plans and a bigger reputation. In short, go for GoDaddy if:

• You target a worldwide audience
• You want all-in-one website tools
• You want WordPress-specific plans
• You need reseller hosting packages
• You want a host with a WAF out-of-the-box