Oh Nodaddy! Godaddy vs. WP Engine Hosting

Website maintenance and hosting are often the most overlooked elements within your digital presence. Because of this, we’ve decided to provide some insight into your website hosting and management options, and break down the value behind some of those options. In this article, we will compare two popular hosting platforms: GoDaddy and WP Engine. WP Engine is utilized by Nice Branding Agency's Website Management Plans. There's no doubt that GoDaddy and HostGator are cheaper options and their prices can’t be matched; however, there are factors aside from cost that must be considered when deciding on a host and management plan for your website.

Hosting, domains, websites, the inner workings of the world wide web — these are all very confusing subjects. Thorough knowledge is needed to successfully navigate this area of the digital arena. Most business owners do not, and should not, dabble in selecting a host for their website. So, how do you decide who should decide?

WP Engine vs. GoDaddy

WP Engine, the backer behind the hosting and website maintenance plans offered by Nice Branding Agency, was built with the intention to serve up reliability and security to websites built on the popular content-management platform, WordPress. WP Engine touts that it was founded with the sole purpose to support WordPress websites.

GoDaddy planted its roots in 1997 and provided domain registration — aka a place where you could purchase your domain name. There’s no information online that shows when GoDaddy began offering hosting services; however, it’s clear that GoDaddy’s initial key service was domain registration. Today, GoDaddy brags that they are the world’s largest domain registrar.

To learn more about the difference between hosting and domain names, click here.

Uptime

According to an online source that we came across, a test was performed on uptime (meaning the time that your site is not down) on both WP Engine and GoDaddy. Results stated that over a period of six months of hosting service, if hosted on GoDaddy, your site would be down for over 49 hours. With WP Engine, your site would be down for around 4.5 hours. One point for WP Engine and Nice Branding Agency. We won’t mention that GoDaddy might have some false advertising related to their uptime. When thinking about hosting on GoDaddy, just consider this fact and say, "Nodaddy."

This same source dug into the subject deeper than we will go in this article, and more information is available if you feel the need to have further proof WP Engine rocks. Click here if you want to delve deeper into these test results concerning uptime.

Load Time

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been on a website that was so slow to load you decided to say, "Buh Bye." Put your hand down — we can’t see you. Load time, aka speed, is important to search-engine ranking as well as user experience. Your website speed affects how high you rank on the pages of the search engines. So let’s take a speedy little look at the difference in the speed delivered by WP Engine and GoDaddy.

WP Engine provides multiple servers with sites spread out evenly over those servers. GoDaddy packs the rack in terms of the amount of sites sitting on the same server. Our research friends tested some websites with both hosting companies and found that the average speed of a website running with WP Engine was 1.3 seconds, while GoDaddy came in at 1.95 seconds. It’s been shown that some sites hosted on WP Engine were larger but actually loaded faster than smaller sites that were hosted on GoDaddy. Looks like that’s another point for WP Engine and Nice Branding Agency. If you want your site to load with lightning speed, it’s obvious you need to say "Nodaddy."

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, you can’t beat GoDaddy for hosting. GoDaddy wins hands down. When going line to line, there’s really just no point in comparing. However, it must leave you wondering, how can something be so cheap. Right. But we will give it to you on this one. "Godaddy".

Support

With each Website Management Package that Nice Branding offers, you get access to WP Engine’s robust hosting platform, as well as a dedicated team member from Nice Branding who will perform monthly maintenance and updates to your WordPress site. Both plugins and the overall platform will be updated and reviewed for proper functionality after updates are performed.

Keep in mind, most website development companies AREN’T in business to sell hosting or maintenance packages but instead have a goal to build websites. With this, they are forced to guide their clients through the hosting process. Luckily, in the last few years, WP Engine has emerged and filled a much needed void to be a trusted partner for website development companies to assist their clients.

Security and Service

Security and customer service are two other factors to consider when choosing a website maintenance and hosting company. WP Engine has concentrated on building a highly secure system that delivers daily backups of any website hosted through their platform. WP Engine, along with monthly maintenance and updates from Nice Branding Agency, provide a valid layer of protection on your WordPress website; however, attackers can always succeed. Not to worry: if your site is compromised and you are on a website management plan with Nice Branding Agency, we can get your site up and running in a jiffy.

Hosting Wrap Up

Although GoDaddy may be cheaper, we place a high value in partnering with WP Engine to provide our clients the best-available hosting service on the market. We’ve been around the block with hosting companies, and we sleep better at night since WP Engine has entered the playing field. If your budget just will not budge, you will have to make some sacrifices in quality, as well as security; however, GoDaddy will get the job done.

Just keep in mind, GoDaddy was built for domains, and WP Engine was built to host WordPress websites. Purchase your domain from GoDaddy and host your WordPress site with Nice Branding through WP Engine. Everyone wins.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched the importance of website management grow. Hosting companies are stepping up their game, and website development companies are placing high value on delivering their clients a trusted, reliable source for monthly updates and website hosting. With the speed of development in the technological space, you and your site will be left in the dust if you don’t make the right decision.

What do we at Nice Branding Agency suggest? We suggest you find a web development company that you trust to lead and guide you in your decision. You, as a business owner, with limited experience in this area, should not be making this decision without a trusted partner. Additionally, you should not base this decision solely on price, unless you have no other choice.

We would love to help you begin to build trust in the team at Nice Branding Agency. Give us a shout.