Most people meet GoDaddy hosting through a domain search. You type a name, it is available, and a box offers you hosting for a few dirhams a month. It feels like the easy path, and in some ways it is. But the price in that box is only for the first term, and on GoDaddy the jump after that is bigger than at most hosts we review.
We went through every GoDaddy hosting page on October 27, 2026: shared Web Hosting, the High Performance tier, Managed Hosting for WordPress, VPS, Microsoft 365 email and the .com domain offer. We also opened the small print under the plan cards, which is where the useful facts hide. One note before we start. GoDaddy showed us its UAE store, so every price below is in UAE dirhams (AED) and excludes tax. If you buy from another country your currency and numbers will differ, but the pattern is the same.
Quick answer
GoDaddy is fine for a small site if you value having your domain, email and hosting in one account, and you have budgeted for the renewal. It is a poor deal if you picked it for the headline price. Economy starts at AED 8.50 a month and renews at AED 43, about five times more. The bigger plans roughly double. Refunds are generous on annual plans (30 days) and tight on monthly ones (48 hours). Support is available around the clock by phone, and the WordPress plans are genuinely easy. Our advice: buy it knowing the second-year price, or look elsewhere.
| Starting price (UAE store) | AED 8.50 a month for the first 1-year term (Economy) |
| Price after the first term | AED 43 a month on the same plan |
| Hosting types | Shared (cPanel), Managed WordPress, VPS, High Performance shared |
| Storage | NVMe on every plan we checked |
| Uptime promise | 99.9 percent |
| Refund window | 30 days on annual plans, 48 hours on monthly plans |
| Support | 24/7, phone listed on every hosting page |
| Best for | One or two small sites that want domain, email and hosting together |
Price: what you pay in year one and after
Every GoDaddy plan card shows two numbers. The big one is the intro rate, labelled “For first 1-yr term”. Above it, smaller and crossed out, is the regular rate. That crossed-out figure is what you pay once the first term ends, and GoDaddy’s own disclaimer says renewal pricing can change on top of that.
Here is how the four shared plans line up, per month, on the UAE store:
| Plan | First term (AED/mo) | Regular (AED/mo) | Websites | NVMe storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Economy | 8.50 | 43.00 | 1 | 25 GB |
| Hosting for WordPress Basic | 11.00 | 55.00 | 1 | 10 GB |
| Deluxe | 29.00 | 59.00 | 10 | 50 GB |
| Ultimate | 39.00 | 79.00 | 25 | 75 GB |
Put Economy into yearly money and the gap gets real. The first year costs about AED 102. Every year after that costs about AED 516. Over three years that is roughly AED 1,134, so the true average is around AED 31.50 a month, not 8.50. WordPress Basic follows the same curve: about AED 132 in year one, then AED 660 a year.
Oddly, the more expensive plans are the better value over time. Deluxe and Ultimate only double at renewal, so if you run more than one site, Deluxe at AED 59 a month regular is not far from Economy at AED 43, and it covers ten sites instead of one.
Two more things from the small print. Prices exclude taxes and fees, including ICANN fees on domains. And products renew automatically until you cancel, which you can switch off in your GoDaddy account. We would do that on day one and set a calendar reminder instead, so the renewal is a decision rather than a surprise.
The free extras and their conditions
GoDaddy lists a free domain, free email and free SSL on its plans. All three are real, but each one has an asterisk or a caret next to it, and the footnotes matter.
The free domain needs an annual plan or longer, the domain has to be in your cart when you buy, and its term cannot be longer than the hosting term. It is free for the first year only. After that it renews at GoDaddy’s normal domain price, and there is an ICANN fee of AED 0.73 per domain per year from the start. That is a fair offer, as long as you know it ends.
The SSL certificate is free with annual plans or longer. On Economy, though, the SSL renews automatically after the first year at the then-current price. Deluxe and Ultimate list free, unlimited SSL for all your sites, and the WordPress Basic card says “no renewal fees”. If you are on Economy and want to avoid a paid certificate, check what your account offers before the first year ends. Our guide to the hidden costs of website hosting covers this kind of renewal trap across the market.
Domains on their own follow the same playbook as hosting. When we checked, a .com on the UAE store was AED 1 for the first year, but only with a three-year purchase, and each additional year was AED 85. So the AED 1 headline really means AED 171 for three years.
If you want to see how that compares with other registrars, our breakdown of how much a domain name costs has the wider picture.
Plans: shared, WordPress, High Performance and VPS
GoDaddy splits hosting into more products than it first appears. The Web Hosting page has two tabs, and the WordPress and VPS pages have their own plan sets. Here is how we would read them.
Standard shared hosting
Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate are classic cPanel hosting with Node.js support. Economy is one site with 25 GB, Deluxe is ten sites with 50 GB, and Ultimate is 25 sites with 75 GB. All of them include unmetered bandwidth, automatic daily backups that restore the whole account from the previous day, and data centers in North America and Europe. Nothing exotic, but the daily backups are a nice touch at this level, since some budget hosts charge for them.
Managed Hosting for WordPress
This is where GoDaddy is strongest for beginners. WordPress comes pre-installed, core updates run automatically, and there is a migration tool if you are moving an existing site. Every plan includes malware scanning and removal, a web application firewall, DDoS protection, daily backups and Patchstack vulnerability scanning. You can also try any of the three plans free for seven days.
Basic (AED 11, then AED 55) covers one site and 10 GB. Deluxe (AED 35, then AED 75) adds a staging site, a CDN and an SEO tool with 20 GB. Ultimate (AED 49, then AED 99) gives you three sites, 30 GB, WooCommerce, priority support, PHP version control, Object Cache Pro and performance monitoring. If you run a shop, Ultimate is the only WordPress plan that lists WooCommerce, so skip the cheaper two.
One thing confused us. The shared Web Hosting page lists a CDN on WordPress Basic, but the WordPress page only lists the CDN from Deluxe up. Ask GoDaddy which is right before you choose Basic for speed reasons. Staging is the feature we would actually pay for: it lets you test a theme or plugin update on a copy of the site before it touches the live one.
High Performance shared hosting
The second tab on the Web Hosting page is aimed at agencies and busy sites. These plans give you set amounts of RAM and CPU, a free dedicated IP and unlimited databases. Launch starts at AED 65 a month (AED 129 regular) with 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 100 GB and up to 50 sites. Expand, the top plan, is AED 189 (AED 399 regular) with 32 GB RAM and 16 vCPUs.
VPS
GoDaddy’s VPS prices are quoted for a three-year term, which makes them look cheaper next to the shared plans than they are. The smallest VPS (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB NVMe, Linux only) is AED 33 a month for the first three years and AED 55 after. You get root access, snapshot backups and cPanel or Plesk as options. It is a reasonable VPS, but compare the price after the three-year term with other VPS providers before you sign up for that long.
Email: the add-on most people end up buying
The hosting cards say “Free email”, but the card does not spell out what kind of mailbox it is or how long it stays free, so check both at checkout. If you need more than that, the paid Microsoft 365 plans are priced per mailbox, and like everything else they have a first-year rate and a regular rate.
Email Essentials is AED 9 per mailbox per month in year one and AED 29 after. Email Plus goes from AED 15 to AED 35. The plans with Office apps, Online Business Essentials and Business Professional, go from AED 29 to AED 49 and from AED 35 to AED 65. Email backup (AED 9 a month) and advanced email security (AED 18.33 a month) are extra. A five-person team on Email Essentials pays about AED 145 a month after year one, before any add-ons. That is the cost to weigh, not the “free email” line. Our list of the best email hosting providers shows cheaper ways to get a domain mailbox.
Watch the refund window here too. Email plans come with a 7-day money-back guarantee, not 30 days like hosting.
Performance and uptime
GoDaddy promises 99.9 percent uptime on its hosting, with the terms in section 9 of its Hosting Agreement. It also says its hosting can load pages up to twice as fast, mostly thanks to NVMe storage and a CDN on some plans. Those are GoDaddy’s claims. We did not run our own uptime monitor or load tests for this review, so we will not pretend to give you a measured number.
What we can say is that the hardware on paper is current. Every plan we looked at uses NVMe storage, which is the faster kind of SSD, and the shared plans show resource tools for CPU, memory, entry processes and I/O in the dashboard. If you want to know what NVMe changes in practice, the short version is faster reads and writes, which helps database-heavy sites like WordPress the most. Our guide to how SSD storage improves hosting performance explains why.
Our honest suggestion: if you sign up, put your site on a free uptime monitor for the first month and run a speed test a few times a day. If the numbers disappoint, you are still inside the 30-day refund window on an annual plan.
Support
Support is one of GoDaddy’s real strengths, at least in reach. Its hosting pages say the team is available 24/7, list a phone number on every product page, and describe the GoDaddy Guides as over 3,500 people in more than 20 countries working by chat, phone and email. The pages also show a 4.4 out of 5 Trustpilot score from more than 142,000 reviews, though that covers the whole company, not just hosting.
We did not contact support for this review, so we can’t rate the answers. Being able to call someone is still worth a lot to a beginner whose site has just gone blank. The one catch is that “Priority Support” appears only on the WordPress Ultimate plan, which suggests the queue on cheaper plans is the standard one. Our tip is the same as for any host: ask a pre-sales question by chat before you buy and see how quickly and clearly you get an answer.
Refunds and cancelling
The plan cards say “30-day money-back guarantee”, but the footnote adds an important detail. You can ask for a full refund within 30 days on annual plans, and within 48 hours on monthly plans. GoDaddy also says a hosting service that has already been performed is non-refundable.
So if you are unsure about GoDaddy, the annual plan is actually the safer trial, because you get a month to test it. A monthly plan gives you two days. Remember too that any free domain you claimed stays registered, and its renewal is a separate charge in later years.
Who GoDaddy hosting suits
GoDaddy works well for a small business owner who already has a domain there and wants one bill, one login and someone to phone when something breaks. It also suits a first WordPress site, where the managed plan handles updates, security scans and backups for you. And if you run several small sites, Deluxe is decent value because its renewal is only about double the intro price.
The WordPress Ultimate plan is a sensible pick for a small WooCommerce store that wants staging, caching and priority support without moving to a VPS.
Who should skip it
If you chose GoDaddy because Economy looked like the cheapest plan on the internet, think again. At AED 43 a month after year one, it costs more than many hosts charge for plans with more sites and storage. Bloggers on a tight budget, students and anyone who plans to stay several years on one small site will get more for their money elsewhere, and our list of the best cheap web hosting is a good place to start.
Skip it too if you need business email for a team and do not want to pay per mailbox on Microsoft 365, or if you are a developer who wants a cheap, plain VPS. GoDaddy’s VPS is fine, but its prices assume a three-year term.
Our verdict
GoDaddy is a competent, very large host with good WordPress tools, daily backups on its shared and WordPress plans, and round-the-clock phone support. Its weak spot is price over time. The first year is cheap on purpose, and the second year on the entry plans costs about five times as much. That is not hidden, the crossed-out price sits right on the card, but it is easy to miss when you are excited about a new domain.
If you go ahead, buy an annual plan so you get the 30-day refund window, switch off auto-renew, and pick Deluxe over Economy if there is any chance you will add a second site. You can see the current plans on GoDaddy’s web hosting page. And if the renewal price puts you off, that is a sensible reaction: compare it with a couple of other hosts’ second-year prices before you commit.
Frequently asked questions
Is GoDaddy hosting cheap?
Only in the first year. On the UAE store Economy is AED 8.50 a month for the first 1-year term and AED 43 a month after, so over three years it averages around AED 31.50 a month.
How much does GoDaddy hosting cost after the first year?
On the UAE store we checked, the regular rates are AED 43 a month for Economy, AED 55 for WordPress Basic, AED 59 for Deluxe and AED 79 for Ultimate. Taxes, domain renewals and add-ons come on top, and GoDaddy says renewal prices can change.
Does GoDaddy hosting include a free domain?
Yes, for the first year on annual or longer plans. You pay a small ICANN fee from the start, and from year two the domain renews at GoDaddy’s normal price.
What is GoDaddy’s refund policy for hosting?
You can get a full refund within 30 days on annual plans and within 48 hours on monthly plans. Microsoft 365 email plans have a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Is GoDaddy good for WordPress?
It is good for beginners. The managed WordPress plans include automatic updates, malware scanning, a firewall and daily backups, and Deluxe adds staging. For a store, choose Ultimate, the only WordPress plan that lists WooCommerce.
Does GoDaddy have 24/7 support?
Yes. GoDaddy says its hosting experts are available 24/7 by phone, and its pages also mention chat and email. Priority support is listed only on the WordPress Ultimate plan.
