GoDaddy Vs 1and1: Linux Shared Hosting Features & Pricing

Here’s Round 1 of our comparison between 1and1 and GoDaddy. Today we’re going to have a deeper look into each web hosts shared hosting plans.

Shared Hosting Features

One thing I’ve noticed about GoDaddy and 1and1 is that they are not oversellers like many of their competitors. Their basic hosting packages offer 10GB of storage space which is much more reasonable that offering 2TB in my opinion. Chances are you won’t use that much space anyway.

Let’s compare their shared hosting packages:

As far as functionnalities goes, both web hosts offer about the same thing except for GoDaddy who offers Ruby On Rails support on their Deluxe and Premium plans. Another feature which is nice to have is SSH access. I tend to do a lot of things through a command shell and I think that more experienced users will agree about the utility of having SSH access.

There’s also the CRON feature I can’t live without. The CRON allows you to scheduled tasks to be performed automatically. To this day, I’ve never had a site which didn’t use CRON. Both web hosts offers CRON management but 1and1 only has it on their Business and Developer plans.

Extra Features

Both web hosts offer a lot of extra features especially 1and1. With any 1&1 hosting plan, you also get a free WebsiteBuilder, DynamicSiteCreator (adds Flash animation to your website). With 1and1’s Home, Business and Developer plan, you get SpeadShirt Merchandising to design and brand your own products for sale on your website.

1and1 gives you some nice vouchers. You can get up to $200 in Microsoft adCenter credits, up to $100 in Google AdWords advertising, up to $75 of Yahoo Search Marketing credits and a $100 voucher for Citysearch.

On GoDaddy’s part, they offer less extra features. Some of them include over 290 greeting cards designs (which you could find anywhere on the web for free in my opinion) and a LightWebmail access for PDAs which can come really handy.

GoDaddy also offers some PPC marketing vouchers: a $24 voucher for Google AdWords and $49 in Microsoft adCenter credits.

Control Panel

1and1.com and GoDaddy.com both have their own homemade control panels. I have tried both and unfortunately I gotta say I am not impressed by neither one of them. If I had to pick one, I’d say that 1and1’s control panel is more intuitive and a bit faster (although they are both kind of slow).

I found GoDaddy’s control panel to be sort of confusing and that’s not good considering I’ve been managing web servers for a decade and a half! It took me over 15 minutes to figure out how to setup a mail forwarder with GoDaddy’s control panel.

Click on the screenshots to enlarge

Pricing

I like the fact that GoDaddy and 1&1 both offers short term contracts. This way you can’t lose a lot of money if you’re unsatisfied with their service. One thing that isn’t mentioned in the comparison grid above is that you get the first three months free on 1and1’s Home and Developer hosting plans.

Also the fact that 1and1 offers some really, really nice PPC marketing vouchers is very appealing because advertising can be quite expensive.

Other than that, 1and1 and GoDaddy both offer affordable web hosting packages so nothing to complain about here.

Conclusion

Based on pricing and features only, 1and1 gives you more for less. GoDaddy’s Economy Plan only gives you the possibility to host one website per account and I think that’s not enough (at least compared to 1and1’s Beginner package which allows 20 websites on a single account).

Also the fact that you get at least 1 free domain name with 1and1.com is a plus. Considering GoDaddy is one of the largest domain name registrar on the web, I think they could top that easily.

Stay tuned for round 2 of 1and1 Vs GoDaddy coming soon!

External links:

• GoDaddy.com Website
• 1and1.com Website

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