I recently purchased a domain name with GoDaddy and they were offering a hosting plan at a discounted rate with it. The domain purchase plus the hosting plan was less expensive than just purchasing a domain name on its own, so I decided to buy the whole package just to test Windows hosting.
I selected the Windows Deluxe Plan and was surprised that it now supported ASP.NET 4.0. The last time I tried it, only 3.5 was being supported. I decided that this would be a good time to move all of my web sites over from 1&1 to GoDaddy. I needed a host that supported PHP/MySQL while I transitioned all of my web sites over to ASP.NET. GoDaddy seemed like a good choice for this.
The hosting plan cost $8.14 CDN per month, and includes 150 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 50 FTP users, 500 e-mails, auto-responders, 2 MSSQL databases, 25 MySQL databases, unlimited domains and subdomains, SSH and FTPS access, all versions of ASP.NET, MVC2, and PHP5. This is more than sufficient for what I need.
Setting up the first site was a problem. I couldn’t connect the domain name to the web site folder. An e-mail to their tech support team promptly fixed that. I then added another domain, and it was not recognized by the server. I couldn’t connect the folders to the domain. I contacted tech support and they said that doing this sort of thing would be a problem. It works better with their Linux hosting packages. This is something I do all the time with my Linux hosting plan on 1&1.
This is a real problem with my sites. I have multiple web sites, and more will be created later, and I need a way to create new web sites on a server without contacting their IT department every time. Unfortunately, I canceled my account near the end of the month before renewal. The last time I canceled my account with GoDaddy was when they weren’t adequately supporting URL rewriting in IIS.
The Windows hosting accounts at GoDaddy would work well if you just have one web site, even if it had subdomains. If you have multiple domains, it will be problematic setting them up. Hopefully, GoDaddy can fix this in the near future because I think that of all the ASP.NET shared hosting packages out there, their plans have the best features. Their tech support is also very good and very helpful, with short turn-around times. I would recommend their Windows hosting plans if you have a single web site only to host.