I’ve had GeekGhost for around a year now, after moving away from GoDaddy for my shared web hosting needs. This post is a comparison and review of the two.
I would say that it’s overwhelmingly better to be with GeekGhost. GeekGhost has a very simple business model. They advertise a price for different services, they deliver what they promise for that price, and that’s about it.
GoDaddy’s business model is based on offering a super cheap up front introductory price, larger ongoing price, and then to upsell you by making their initial product garbage. As an example, they charge (like most hosts still do) for a basic SSL certificate. They then make it very hard to actually use, to the point that their “tech support” can’t help get it installed. But, they “solve” the problem by offering a premium service of installing/maintining SSL certificates. Compare this to GeekGhost, who provide free included SSL certificates with all their hosting options, and automatically install/maintain those certificates for you.
Billing on GeekGhost is nice and simple. You can authorize recurring charges, but they also let you pay one month at a time, manually making a payment each month. I actually like this option, because it puts me in complete control. They just remind me each month, and I pay. Businesses like this, know they have to give you ongoing service, if they’re going to keep you as a customer.
GeekGhost doesn’t have phone support like GoDaddy. While that’s disappointing, their online ticket support does give timely answers, that are as good or better. GoDaddy’s support is actually sales agents, who’s primary purpose is to upsell customers on premium services. With GeekGhost, the support people just provide support. When I was with GoDaddy, I regularly got unsolicited calls trying to get me to “review” my needs, in hopes I’d buy something more. GeekGhost seems content to keep charging me the same monthly fee for the same monthly service.
Not everything with GeekGhost is perfect. They’re servers seem to be set to “auto-block” a little to easy when dealing with invalid login credentials, or “excessive” login attempts on certain services (e.g. email). This can be quite a nuisance. However, they are generally helpful in resolving these issues. They resolved the most recent case of this in 15 minutes for me. This is the one big issue, that if properly resolved would let me unambiguously recommend them overall (not just against GoDaddy).
The only thing I use GoDaddy for is registering a domain. They do a fine job, and have a nice online interface for managing domains. GeekGhost does a fine job of this as well. When moving from GoDaddy to GeekGhost, it works best to just keep GoDaddy as the registrar and have it hosted on GeekGhost. It’s a good strategy to keep the two separate, as it makes future moves easier, and avoids “lock-in” situations.