Here at PRONETS, we’re always looking for ways to optimize, improve, and benchmark our services. We recently had the opportunity to do a case study on a website’s load time & page speed on our hosting platform versus GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting platform.

Comparing Features

Below you will find a detailed breakdown of what PRONETS WordPress hosting includes compared to GoDaddy WordPress hosting.

GoDaddy "Ultimate Hosting"

WordPress Hosting
$20/monthly*
  • SSL certificate
  • 1 website
  • Fully-managed WordPress, theme, and plugin updates.
  • Website problems caused by supported theme & plugin updates are fixed by our in-house web developer.
  • Free website optimization & CDN included in setup
  • 15 minutes of 1 on 1 support for website & administrator system questions
  • Detailed monthly reports on traffic & search rankings
  • Low-cost licenses available for 40+ plugins & themes
  • “Unlimited” storage ¶
  • “Unlimited” visitors ¶
  • One email address at domain ¶¶ (one year)
  • 90-day backups
  • Daily malware scans
  • Full Web Application Firewall w/ Daily Scans
  • Yoast SEO included – no SEO performed.
  • Staging site
  • Advertising credits

PRONETS Hosting

WordPress Hosting
$40/monthly**
  • SSL certificate
  • 1 website
  • Fully-managed WordPress, theme, and plugin updates.
  • Website problems caused by supported theme & plugin updates are fixed by our in-house web developer.
  • Free website optimization & CDN included in setup
  • 15 minutes of 1 on 1 support for website & administrator system questions
  • Detailed monthly reports on traffic & search rankings
  • Low-cost licenses available for 40+ plugins & themes
  • 1 GB of storage***
  • 20K – 40K visitors***
  • One email address at domain (forever)
  • 90-day backups
  • Daily malware scans
  • Full Web Application Firewall w/ Daily Scans
  • Yoast SEO included – optimizations done.
  • Staging site
  • Advertising credits

* GoDaddy requires annual commitment for certain features included in hosting, discounts on services may be offered, usually only for first year. (Real upfront hosting cost: $240)

** PRONETS usually requires an annual commitment for first-time customers, but does not require payment of all hosting upfront. After first year, hosting reverts to month-to-month commitment with no loss of features.

*** PRONETS evaluates all storage & bandwidth overages on a case-by-case basis. We never force an upgrade in services and offer a-la-carte pricing for bandwidth & storage. 

¶ “Unlimited” is defined by GoDaddy as being subject to their discretion. If, you exceed your resources for storage or bandwidth, you may be forced to upgrade to a more expensive dedicated server or VPS packages. 

¶¶ GoDaddy email address is free for first year, has yearly cost afterwards.

The Hard Numbers

Now you know how our service stacks up to GoDaddy, let’s take a look at how it performs. For these tests we’ve compared the same site running on our infrastructure to the site running on GoDaddy’s servers. We’ve done everything we can to keep the test parameters the same, however we can’t control what GoDaddy changes on the WordPress install when setting up on their system.

Page Speeds

Our first test is to see how the site loads from Pingdom’s speed test servers in Washington, DC and San Francisco, CA. We ran our test around the same time of day, and recorded the load times & HAR files for each test.

As you can see, in both tests the site loaded faster on our server. In the case of Washington, DC, it loaded 230% faster! This is due to our server using lightning-fast caching, worldwide content-delivery networks, and being located on the East Coast. (We put our servers where your customers are!)

Page Sizes & Request Counts

Our next test is page size & request count.

The smaller your page is, the better, it saves your customers phone bandwidth, and does a ton to help it load faster. This one is pretty simple, our page with optimizations was 12% smaller.

Request count is technical, it refers to how many “HTTP requests” were made to load the page. The more of these, the more overhead your site has, it means that computers & phones are wasting more time talking to the server than rendering the page. In our test, the site running on GoDaddy’s hosting & optimizations had approximately 200% more requests. This can be very hard on older computers & phones.

Page Scores

We ran the site against two page speed scores. These look at various factors on the page and rank how well they’re optimized for certain factors. This tells you how well the site is doing at optimizing things that usually slow a website down.

PRONETS

Factors:

  • Deferred JavaScript
  • Specified a cache validator & use browser caching
  • Minify Javscript & CSS

GoDaddy

Factors:

  • Serving large unscaled images
  • Has many redirects
  • Does have some browser caching

Our Takeaway & Recommendations

Superior Performance

As shown by the data above, our server & talent at optimizing sites outperforms what GoDaddy can offer. Especially so for customers based on the East Coast. Plus we use worldwide Content-Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize delivery to other locations.

Superior Security

Our platform has superior security, we use a Web Application Firewall called Wordfence. This firewall & malware scanner is optimized SPECIFICALLY for WordPress and has a cutting-edge team behind it researching & releasing rules & patches for exploits daily. In comparison GoDaddy uses a generic enterprise-grade security software called Sucuri. In our research, it appears that GoDaddy’s main reason for using Sucuri is that they acquired the company that owns it.

Hosting for All Businesses

We design our hosting & services to provide premium services & performance to all businesses that we host.

Per GoDaddy’s hosting agreement, their “Unlimited” storage & visitors is at their discretion. Specifically, “In the event the bandwidth, number of websites or disk space usage of your website presents a risk to the stability, performance or uptime of our servers, data storage, networking or other infrastructure, you may be required to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server, or we may take action to restrict the resources your website is utilizing.” GoDaddy’s managed VPS offerings that could host WordPress would start at $130 / month.

We don’t limit or design our services to lead to an upsell. Per GoDaddy, their service is “designed to host most personal, small business and organization websites.” Our services are built to serve individuals, small businesses, all the way up to large multi-regional businesses. if your site should end up needing more resources to stay stable, we provide a reasonable a-la-carte quote on doing so (per-GB of storage or bandwidth).

Experience & Personalized Support

Finally, we think our best feature is our support. We have knowledgeable & experienced web development staff who know how to help you. Plus, your site gets a dedicated account manager, so you never have to worry about whether you got the good support representative.

Plus, if you’re near Galax, VA (30 mins from Mount, Airy NC – 30 minutes from Wytheville, VA) we are happy to meet you with you to help you learn more about your site, and design a plan for you!

If you want to learn more about WordPress hosting please get in touch! We can be the one solution to your technology needs.

Sources

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