Hosting and domain registration isn’t the business it once was.
Providing space on a server and handling the domain creation process isn’t enough any longer, people want and expect more.
As one of the biggest providers of these services GoDaddy understands the evolving marketplace and has put in place a suite of useful tools for those involved in website creation, administration and marketing.
Here are ten of them that demonstrate their commitment to making domain administration and website management easier for those that do it every day.
- We've also highlighted the best shared web hosting
GoDaddy Pro
GoDaddy knows its customer base well. They’re made up of those from a varied selection of occupations that includes commercial IT people, bloggers, corner shop owners and web professionals, to name just a few.
For those that have one domain or website administration is relatively straightforward, but for those that handle many, some extra help is at hand.
GoDaddy Pro is a free to use facility that helps you manage multiple websites, and different clients for them through a single easy-to-follow interface.
Along with the site management convenience that GoDaddy Pro offers, they also have a useful mechanism for billing clients for site service contracts, with whatever additional services that they’ve taken (Backups, SEO, etc.)
For web professionals managing a dynamic hosting and web services business, GoDaddy Pro provides a direct means to keep on top of the workload and help them deliver a service that will impress their clients.
Bulk Domain Search
Your marketing team has come up with ten different names for their new product, and they’d like to explore what the situation is regarding available domains.
You could type each one in, and all the extensions (.com, .net, .org, etc.) for each, or you could use the GoDaddy Bulk Domain Search to do most of the hard work for you.
Taking a simple list of potential domain names, and clicking the extensions you’d like to use, and a single click will reveal if any are already registered.
It will also reveal if any domain name is too long, as they can be a maximum of 63 characters not including the extension, or 64 if you use .uk, .com or .org.
And, it will point out if the choices contain anything other than the allowed letters, numbers, and hyphens, and if the hyphens are at the beginning or end (another no-no).
Should everything be good, and you then wish to proceed with registering up to 500 domains, GoDaddy offers discounts on multiple registrations, and there is no need to enter the information elsewhere.
SmartLine
In 2016 GoDaddy bought FreedomVoice, a company that specialises in creating an appropriate separation between the business user and mobile phone calls.
Giving out a phone number for business on the personal phone you use outside office hours is fraught with difficulties, especially when it is time to move to another job or you take a vacation.
The GoDaddy SmartLine app developed by FreedomVoice offers the solution with a redirected virtual number that is distinct from the one allocated by the SIM card you use.
This business number has a custom voicemail greeting, appears on Caller ID information for those you ring and can have specific work hours that it operates with voicemail coverage outside those.
It can even take those voicemails and transcribe them into text for you to read quickly.
For just $5.17 (£3.99) per month, you get SmartLine Basic with 100 call minutes per month and 100 texts or pictures sent or received. Creating extra texts beyond the 100 cost 1p each and extra call time is 2p for every six seconds.
For those that call often would probably be better suited with SmartLine Unlimited at $10.33 (£7.99) per month. In this context, ‘Unlimited’ translates into minutes and texts based on Fair Usage policy up to 2,000 minutes and 2,000 texts per month.
To be clear these costs and quotas are in addition to whatever call time and texts you have agreed with your existing carrier, as the service uses conventional mobile communications and not WiFi for the very best quality.
Domain Broker
It’s a fact of modern life in the business world that scattergun approaches to problems are often deployed rather than surgical strikes.
Because of this companies often register domains they don’t need or use, and they remain an asset that has overheads but no return on investment.
Maybe they’re just waiting for someone to come along and make them a reasonable offer for that domain, or they’ve entirely forgotten that they registered it, or possibly why.
The GoDaddy Domain Broker is a service where one of their team with contact the current owner to see if he or she is willing to sell the domain name you are interested. They’ll do all we can to get the name at the lowest possible price for you.
The fee for handling the process is $63.31 (£48.99) plus a 20% of the finally agreed price if the domain transfer is ultimately successful. These costs don’t include the cost of the domain name when that is agreed.
As the fee is non-refundable, you should check that the domain isn’t in use before asking them to inquire about selling it. While it is entirely possible that an actively used domain can be bought, but the price is likely to be higher than one that isn’t.
Domain Value Appraisal
On the flip-side of the Domain Broker coin is the GoDaddy Domain Value Appraisal tool.
This tool has two practical uses; one for those who have a domain they wish to sell and another for those looking to buy a domain.
If you have an existing domain that you wish to release and are curious how much it might be worth, the GoDaddy Domain Value Appraisal will give you a ball-park valuation. And, it will also tell you if it has previously sold, and for how much.
The valuation is based on the extension (.com is best), if it contains a popular keyword and the domains prior sale history if one exists. While this number might not accurately represent what it is worth to those that want or own the domain, but it’s a decent start point for any negotiations or sales.
This tool also presents any extensions to the domain name that aren’t registered.
Express Malware Removal
There are numerous ways that unwanted software can sneak on to a site, especially if you have comments active on a forum or a database component.
That these things happen is unfortunate, but they need to be addressed quickly before your site's reputation is damaged by it being distributed to any visitors.
The GoDaddy Express Malware Removal solution does what it says on the tin, providing both proactive prevention and identified threat removal with a 30-minute response window.
Should GoDaddy detect anything undesirable on your hosted site, they’ll immediately inform you, and they’ll also keep you in the loop until all the malware has been located and removed.
Also, the service also keeps an eye on changes to your DNS, SSL and WhoIs, as well as spam lists and uptime performance. What you effectively get with it is the equivalent of having an extra employee with web security responsibilities, but at a fraction of the cost.
The cost of the service is currently on offer at $249.36 (£192.99) to begin, with the renew costing the $306.21 (£236.99) per annum when that first year expires.
GoCentral
Statistically, the number of people that need a website outnumbers those with the technical expertise to build one from scratch.
However, as GoDaddy demonstrates with their GoCentral toolkit, to build and deploy a website can be much easier than most non-technical people might imagine.
There are three components to GoCentral; Website Builder, Online Store and Website Templates.
The Website Builder is a simple to use tool for constructing a wide range of website types, where you get to enter the content while GoDaddy worries about HTML and CSS style sheets.
The Online Store is an enhanced version of Website Builder that comes with e-commerce functionality, allowing you to build a commercial selling site rapidly and without expert help.
And, the Website Templates are, as you might expect, a very wide selection of pre-designed site templates that you can then customise in the Website Builder. Search for the sort of site you want to make, and invariably there will be some relevant templates to get you started.
Where GoCentral is most useful is when you need a website in a hurry, and it is important to present a professional looking site within a few days or even hours of the requirement being identified.
Even those with little or no web technology skills should be able to get a site up and running in a short timeframe with GoCentral.
Website Backup
Hackers have more than one way of disrupting a smoothly running website, and after using it as a repository for malware, the next most common activity is defacing it.
In these scenarios the culprit is often a disgruntled ex-employee or someone pushing an agenda, but whatever the reason they might find a way to make unwelcome changes to your content.
If that happens to you, the best policy is to return the site to its previous state, rather than trying to find every change. And, to do that easily you’ll need a Website Backup.
The GoDaddy Website Backup tool is a low-cost facility that can automatically secure your entire site on a daily basis, or selectively backup a file, folder of the entire database on demand.
It can also download to local storage, as a secondary line of defence, and you can restore the whole site or parts of it with a single click.
Every day the site is also scanned for malware, so you don’t inadvertently restore that too, and support staff is on hand if you have any issues with backup or restoration.
The cost of the service is modest and based entirely on the amount of data that makes up your site. For basic sites that only need 5 GB of backup storage that could be as low as $2.58 (£1.99) per month ($3.88 or £2.99 to renew). And, even big sites that might need 50 GB of capacity are only $6.46 (£4.99) a month ($9.04 or £6.99 to renew).
They’re happy to deploy this inexpensive service on sites that GoDaddy doesn’t host, in case you wondered.
Online Bookkeeping
As part of the GoDaddy Email & Office suite, you can access an Online Bookkeeping solution that is perfect for small entrepreneurs that use Amazon or eBay to sell their wares or services.
Traditionally it’s a complicated exercise to get credit card approval and manage all the possible means of getting paid. Online Bookkeeper provides an easy way to accept credit, debit card and ACH payments without all the hassle of having card readers and other paraphernalia.
Having all that that functionality costs only $3.88 (£2.99) a month ($5.17 or £3.99 when renewed), and you can expand that functionality to include local sales tax, importing of bank and credit card transactions, and import sales data from your Amazon, PayPal, eBay and Etsy for $7.75 (£5.99) ($9.04 or £6.99 when renewed) with their ‘Essentials’ package.
For those with serious business ambitions, they also offer a ‘Premium’ Online Bookkeeping option at $10.34 (£7.99) per month and $12.92 (£9.99) when renewed. That can also generate recurring invoices, making it ideal for those businesses that provide a monthly service or similar.
WordPress Theme Directory
Alongside the selection of Website Builder themes that GoDaddy offers elsewhere, they also have an impressive choice of WordPress ones to accelerate deployment for those that like WordPress technology.
These themes have all been built to deliver a professional styling to whatever project you have planned and can be directly plugged into GoDaddy hosted WordPress with just a few clicks.
We counted over 170 custom themes, providing something appropriate for most business users. Once additional custom logos, fonts and colour selections have been made, it is highly unlikely that your WordPress site will be confused with another.
And, should you feel like a change of scenery, you are free to browse the possibilities at GoDaddy and apply them to your existing content.
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