Amazon Lightsail vs. GoDaddy

Amazon Lightsail

GoDaddy

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Amazon Lightsail	Score 9.6 out of 10	N/A	Amazon Lightsail is a virtual private server (VPS) designed to present an easy-to-use cloud platform that offers everything needed to build an application or website, plus a cost-effective, monthly plan.	$3.50 per month
GoDaddy	Score 7.4 out of 10	N/A	GoDaddy Web Hosting provides users with storage, email addresses, and unlimited bandwith.	$6.99 per month with an annual term

Pricing

Amazon Lightsail

GoDaddy

Editions & Modules

512 MB Linux: $3.50
per month
1 GB Linux: $5.00
per month
2 GB Linux: $10.00
per month

Basic: as low as $6.99
per month with an annual term
Basic: as low as $10.49
per month with an annual term
Premium: as low as $13.49
per month with an annual term
Commerce: as low as $14.99
per month with an annual term

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Amazon Lightsail	GoDaddy
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Optional

Additional Details

—

Discounts available for annual subscription.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Amazon Lightsail	GoDaddy
Considered Both Products	Amazon Lightsail PB Pintu Barman Web Developer Chose Amazon Lightsail The only reason to shift from liquid web to Amazon Lightsail is the cost. Amazon Lightsail's cost is very low as compared to liquid web. Incentivized Helpful? AP Arpit Patel Student Chose Amazon Lightsail Amazon Lightsail is ideal for beginners looking for a low-cost VPS to try out new things. It's especially useful if you're at a hackathon and need a quick way to prototype a quick idea. I would never recommend Lightsail for any kind of production work. In terms of uptime, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon Lightsail I believe Lightsail has worse support than DigitalOcean and the pay more for better service model is not great as most customers are trying it for the first time. They are both very fast to set up and get started, but we went with AWS Lightsail because we were familiar with … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon Lightsail Linode and Digital Ocean are far more reliable than Amazon Lightsail. I would recommend against hosting any production applications in Lightsail. Even for prototyping, I would also suggest using the VPS provider of your choice for your production application because you can … Incentivized Helpful? Sandesh Singh FrontEnd Development Engineer Chose Amazon Lightsail Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality … Incentivized Helpful?	GoDaddy Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy is simple to use the platform that's why I elected the GoDaddy platform. Incentivized Helpful? Josh Edney Executive Pastor Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy is just more credible and has been in the industry longer. Incentivized Helpful? Kyle Bergeron IT Manager Chose GoDaddy We haven't really considered any others. GoDaddy has been our go to for hosting and domain registration needs. Incentivized Helpful? Manmeet Singh.. Brand Manager Chose GoDaddy Their backend is terrible as compared to Godaddy , also HostGator is slow as compared to Godaddy .I would like to also tell HostGator services are not good as compared to Godaddy , which included hosting , domain name , website builder , also many many more. Incentivized Helpful? AL Anatoly Lubarsky Founder and lead developer Chose GoDaddy SoftLayer and HighVelocity are better in terms of advanced web hosting and dedicated hosting than GoDaddy in my opinion. GoDaddy's main business is domain hosting and basic web hosting and GoDaddy is better at it in my opinion. Amazon Route 53 provides simple domain and web … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy is able to be integrated from these various platforms. I haven't used much of other services such as Host Gator, but GoDaddy's relative ease of use makes it a relatively simple platform for your small business needs. It does not quite plug and play, but it's not too far … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy Best customer service and fees when first becoming a client. Very helpful, supportive, and full of kindness when making website hosting changes. Follow up and good product offering. When I called to begin using the service they were helpful and switched it over for me at no fee … Incentivized Helpful? Joshua Day Internet Marketing Manager Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy's website builder is more robust than these other website hosting sites. I have used many different platforms, and GoDaddy is easier, faster, and more efficient in getting a website up and running, as well as maintaining it for a business that wants to grow. I am … Incentivized Helpful? Alex Greenwood Principal and Owner Chose GoDaddy I found Squarespace to be pretty user-unfriendly compared to GoDaddy. Their sites were hard to update and looked cheap. Incentivized Helpful? Jim Nelson Lead Developer Chose GoDaddy Whenever new clients come to me for website development, I begin our relationship by asking about domain registration and website hosting. I cringe when they say they use GoDaddy and often warn them that additional time and effort may be required to accomplish their goals. … Incentivized Helpful? David Fox President \| Sales & Marketing Advisor Chose GoDaddy Flywheel and WP Engine are both more expensive but they offer more bells and whistles if you need them. I think WP Engine recently bought Flywheel so their services are very similar. GoDaddy offers more standard options that are more affordable. Network Solutions is slightly … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy For my own business website I did switch to BigCommerce because they offered features that weren't available at the time with Go Daddy, such as sales tax rates for every city/state, and products were limited to I think 10 or 20 options at the time and I needed 100+ options for … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy has gotten too big for themselves. They have gone very corporate, you can't really get support as easily as you used to, and their pricing is ridiculous. Not to mention they sneak things into your cart during the checkout process and reel you in with introductory … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy We use GoDaddy because of institutional inertia. To be honest, most of the big-name registrars and web hosts out there are pretty terrible and suffer from the same issues with transfers, uptime, and support. I want to try evaluating more alternatives soon, but honestly, the … Incentivized Helpful? KT Karina Tama -Rutigliano CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Chose GoDaddy I thought they are a good company but [in my opinion] they are not. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy We had considered wix before selecting GoDaddy, however, it did not seem as easy to use, especially the website templates. The features we needed for the company website were not all readily available in wix, so we finally chose Godaddy & WordPress hosting for the website. The … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy Pricing was just better and domains are simple to keep organized. Incentivized Helpful? Emily Hammell Marketing and Communications Manager Chose GoDaddy We had used a few different platforms in the past, including Wix and Squarespace. These alternative platforms offered much more robust design elements that were more customizable and attractive, by far. These platforms weren't as cost-effective for our organization and didn't … Incentivized Helpful? Anne Theriault Internet & Small Business Mentor Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy works well with Wordpress and many Wordpress plugins. GoDaddy has fast page loading speeds and experienced customer service. The price is fair for anyone looking to begin a blog or website and doesn't want to invest too much in hosting. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy We are only now shopping around for an alternative, and have considered a local provider most seriously, but so far, no move is planned. GoDaddy is good enough as-is - we will see if we choose to step away from it, in favor of better support, less errors and more up time. So … Incentivized Helpful? Carter Durham Chief Creative Officer and Head of Product Chose GoDaddy GoDaddy compares well to other options and the tool used for building or updating the site content is relatively easy to use and problem-free. WordPress may have more options as far as templates are concerned, and we sometimes run into those constraints with GoDaddy as far as … Incentivized Helpful? page V CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Chose GoDaddy With GoDaddy: I can always expect that their support will be helpful and positive. That I can reach operators by phone or chat That I can find my domains and host in one place. That I can also purchase and access email for myself and my team. Incentivized Helpful? Meredith Brough Business Owner Chose GoDaddy I looked at several website builder options. Some looked good complicated, most were too expensive, then I found GoDaddy Web Builder and I loved the pricing, the functionality, and the variety of styles and options. It’s as easy as building a scrapbook page. I have shared it … Incentivized Helpful? KE Kiara Elder Senior Office Manager Chose GoDaddy I would recommend the other platforms for ease of use and overall functionally. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose GoDaddy We evaluated Bigrock but their support was very lethargic. Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Amazon Lightsail

GoDaddy

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
	Amazon Lightsail 8.8 Ratings 6% above category average	GoDaddy - Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime	10.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling	5.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing	9.30 Ratings	00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates	8.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Monitoring tools	8.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images	8.90 Ratings	00 Ratings
Operating system support	10.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Security controls	10.00 Ratings	00 Ratings
Automation	10.00 Ratings	00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Amazon Lightsail	GoDaddy
Small Businesses	DigitalOcean Droplets Score 9.7 out of 10	Ecwid by Lightspeed Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.0 out of 10	10Web Score 7.5 out of 10
Enterprises	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.0 out of 10	Adobe Experience Manager Score 8.6 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Amazon Lightsail	GoDaddy
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (0 ratings)	8.1 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Amazon Lightsail	GoDaddy
Likelihood to Recommend	It is best suited for the small applications which do not need much CPU powers to executes tasks and when integration with other AWS services but it is less suited for the applications which need very frequent auto scaling for the performance purpose, as AWS Lightsail did not support system downgrading so not recommend to use in this case. Incentivized PB Pintu Barman Web Developer Read full review	I have purchased domains through a few different sites over the years and the ones I purchased from other companies, I always had issues with. The ones I have purchased through GoDaddy were no problem at all. They have easy help pages that helps you set up step-by-step no matter where you will use your domain. I now only purchase them from GoDaddy. They also have coupon codes where you can sometimes get them for 99 cents, especially if you are a new user. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Value instances packages Better organized UI Easy billing resulting in higher efficiency Cheaper than competition Better support staff Can adjust for any bills you may have incurred by accident Incentivized Sandesh Singh FrontEnd Development Engineer Read full review	Customer service is definitely number one here. The fact that they are open for calls 24/7 and have a great support team is a really nice thing to have when you aren't fully versed in all things domains/cpanel/email etc. They also usually answer quickly. Ease of use throughout the website. It's made for the non web savvy individual, clear and instructive for proper usage. I think they know their target market well and it's nice to see that their website shows just that. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Lack of flexibility in terms of configuration Customer service tiers - have to pay more for better service Usage not shown in obvious place Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Support agents are woefully undertrained, even in knowledge of their own products. Support agents will always try to upsell you, even when you're dealing with an urgent, high-impact issue. There's no guarantee of uptime, and there will often be gaps in service as part of normal procedures. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	We can't really choose anyone else and the cost/effort of moving all of the hosted data would be extremely large, and we just have to stick to them, and hope they improve service Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	My overall experience with Amazon Lightsail is very good, and the online community of Lightsail users is very large and its helps to resolve any kind of issue i faced on my server. I also like the integration of other AWS services with Amazon Lightsail like we can export our Lightsail instance into ec2 server using snapshots. Incentivized PB Pintu Barman Web Developer Read full review	Some integration could be much cleaner and smoother. Seems it used to be easier. Plus, they took away the catch all email feature. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	I think a lot of companies can learn from GoDaddy's support team. I have found: Chat or phone support is almost always available. Their agents are friendly and helpful. Their agents seem to care and be knowledgeable about a wide range of issues. I rarely have to escalate my problem to get the support that I need. If they can't help me, then they can tell me why something is happening and direct me to resources that can fix my problem. Incentivized page V CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Amazon Lightsail is ideal for beginners looking for a low-cost VPS to try out new things. It's especially useful if you're at a hackathon and need a quick way to prototype a quick idea. I would never recommend Lightsail for any kind of production work. In terms of uptime, Lightsail has proved unreliable. Occasionally, the instance will simply crash or reboot at random. Without warning, Amazon will perform maintenance on your Lightsail instance. Lightsail's networking is likewise lacking, with no support for IPv6. Incentivized AP Arpit Patel Student Read full review	GoDaddy is able to be integrated from these various platforms. I haven't used much of other services such as Host Gator, but GoDaddy's relative ease of use makes it a relatively simple platform for your small business needs. It does not quite plug and play, but it's not too far off, either. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Hosting a production application on Lightsail will guarantee you a loss Saved lots of time for our prototyping Other VPS providers are better Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Definitely a positive ROI because we are able to have a website to get information out there in addition to our social media pages. It brings everything together in one place. Companies with websites are way more credible than those without. We are planning on hosting our online store through GoDaddy, as well, which will also increase our ROI. Incentivized Kirsten Rodriguez Realtor Read full review
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