Is GoDaddy Legit? What We Tell Clients in 2026

Is GoDaddy legit? Yes. GoDaddy is a real, publicly traded company and an ICANN-accredited domain registrar that has been in business since 1997, and it manages about 81 million domains for 20.5 million customers. It also has a security record you should know about, and its renewal prices are some of the highest in the business. This guide covers who owns GoDaddy, what its reviews really say, its breaches and the FTC order that followed, what a domain costs after the first year, and when we’d tell a business to use it.

We set up domains, DNS, hosting and email for small businesses every week. Every number below links to GoDaddy’s own pages and SEC filings, the FTC, the BBB, Trustpilot or one of our earlier price checks, and was checked on October 30, 2026.

Is GoDaddy legit?

Yes. GoDaddy is an ICANN-accredited registrar founded in 1997, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the biggest domain registrar, with about 81 million domains.

The quickest way to check any registrar is the public domain records. A Verisign RDAP lookup for godaddy.com shows the registrar as GoDaddy.com, LLC under IANA registrar ID 146, and you can confirm the same thing in ICANN’s lookup tool. GoDaddy’s 2015 IPO prospectus says it became ICANN accredited in 2000, so it has followed ICANN’s rules on transfers, renewals and contact details for more than 25 years.

You don’t have to take GoDaddy’s word for its size. As a public company, it reports its numbers to the SEC. Its 2025 annual report lists about 81 million domains under management at the end of 2025, roughly 21% of the 387 million domain names registered worldwide, and $4.95 billion in revenue for the year. Its third-quarter 2026 results, released October 29, 2026, show 20.5 million customers and $1.34 billion in revenue for the quarter.

GoDaddy isn’t a scam. The more useful questions are whether it keeps your site safe, what it costs once the promo ends, and how it treats customers, and those answers are more mixed.

Who owns GoDaddy?

GoDaddy is owned by its shareholders. It has traded on the New York Stock Exchange as GDDY since 2015, and Aman Bhutani is its CEO. Bob Parsons founded it in 1997.

The company’s history is laid out in its IPO prospectus. Bob Parsons started it in 1997 as Jomax Technologies, and it changed its name to GoDaddy in 1999. In 2011, private equity firms KKR and Silver Lake, along with Technology Crossover Ventures, made a majority investment. GoDaddy then went public in 2015 at $20 a share on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GDDY.

Today GoDaddy Inc. is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. Aman Bhutani signs its filings as Chief Executive Officer, and he’s quoted as CEO in the October 2026 earnings release. Because it’s public, GoDaddy has to disclose its finances, its lawsuits and its security incidents to investors, which is also how we know about the problems covered below.

Is GoDaddy safe?

For buying and holding a domain, yes. Its hosting has a weaker record: GoDaddy reported breaches in 2021 and 2022, and an FTC order now requires it to run a full security program.

Here’s what matters most if your website runs on GoDaddy. In its 2022 annual report, GoDaddy disclosed two incidents:

• In November 2021, someone used a compromised password to get into the provisioning system for its Managed WordPress hosting, affecting up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers.
• In December 2022, an unauthorized party installed malware on its cPanel hosting servers, and the malware intermittently redirected random customer websites to malicious sites.

GoDaddy said it believed these incidents were “part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group.” Then in January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission charged that since 2018 GoDaddy had failed to use reasonable security on its hosting, and that the failures led to several major breaches between 2019 and 2022. The FTC says those breaches put visitors at risk of being redirected to malicious websites. It also said GoDaddy misled customers about how secure its hosting was.

GoDaddy settled. The order bars it from misrepresenting its security, requires a comprehensive information security program for its hosting, and requires an independent assessor to review that program at the start and every two years after. GoDaddy’s latest annual report says the FTC approved the settlement on May 21, 2025, and that the hosting security requirements last for at least 20 years. The BBB’s summary of the order notes it was for settlement purposes only and isn’t an admission of guilt.

What does that mean for you? The incidents GoDaddy disclosed hit its hosting, not domain registrations. If you only register domains there, the bigger risk is your own account, so turn on two-step verification and keep the domain locked. If your website runs on GoDaddy hosting, keep your own backups, keep WordPress and plugins updated, and know who to call if the site starts redirecting somewhere strange. For a comparison of how a different company handles security, see is Cloudflare safe?

What do GoDaddy reviews say?

It depends on where you look. Trustpilot shows 4.4 stars from about 145,000 reviews, while BBB customer reviews average 1.06 out of 5, even though the BBB rates GoDaddy A+.

On Trustpilot, GoDaddy has a 4.4 “Excellent” TrustScore from 144,901 reviews. Two details on that page matter. Trustpilot labels GoDaddy as a company that “asks customers to review,” and it shows GoDaddy pays for a Trustpilot subscription. Invited reviews usually come from people who just had a support call go well, so they skew positive. GoDaddy’s own website builder page shows the same kind of rating and says outright that it’s “showing our 4 and 5 stars reviews.”

The Better Business Bureau tells a different story. GoDaddy.com, LLC is BBB accredited (since April 2000) and holds an A+ rating, which reflects how it responds to complaints. But the customer reviews on that profile average 1.06 out of 5 across 754 reviews. People who go out of their way to post on the BBB are usually upset. The latest ones on the profile complain about a move to GoDaddy’s new system, an email renewal that stopped working without the domain, and a point-of-sale setup.

Neither number is the full picture. Read together, they describe a company that’s legitimate but frustrating to some customers, and the complaints we read were about service and billing, not fraud.

Why does GoDaddy cost so much to renew?

GoDaddy makes its money on renewals. A .com is $0.01 for the first year with a three-year purchase, then $22.99 a year, about double what some registrars charge.

Here’s what GoDaddy’s .com page showed on October 30, 2026: “$0.01 /1st yr. 3-year purchase required. Additional year(s) $22.99.” In practice that means you pay about $46 up front for three years, and $22.99 every year after that. The other common extensions renew at similar prices:

The .net, .org and .co prices come from our Cloudflare vs GoDaddy domain pricing check. For comparison, a .com renews at $11.17 a year at Cloudflare (checked November 2) and $19.98 at Namecheap (checked November 3, see is Namecheap legit?). Over five years, one GoDaddy .com costs about $36 more than the same domain at Cloudflare, and the gap grows with every domain you own. The .com registry price went up for every registrar on November 1, 2026: Cloudflare’s .com rose from $10.46 to $11.17 and Namecheap’s renewal from $18.48 to $19.98, while GoDaddy’s stayed at $22.99.

The second cost is add-ons. Basic WHOIS privacy is free: GoDaddy’s help page on Domain Protection says Domain Privacy is added automatically to all eligible domains. But alerts for changes, protection against unauthorized transfers, and a grace period to recover an expired domain are sold separately as Full and Ultimate Domain Protection. GoDaddy also sells email, website and security products alongside your domain. None of that is a scam. It just means your yearly bill can end up well above the price you clicked on.

Is GoDaddy a good website builder?

For a simple site you want online fast, it’s fine. GoDaddy’s AI builder, Airo, has a free plan, and paid plans start at $9.99 a month billed annually or $19.99 month to month.

GoDaddy’s website builder is now built around Airo, which writes the pages, copy and layout from a few prompts. The free plan includes 50 AI credits a month with no credit card. On October 30, 2026, the paid plans were:

GoDaddy says annual plans include “an extra discount on your first year,” so check the renewal price before you pay for a year. One thing we like: GoDaddy says paid plans let you download your site’s code at any time, which makes leaving easier. Airo is clearly selling. GoDaddy’s latest results say it passed a $100 million annualized bookings run rate.

Where it falls short is growth. Once you need custom features, serious SEO control, or a site a developer can work on easily, most businesses end up on WordPress or Shopify. We break down that choice in WordPress vs Shopify. If you’re also looking at Wix, our review of whether Wix is legit covers its plan prices, renewals and why a Wix site can’t move to another host.

Is GoDaddy good for web hosting?

It works, and millions of sites run on it. Its breach history and FTC order are the reason we’d keep your own backups and not put everything with GoDaddy.

The FTC describes GoDaddy as one of the world’s largest web hosting companies, with about five million hosting customers. The issue is that two of the incidents above hit shared and Managed WordPress hosting, the products small businesses use most. The FTC order should make GoDaddy’s hosting more secure from here, since an outside assessor now checks it every two years. Whether it does will show over the next few years.

Our advice is the same whatever host you choose: make sure someone is updating WordPress, plugins and PHP, and that backups exist somewhere other than the host. If you’d rather not handle that yourself, our hosting starts at $15 a month, and we compared outside maintenance options in best WordPress maintenance services.

Should your business use GoDaddy?

It’s a safe place to buy a domain, but rarely the cheapest place to keep one. If cost matters, register or transfer elsewhere, and keep your domain, hosting and email separate.

GoDaddy is a fine choice if you want one company, one bill and 24/7 support, and you’re comfortable paying more for that convenience. It’s a worse fit if you own several domains, since the $22.99 renewals add up fast, or if you want a simple checkout without add-ons. If you already have domains at GoDaddy, there’s no emergency. Turn on two-step verification, keep auto-renew on, check what protection add-ons you’re actually paying for, and decide at your next renewal whether moving is worth it. If you decide to switch, here’s how to transfer a domain from GoDaddy to Cloudflare, step by step.

Whichever company you use, don’t let one login control everything. If your domain, DNS, website and email all sit in one account, a single locked account or bad day can take your whole business offline.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

GoDaddy is legit. It’s an ICANN-accredited registrar that’s been around since 1997, a public company that reports to the SEC, and the biggest domain registrar. Its weak spots are real: hosting breaches in 2021 and 2022, an FTC order over its security, and .com renewals of $22.99 a year after a one-cent first year. Use it if the convenience is worth the price, lock your account down, and keep your domain, DNS, website and email from all depending on one company.

Not sure what you’re paying GoDaddy for, or whether moving would save money? Talk to us and we’ll go through your account with you and tell you what’s worth keeping.