If you’re in the market for a web hosting service, GoDaddy is almost certainly on your shopping list. And though its various tiers include email hosting options, the company also offers its own rebranded version of Microsoft 365 Business Premium. While it offers feature parity and many of the same advantages as Microsoft’s hosted email offering, GoDaddy’s service has a few distinctions that set it apart. The company has done some extensive work on building its own management portal, and it’s also added additional tiers focused on email rather than productivity.
If you’re a GoDaddy customer, this platform is a no-brainer. But if you’re starting from scratch in your search for a full-fledged email and productivity suite, GoDaddy may not tempt you from our two Editors’ Choice award winners, Google Workspace Business Standard and the original Microsoft 365 Business Premium.
GoDaddy Microsoft 365 Pricing and Plans
GoDaddy provides three tiers of Microsoft 365 Business Premium services. At the low end, there’s Online Essentials, which includes the Online Office apps and email hosting. That’ll run you $7.99 per user per month and includes 1TB of online storage. The next tier is the Business Premium level, which costs $8.99 per user per month and steps up to 50GB of mailbox storage, 1TB of OneDrive storage, and locally installed versions of Office as well as Microsoft business apps like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. This level includes HIPAA-compliant email. Finally, the Premium Security tier ($16.99 per user per month) protects your email with end-to-end encryption and adds searchable archiving.
If you’re not up for all the bells and whistles of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium platform, GoDaddy still has email hosting options for you as long as you’re a web hosting customer. These are not only affordable, but they’re also nicely featured even when compared to dedicated low-cost hosted email offerings such as Fastmail or even Zoho Mail.
The host’s Email Essentials plan goes for $1.99 per user per month when billed annually and includes 10GB of email storage and calendaring. The Email Plus plan ($3.99 per user per month on an annual basis) ups email storage to 50GB. Both have support for multiple domains as well as antivirus and spam filtering. If you need more than what these two tiers offer, you’ll get bumped into one of the Microsoft 365 tiers. Unfortunately, none of these services have a free trial available for evaluation, which is an oversight that GoDaddy really needs to address.
Getting Started
Getting started with GoDaddy’s email offerings presumes you already have a GoDaddy account with a hosted domain. For many, this will be the biggest barrier to entry if you are using a different registrar. However, adding the service to an already configured domain can be a plus—GoDaddy handles this setup on the back end, which takes away a major irritation of setting up Microsoft 365.
Adding an account is simple: You select the tier you want to add, and a wizard walks you through picking an account name and password. In the end, assuming you chose Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you’ll get a QR code that you can scan with your smartphone to download apps. While this is a little gimmicky, it does add a level of polish that you don’t get with Microsoft 365 out of the box.
The GoDaddy Microsoft 365 Business Management Portal
It’s a bit of a mouthful, but once you get a few accounts set up, you’ll want to poke around GoDaddy’s own Microsoft 365 Business Management portal. Here, you can configure multi-factor authentication and indicate whether or not you’ll support third-party clients. This includes clients that run on POP, IMAP, and SMTP. An interesting addition to this screen is a “Tips on Protecting Your Account” article that does a fairly decent job of outlining best practices for email security. Honestly, it was refreshing to see, and this kind of education should be made available more often.
On the other hand, one thing I thought was lacking was the ability to quickly set a whitelist or blocklist for email. It’s doable, but you have to go into the Advanced Settings menu. While this feature tends to be buried in Microsoft’s own offering as well, GoDaddy missed a prime opportunity to make it easier to find. Likewise, if you want to get to the quarantine and other such features, you’ll also have to explore the advanced section.
Distribution groups and aliases are easily configured from the admin section. Both of these menus require only a few entries to complete and are an improvement on what Microsoft offers by default. That said, you can quickly exhaust GoDaddy’s tools at which point you’ll need to dig into Microsoft’s underlying resources (located under Advanced Admin Centers). It’s a fair balance between power and ease of use, but it would be nice to see GoDaddy build this out even further. This mainly applies to folks needing to access settings for Exchange, Teams, OneDrive, or SharePoint; the last in particular seems well-hidden unless you’re actively looking for it.
In terms of applications, you have access to everything available in Microsoft 365. For email, you can use the web, desktop, or mobile Outlook clients, with Microsoft Teams on hand for collaboration purposes. For Business Premium users, SharePoint is also included. Installs of the Microsoft Office productivity suite are allowed for up to five devices per user. All in all, it’s roughly the same offering.
GoDaddy Hosted Email Security
Happily, GoDaddy provides the same level of security that Microsoft offers its own 365 Business customers. Two-factor authentication is readily available across the platform, and there are a variety of privacy options. While no service is bulletproof, Microsoft puts up a great fight to protect your data and frequent patches reduce the risk of running into issues.
Microsoft has data centers distributed across the U.S. and Northern Europe, all of which have undergone SOC auditing and achieved SOC 1 Type2, SOC 2, and SOC 3 reports. As mentioned, GoDaddy (like Microsoft) is capable of complying with HIPAA standards if an appropriate HIPAA Business Associate Agreement is in place.
A Great Option for Existing GoDaddy Customers
GoDaddy represents a value-add for the configuration-squeamish, and its significant price reduction from Microsoft’s offering is definitely attractive. That said, your choice of 365 Business providers will likely depend on whether you’re already a GoDaddy client. There isn’t much reason for folks already using Microsoft 365 to jump ship to GoDaddy’s version, and while the latter’s ease of setup is attractive, Microsoft has noticeably improved its own setup process since the start of the pandemic.
Advanced users might find that GoDaddy obscures the underpinnings a bit too much, making access to specific configuration items a bit cumbersome. But if you’re now using the company’s hosting and want email and Microsoft Office, do not pass Go, but go directly to GoDaddy.
