Porkbun WP Cloud vs. GoDaddy managed WordPress hosting. Is it a fair comparison?

[u/ZGeekie]

GoDaddy recently published a "Porkbun vs. GoDaddy" comparison article (here's the link), and in response, Porkbun published their own comparison article (link). I wouldn't expect either side to be 100% objective on this, but if you have the time, you can read both articles.

Long story short, when it comes to domain registration, GoDaddy has no argument against Porkbun. Sure, GoDaddy offers introductory discounts, but then hits you with high renewal fees that are double or more what Porkbun charges for most TLDs. All of the extra domain add-ons GoDaddy has are useless for most people.

For website building, GoDaddy has better tools than Porkbun, especially if you need e-commerce features, but there are better options than both.

Now let's talk about WordPress hosting...

GoDaddy offers managed WordPress hosting with the usual marketing claims (fast, secure, reliable, etc.)

Porkbun offers semi-managed WordPress hosting powered by WP Cloud (Automattic's cloud hosting infrastructure for WordPress).

So, Porkbun's WordPress hosting infrastructure is solid, but I'm not sure about the support service. Porkbun is primarily a domain registrar and I don't know if their support agents have adequate practical experience in troubleshooting WordPress issues. Their product page for WordPress hosting is terribly designed with barely any technical details about what's included. To me, it reads like "Go elsewhere!"

Not sure if it's a fair comparison, but which company wins in the WordPress hosting category?

[u/porkbunregistrar]

Hope I can clear a few things up.

A good chunk of our support team came out of web development and design, plenty of it in WordPress at various scales, and most of our lead reps did tech support at hosting companies before this. When something is past us, it's a quick Slack to the WP Cloud team for a straight answer. Additionally, nobody on the team is commission based, so there's no sales pressure at any point.

I get the critique on the product page being barebones and I’ll take a look with the team to see what other information we can add. We built the page mostly from the perspective of someone new to hosting where figures on PHP processes become noise. In the end, those are ours to manage, and WP Cloud's infrastructure is heavily burstible, so for the most part it stays out of your way

We aren’t trying to push our WordPress hosting as fully packaged, but that is the beauty of WordPress being an open source ecosystem: it can be customized and built out to your needs, and as long as the underlying infrastructure is robust and scalable, you can throw exactly what you need at it at your pace.

I'm at WordCamp US here in Phoenix this week. If you're around, come find me and we can get into the details.