Godaddy Vs Bigrock

Quick Comparison between GoDaddy & Bigrock in India

A question that comes to your mind often, is when buying websites in India what is your best option. Well, given from personal experience that I hardly take 10-20 minutes to make up my mind about this sort of subject where there is no physical object in question, I want to share a quick article about few things related to setting up websites. 

This is the complete list of registrars which you may want to see, anyone outside of this list is not to be trusted (strongly!): http://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accredited-list.html

Cost & Payment Options

If you go through the list, you would find that a majority of domain registrars are based in US, and very few in India. Even for non-US ones, expect to pay in Dollars $ , which is quite expensive for your average Indian, and honestly, if you have too much money to waste it on currency exchange.. give it to me! lol!

So far, only two registrars I have come to trust in terms of service quality and value for money that are Godaddy & Bigrock. While Godaddy is way bigger than Bigrock in every aspect, but from an Indian's perspective, Bigrock is very much comparable. 

Cost wise, both are nearly equal, and please remember to google coupon codes for each before buying, to save 10-40% anytime of the year. Both of them have coupon system. The prices for domains are always fluctuating, so its impractical to post any numbers here, but from experience, both of them have identical pricing.

Though, payment using Debit cards is easier on Bigrock, compared to Godaddy, who have just recently introduced the ccavenue, which has been used by Bigrock for long time now. In operability, for average netizen, Bigrock's checkout is easier. But if you spend a little bit of time, on the checkout page, and are not in a rush, neither of them has any difference left.

Hosting is a different case, after coupons on both, Godaddy is cheaper by 10-15%, which makes a huge difference. As I said above, prices are actually always fluctuating, depending upon right coupon applied. 

but when it comes to VPS & SSL Certificates, godaddy is way more expensive. Though careful to note in case of SSL certificates is this, that Godaddy has the high end certificates, while BigRock has entry as well as medium level certificates. Depending on your size you can choose between either. Yes, godaddy provides slightly more features in terms of VPS, but the cost difference is not justified. 

Znet provides cheaper VPS service, but I haven't personally bought from them yet. So I can't say much about them. 

Account & Hosting Panel

When it comes to account panel, godaddy has more features, and has a easier login system in place at the moment. At bigrock, after you have bought hosting, you have to write cpanel in front of your sitename like this: mysite.com/cpanel   

But when it comes to godaddy, there default page, has a direct link to the cpanel, and for the average joe, it is way more easier to access. Also, when it comes to the linux cpanel or windows cpanel for your hosting plan, godaddy takes a big lead. While bigrock just gives you the same industry standard cpanel, it comes only in default view which is like from the 90's era!
Godaddy on the other hand have edited the style of the cpanel and have a very clean and easy to navigate cpanel.

In this dept, Godaddy takes the lead. 

Programmign Language Support

Both of them have support for the major languages, PHP/RubyonRails/Perl on nearly equal basis. MySQL is the only database supported. Though Godaddy limits no of MYSQL connections and databases on its deluxe plan, while Bigrock doesn't for the similarly priced plan.

When it comes to python support, it is horrible at present at Bigrock. I bought hosting with them, just to find out, that I cannot use Python via CGI to connect to my MYSQL database. Over that FCGI is not supported on Bigrock as of yet. To give you a quick comparison, using FCGI, performance is 10x time literally faster!

Customer Support

So far godaddy may have had the upper hand, but here it is where it fails. It fails miserably in this aspect, infact my first message to their support was never replied to. The UX interface for their customer support is comparatively slow as well as difficult to use. Creating a support ticket is not as easy as it should be. Well maybe its just me, but I will give them a thumbs down at present. 

On the other hand, Bigrock has excellent customer support for shared hosting as well. Which is not the case generally with many people. Send them a message, 12 hours is the max it would take them in general. Bigrock customer support is really a rock on in my opinion, and without comparable customer support, godaddy will always be second fiddle, because as I say "Customer is the King, and a distressed Customer is the Emperor! Get this S!" 

Well that concludes this :)