Purchasing and setting up web hosting through GoDaddy is more simple than you think. One drawback about GoDaddy is their user interface is just overloaded with links, buttons, and numerous attempts by them to have you buy more items. As long as you know how to get from point A to point B on GoDaddy and not stray away, you’ll have your hosting set up in no time, well at least within 24 hours, but we’ll get to that.

You’ll need a domain name obviously to link with your hosting, if you purchased the domain via GoDaddy then you can easily associate it with your hosting during set up. If you purchased your domain with another provider you’ll need to contact your domain registrar in finding out how to setup your nameservers to point to your GoDaddy hosting.

To purchase and set up GoDaddy Hosting, make sure you’re logged into your GoDaddy account. Click on Hosting and from there you’ll have 3 basic options to choose from. There are other types of hosting available with more storage space, bandwidth speed, cpu speed, etc., but for beginners or novices these 3 options should suffice.

Obviously the more you spend, the more you get, however you need to ask yourself if you really need that much more gigabytes of space, email accounts, and MySQL databases for your site. You can always choose the cheapest and upgrade at a later time, such as when the traffic for your site increases.

Now once you select your hosting you’ll come across a series of items that GoDaddy pushes you to buy. It’s kind of like exiting a theme park where all the vendors are giving it one last push for you to buy something before you leave.

Once you arrive at your shopping cart, pay attention to the right where the Order Summary box is, there you’ll see a link to enter a Promo Code.

Doing a simple Google search on GoDaddy promo codes should allow you to find current and updated promo codes which can be used to discount your order total. Promo codes can’t be combined, you’re only allowed to use one, so keep entering them until you get the biggest discount.

Once you’ve purchased your hosting and received your confirmation of purchase email, you can go ahead and start setting up the hosting account. You want to get into “My Account” and look under “My Products” on the left menu and click on “Hosting”.

From there you’ll come across a section that displays the web hosting you just purchased. Click on the “Launch” button which will open up a new tab/window to set up your new hosting account.

Agree with the Hosting Service Agreement and click “Next”.

Next you’ll create a username and password for your hosting. It’s very important that you remember this step because this user name and password is what you’ll use everytime you need to ftp files for your website.

Once you’ve created the username and password you will then select the domain you would like to link to your hosting. If you purchased it through GoDaddy your domain should be available through the drop down menu.

You’ll come across a couple options of the PHP version you want for your hosting and enabling Google Webmaster Tools to help Google access your site. I would leave the default setting as is since the higher PHP version and Google Webmaster Tools are good things to have.

The second to last page is the Confirmation page giving you a summary of your newly set up hosting account.

The last page gives you an account status notice that your hosting account is pending setup and may take up to 24 hours. Normally it takes way less and sometimes within the hour. Just check back often to see if the hosting account status has been set to ready. Once ready, you can now beginning uploading files to your website or using GoDaddy Connect to set up applications like Joomla or WordPress. Adios!