You asked to hear from GoDaddy managed hosting customers. I like GoDaddy because they have excellent service and they give good information. I started with shared hosting, and just moved to try out their managed wordpress hosting. You asked to hear from people using it.

I just did migrate an existing site that I had with GoDaddy. I'm right now set up on the temporary domain. I'm gonna try to figure out how to change it to the permanent. But, just the switch... was so simple. The screen just asked for my ftp info and log in info of my existing website domain... and ZAP! It was done. It's cloned on the managed site with a temporary domain name. It's typical, really, of GoDaddy.. making things ez for ppl who are doing something for the first time.

I already knew that a managed site is going to limit plug-ins that will create a conflict... which, to me, is part of their protection against me doing something that will mess things up. I decided to try GoDaddy for a month on managed hosting. I didn't even review their blacklisted plug-ins.

But, their service department is so helpful, that when I was talking to Eric there, when I said I was going to try the managed hosting... he just offered to send me the blacklist and emailed it immediately. That's what they are like... doing things for you that are the extra mile. I believe I have talked to Eric a couple of times, and to me, he sold me on GoDaddy because of his service.

So, then I looked at the list (which I was going to blindly accept anyway), and it's not really restrictive where people should be concerned. It eliminates the basic caching and security plugins that will conflict because they are already taking care of it. And, if another plugin conflicts elsewhere, they give you options that work with their program.

Before trying the managed hosting, I used security plug-ins. I appreciate the security plug-ins I had. But, the reality is that they themselves conflicted with other plug-ins I wanted to use. So, there were restrictions that were "built-in" outside of using managed hosting. In other words, using security plug-ins rather than managed hosting really does have "restrictions" due to the conflicts that are inherently created thereby in my experience. (One example... I couldn't use the "User Switching" plug-in with a security plug-in because I changed the login for security... and it conflicted. Now, I have the security GoDaddy provided... and I can use that plug-in with their program. And I really wanted to use that plug-in during set up of my sites to see what different user roles are seeing in their dashboards. So, so far, having just switched to managed hosting, my use of plug-ins has effectually been expanded, not restricted.)

I read what you said about GoDaddy being hacked. My thought is that what happened years ago happened to numerous providers at the time. And, I don't know if the other managed programs existed at that time (managed hosting is a new level of service) to fairly compare against GoDaddy and the other providers who experienced a breach those years ago. Being a newer user who wasn't effected by what happened several years ago, it's not a consideration for me.

I am completely comfortable at this time with GoDaddy in trying them out for managed hosting. They will do backups for me, and if my site gets hacked... they will fix it for free. (I don't think that another managed hosting service is automatically going to be better at security than GoDaddy today even if there was an incident a few years ago in my personal view and buying decision.)

I'll know more later about the functionality of the managed hosting. I am just starting out with this managed hosting program as a one month trial. But, because I have needed some help on some things that more experienced users wouldn't need help on, and GoDaddy has been very helpful.