It’s a no brainer that the costlier the plan better the power on offer, but there’s more to it than meet the eyes when it comes to the tier’s within these plans. Yeah, you read that right. Each plan comes with resource levels, adding some additional computing power, which might be sufficient in most cases instead of buying a costlier plan in the same tier or higher tiers like Business, VPS and Dedicated hosting.
When selecting GoDaddy plans, you might have come across the term “Unmetered Bandwidth”, but that doesn’t mean your bandwidth or storage, in certain cases, is unlimited. According to the company, “We don’t limit the bandwidth your site can use as long as it complies with our hosting agreement”, which states that if a website risks the stability, performance or uptime of the shared server, the admin will be notified via email and resources for the website will be restricted — it’ll return a 503 error to visitors often and crash at the backend too.
The only way to get your website back to normal is to upgrade to a costlier plan or your resource level. If you didn’t know already, every Shared hosting plan — Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate and Maximum — has three resource levels available.
Level 1 is the default setting of the plan, and that’s where your server is when you either purchase a new plan or upgrade it from a lower plan. Needless to say, Level 2 and Level 3 add a few resources to your GoDaddy Shared hosting plans. The major changes you’ll see from Level 1 through Level 3 are related to CPU cores, RAM, I/O usage, and entry processes.
Also read: What is no-verity-opt-encrypt? Why is it used?
Difference Between Godaddy Resource Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3
We’re not going to discuss resource levels for every plan here but have taken the example of Deluxe Shared hosting, which sits in the middle of the five available plans. When going up and down from resource levels in other Shared hosting plans, you can expect a similar percentage — if not exact — of change in your resources too.
On Resource Level 1 of Godaddy’s Deluxe Shared hosting, users get the following computing resources. Note that the following are the maximum resources that can be used by your website in Level 1 of Deluxe hosting.
- 1 CPU core
- 512MB RAM
- Unlimited storage
- 1MB/s I/O usage
- 115 entry processes
- 250,000 files
- 25 x 1GB MySQL databases
Upgrading from Level 1 to Level 2
Upgrading from Resouce Level 1 to Level 2 will double the CPU cores from one to two and the RAM from 512MB to 1024MB (1GB). The entry processes also go up from 115 in Level 1 to 140 in Level 2. There is no other noticeable change in the virtual allocation of resources.
Upgrading from Level 2 to Level 3
Upgrading from Resource Level 2 to Level 3 doesn’t affect the number of CPU cores, which remain at 2, but doubles the RAM from 1GB to 2GB and the I/O usage limit from 1MB/s to 2MB/s. In addition, the entry processes are bumped up from 140 in Level 2 to 165 in Level 3.
All the other resource allocations stay the same. As you can see, the main effect while upgrading is felt with CPU cores, RAM, entry processes and I/O usage from Level 1 to Level 3.
Should you upgrade plans or Godaddy resource levels?
While these aren’t a lot of changes — as well as might be, depending on the kind of resources your website requires — it would cost you significantly less compared to upgrading your shared hosting to a costlier plan like Ultimate in the same tier or Business hosting.
If the little boost in resources does the work for you, it’s recommended to upgrade from Resource Level 1 to either 2 or 3 of your hosting plan rather than upgrading it straightaway to a costlier plan.
We wrote this article because while trying to upgrade through different resource level, GoDaddy doesn’t exactly mention what upgrades to expect. The higher you go up in the Shared hosting tier, the better are the resource level upgradations.
In this case, if we were to upgrade from Deluxe Shared hosting Level 3 to Ultimate Shared hosting Level 1, we would have the same number of CPU cores allocated, lower RAM at 1GB, lower I/O usage at 1MB/s and lower number of entry processes at 125.
Price Difference
Upgrading between different resource levels cost us approximately $43 (Level 1 to 2) and $38 (Level 2 to 3) for the remaining period (16 months in this case) of the server plan, while upgrading from Deluxe to Ultimate would have meant spending approximately $150 for the same period. All these prices mentioned here are inclusive of the applicable tax in our region.
However, it’s important to note that it’s always beneficial to go for Business hosting if you’re getting traffic in the millions.
How to upgrade resource Levels?
Upgrading from resource levels is simple, but it isn’t the first thing that pops up when you upgrade plans. To upgrade from Resource Level 1 through Level 3 of your GoDaddy Shared hosting plan, log into your account and follow the steps mentioned below.
Step 1: Go to My Products in your account and click on the down-pointing arrow besides Web Hosting to access more options.
Step 2: Click on Options. A new window will open in an overlay.
Step 3: On the top-left of the new window, click on Customize.
Step 4: Select the Resource Level you wish to upgrade to — Level 2 or Level 3. The price will be mentioned below the respective levels.
If you wish to add more months to your server plan, you can also select a renewal length before checking out. If you wish to shift to a Dedicated IP address, that can be done here too.
Also read: What is L1, L2, and L3 CPU cache? How does it work?
