I'm going to piggyback on your comment here, since it's at the top of the comment thread.
From the Reddit link:
"Name Cheap messaged me with a special discount code for reddit users: BYEBYEGD I'm not taking any positions i'm just reporting it. I asked him to give reddit users a better deal."
I'm not affiliated with NameCheap at all, but if you're going to move your domain, this might make things easier.
Employee here. GoDaddy does care very much about their registrar roots. The fact that we have over half of all registered domain names is a source of tremendous pride, and unlike the elephant scandal I'm willing to venture their registration will not go up because of this, namely because there doesn't seem to be any support of SOPA from consumers, educated or not. And Godaddy's users are decidedly less technologically educated, generally speaking.
"but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes."
I was going to complain about this sentiment from someone not that rich and who can't afford the fanciest red polo shirts money can buy ha ha, but then I said forget it, for what it truly costs to move a domain it's far less then the cost on our liberties if SOPA passes, so I went outside shoveled a few driveways and earned enough money to move over the domains I have without cutting into my budget. There really isn't a reason for people not to do this.
Along those lines. It seems pretty important to do what you think is right, even if it's effect on convincing others of your correctness seems negligible.
In the past godaddy has invited (and thrived) based on negative publicity as well as questionable sales practices. (Godaddy girls, exploitation of women, the elephant hunt as a few examples).
"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods."
Ugh.
(oBDisclaimer: I work for a registrar that unequivocally supports the Open Internet."
In case anyone was suspicious, Nima Kelly (the author of the comment supporting Christine) is one of the GoDaddy legal department heads. Needless to say, she and Christine are quite familiar coworkers and friends.
You can't reasonably support free speech in all instances, just like you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.
It's the listing of those exceptions and how you deal with them that's the tricky bit. So saying "I support an open internet" is just ignoring the issue.
I know probably many people would agree with stopping "cheap fake goods", but can people really not distinguish between originals and fake products?
If anything I wouldn't be for a law that completely bans the cheaper versions of the original. I'd be for a law that only makes it illegal to say they are originals when they are not. But I would allow them to be sold in the market, as long as they state it's a "clone" product or something.
It might or might not hurt the big corporations (would the people buying the cheap clones really have the money to buy the expensive originals otherwise?), but I think it would be much better for the market overall
To put it frankly, godaddy don't give a shit. Their domain business exists as a way to get people into their other products, hosting, whois privacy etc. the ones that actually make money (nobody makes money on domains nowadays, savvy customers use coupons which godaddy provides a lot of). This won't do anything to Godaddy as a business, they'll be losing customers they don't care about -- unless people shutting off their other services too -- but if it makes people feel good then yay! This would be like walmart losing customers who do extreme couponing and only buy the products that serve as loss leaders.
You could go as far as suggesting these people are helping godaddy. If you take away 120 domains (as one redditor is doing) that godaddy are losing money on and you're only using them because they're cheap... that's a win for godaddy surely, unless the scale at which people do this makes a dent in godaddy's total customer/domain figures, which are a marketing point, but that would require millions to leave.
Even with their extreme coupon usage, from what I can tell they are still not using them as loss leaders (if we ignore all costs besides registry/icann).
You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company. My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit. I know from personal experience I've probably influenced ~30-50 people's registrar choice this year. Even if it were 1-2 as the average number, the knock on effects could potentially put a nice dent in them.
Strange logic. If they don't care about their domain business, why are they in it? Even if it's just a loss leader, you still care about the loss leader or you wouldn't continue running it.
The reason this thread is about domain transfers is because GoDaddy is at large known best as a domain registrar. If they were primarily a hosting company/etc., this thread would just as easily be about transferring your hosting/etc.
I'm skeptical of this claim. Registrars pay ICANN something like 7 cents a year per domain and they resell for $10+. That's a nice chunk of change there. Toss in SSL certs for at least that much, you're probably making decent money just on these alone. The hosting and other crap is just more services. I'd say low-end hosting is the loss leader here. Its a commodity industry.
I personally don't use them because I find their advertising extremely distasteful and find the UI to be worse than anything AOL has done in the 1990s.
I have been using GoDaddy for years. I'm just using it for a simple webpage+domain hosting and email. It works but I'm probably being overcharged since I don't bother with coupons. I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks.
"I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks."
Lots of people probably have recommendations, but I've been using nearlyfreespeech.net for a couple of years for hosting my personal site. They're great.
On one cheap Linode VPS instance I already have 5 websites hosted, plus a personal email server, plus several private git repositories, all for ~ $20 per month. I get my domains from other services, like namecheap.com; and good/cheap hosting for PHP stuff (and even Rails) can be found on DreamHost.com.
There really isn't any reason for anybody to use GoDaddy anymore, unless you're hunting for their coupons, but in this instance you really get what you pay for.
And more often than not the coupons are good for the first year only, and transferring after that year (for me anyways) is a bigger PITA than the coupon savings offered.
Right now I'm hosting with Chunkhost, it was their free beta period that got me off the crummy shared account I was on with GD. I could never go back, now.
If you decide to move your domains from Godaddy, and if your DNS is hosted there too, and if you have enough DNS records to not want to recreate them, there's an undocumented way to export the nameserver records from Godaddy to another DNS provider such as Zerigo. In a nutshell (1) upgrade to Godaddy Premium DNS ($35 but refundable within 5 days) (2) Export each domain's DNS settings (3) Cancel Godaddy Premium DNS. Now you can quickly import your DNS settings at your new registrar or DNS host if they handle importing of bind files. Not everyone imports nicely, but Zerigo worked for me. Details here http://pardner.com/2011/11/how-to-switch-dns-painlessly-from...
Godaddy has to be one of the least trustworthy domain registrars I have heard of and I am surprised that people still use them. I guess their crass commercials must be drawing in the customers.
I've registered a few domains through Google Apps. At least the last time I did this GoDaddy was one of the places you might get randomly bounced to. It may have become the only place.
I moved my personal 25+ domains away from GoDaddy to name.com and gandi.net. Best move I have ever done. I don't get shitty advertisements emailed to me anymore, I don't have to jump through hundreds of hoops to purchase renewals where I get bombarded with advertisements for various other services.
And name.com is a small company here in Colorado, so I am supporting local while I am at it.
I still find this funny. I used to work for a web incubator called NAME (and had the name.com domain) in 1999-2000 before they went out of business in the .com bust. I always thought they had a great domain name. Not surprised it was snapped up by a registrar.
I think going after the supporters of SOPA one by one is a pretty effective method, if enough time. First let's go after the representatives who support it, and then after all the companies, and either terminate your account with them if applicable or at least e-mail them to express your feelings about them supporting SOPA.
I have a domain that's (shamefully) hosted on GoDaddy. Worse, I had the domain on a better registrar and I transferred it to godaddy.
I needed a registrar that was able to handle IPv6 glue records, which was rare at the time. (The TUCOWS-backed services only got this capability last month! Before that you had to email TUCOWS and have them manually add the AAAA records to your glue, which I didn't consider a solution.) For all their many flaws, GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.
I suppose by now some of the other registrars probably have gotten their act together. Anybody with experience running IPv6-hosted nameservers have recommendations?
For years, yes - years ago they were cheaper than anyone else and no worse than anyone else. It wasn't until last summer, I think, that I finally moved the last domain off of GoDaddy.
If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.
You're forgetting the people and companies that bought domains back in the early 2000s who now have dozens or hundreds of domains on GoDaddy. People stay because it's easier than transferring. A lot of people still use them even for new domains because they're still the cheapest game in town.
I would expect that SOPA on the whole would discourage domain registration and the general development of web properties amongst the masses so I'm a bit surprised GoDaddy supports it just from a business perspective.
Anyone care to enlighten me about what I'm missing here?
As I understand it SOPA results in a shift of the burden for policing content from registrars and hosts towards government bodies and the administrators of the DNS system. Alternatively-framed bills introduced in the name of combating piracy could have much more damaging implications for Godaddy.
I try to avoid helping anyone who needs help with their GoDaddy-hosted website. Not only is the interface atrocious (at least compared to DreamHost), I hate logging in and seeing Dana Patrick splayed out...if I want people around me thinking that I'm browsing Maxim magazine, I'll buy a Maxim magazine.
Why is anyone who pays any attention still on GoDaddy anyhow?
They're a scummy company that have no respect for their customers, obnoxious advertising, and a clunky, annoying web interface. Why would you use them when you could use any of hundreds of other name registrars and web hosts?
I've been thinking of moving away from GoDaddy for a long time, and this was the last drop. It is crazy how they design the webpages to make it as hard as possible to cancel anything. In the email I got, there were two (identical) links telling me how I could cancel the transfer-request, but no link to accept it. It took me a couple of minutes of poking around in my account before I figured it out.
I thought it would be interesting to see how many domains are moved away because of this, so I just knocked together this quick site - http://stopsopa.mattbearman.co.uk/
It would be awesome if anyone who is transferring domains away from go daddy could add their to the list
[+] [-] pg|14 years ago|reply
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes.
[+] [-] solipsist|14 years ago|reply
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...
[+] [-] someone13|14 years ago|reply
From the Reddit link:
"Name Cheap messaged me with a special discount code for reddit users: BYEBYEGD I'm not taking any positions i'm just reporting it. I asked him to give reddit users a better deal."
I'm not affiliated with NameCheap at all, but if you're going to move your domain, this might make things easier.
[+] [-] didntdrinkjuice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int3rnaut|14 years ago|reply
I was going to complain about this sentiment from someone not that rich and who can't afford the fanciest red polo shirts money can buy ha ha, but then I said forget it, for what it truly costs to move a domain it's far less then the cost on our liberties if SOPA passes, so I went outside shoveled a few driveways and earned enough money to move over the domains I have without cutting into my budget. There really isn't a reason for people not to do this.
[+] [-] gerggerg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
(Note: We are a competitor of godaddy.)
[+] [-] Hexx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] showdog|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DavidSJ|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freejack|14 years ago|reply
http://rudysyndrome.com/2011/10/28/online-copyright-laws-won...
"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods."
Ugh.
(oBDisclaimer: I work for a registrar that unequivocally supports the Open Internet."
[+] [-] didntdrinkjuice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maximusprime|14 years ago|reply
You can't reasonably support free speech in all instances, just like you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.
It's the listing of those exceptions and how you deal with them that's the tricky bit. So saying "I support an open internet" is just ignoring the issue.
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
If anything I wouldn't be for a law that completely bans the cheaper versions of the original. I'd be for a law that only makes it illegal to say they are originals when they are not. But I would allow them to be sold in the market, as long as they state it's a "clone" product or something.
It might or might not hurt the big corporations (would the people buying the cheap clones really have the money to buy the expensive originals otherwise?), but I think it would be much better for the market overall
[+] [-] citricsquid|14 years ago|reply
You could go as far as suggesting these people are helping godaddy. If you take away 120 domains (as one redditor is doing) that godaddy are losing money on and you're only using them because they're cheap... that's a win for godaddy surely, unless the scale at which people do this makes a dent in godaddy's total customer/domain figures, which are a marketing point, but that would require millions to leave.
[+] [-] ohashi|14 years ago|reply
You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company. My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit. I know from personal experience I've probably influenced ~30-50 people's registrar choice this year. Even if it were 1-2 as the average number, the knock on effects could potentially put a nice dent in them.
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|14 years ago|reply
Obviously I'll be moving not only my domain names, but the two hosting accounts as well.
I just spoke to them on the phone, to figure out how to unlock the DNS registration. The rep had never even heard of SOPA.
[+] [-] gerggerg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intenex|14 years ago|reply
The reason this thread is about domain transfers is because GoDaddy is at large known best as a domain registrar. If they were primarily a hosting company/etc., this thread would just as easily be about transferring your hosting/etc.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|14 years ago|reply
I personally don't use them because I find their advertising extremely distasteful and find the UI to be worse than anything AOL has done in the 1990s.
[+] [-] seles|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubuntuftw|14 years ago|reply
+1. GoDaddy, you lost a customer today.
[+] [-] jberryman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|14 years ago|reply
There really isn't any reason for anybody to use GoDaddy anymore, unless you're hunting for their coupons, but in this instance you really get what you pay for.
[+] [-] evandena|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libraryatnight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgieporgie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pardner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexRollman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atourgates|14 years ago|reply
Unless I've missed something, the answer's never. So, when Joe Public wants to register a domain, he only knows about one way to do it.
Seems like a pretty effective marketing strategy to me.
[+] [-] jsolson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] X-Istence|14 years ago|reply
And name.com is a small company here in Colorado, so I am supporting local while I am at it.
[+] [-] unreal37|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lincolnwebs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmerfield|14 years ago|reply
I find it difficult to imagine that any HN reader would. Was there ever an era when GoDaddy's reputation and service were respectable?
[+] [-] bodyfour|14 years ago|reply
I needed a registrar that was able to handle IPv6 glue records, which was rare at the time. (The TUCOWS-backed services only got this capability last month! Before that you had to email TUCOWS and have them manually add the AAAA records to your glue, which I didn't consider a solution.) For all their many flaws, GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.
I suppose by now some of the other registrars probably have gotten their act together. Anybody with experience running IPv6-hosted nameservers have recommendations?
[+] [-] cdr|14 years ago|reply
If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.
[+] [-] jinushaun|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
Anyone care to enlighten me about what I'm missing here?
[+] [-] notahacker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambda|14 years ago|reply
They're a scummy company that have no respect for their customers, obnoxious advertising, and a clunky, annoying web interface. Why would you use them when you could use any of hundreds of other name registrars and web hosts?
[+] [-] richtaur|14 years ago|reply
http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
[+] [-] sixQuarks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrcalzone|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l0c0b0x|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattBearman|14 years ago|reply
It would be awesome if anyone who is transferring domains away from go daddy could add their to the list
[+] [-] wes-exp|14 years ago|reply