How is GoDaddy nowadays? I know for a while, they racked up a terrible reputation ala Network Solutions for poor CS and policies, but have they recovered at all?
I run a very minor hosting reviews site, and regularly monitor people talking about GoDaddy on Twitter.
In short, customer-satisfcation-wise, they seem to have vastly improved, and are leagues ahead of the likes of EIG (A Small Orange, Arvixe, BlueHost, BigRock, Host Gator and fifty thousand other brands). Their hosting packages seem usable now - a vast improvement.
The difficulty in judging hosts is that plenty of people have basic needs that are well served, and will go to the ends of the earth to defend a company. (A Small Orange comes to mind). The people who have bad experiences tend to shout very loudly, which can give a false impression.
The other issue is that people also shout loudly about things which, while not exactly a given host's fault, are connected with hosting, and so they get upset. Typically this comes about from leaving public information on a domain's WHOIS record, leading to spam calls and emails - which leads to some people accusing hosts of selling their customer lists.
Interestingly, EIG have been shutting down a number of their brands' affiliate programs (Site5, A Small Orange, Arvixe - may be others), which makes me wonder if they're going to consolidate some of their brands soon. They seem to be starting with the brands with the worst (recent) track records.
If you're after shared hosting, either go with SiteGround, or go with InMotion hosting (who have the occasional network outage like every shared host, but meh, the rest of their company is sound).
For anything else, grab a VPS from OVH, DigitalOcean, or dedicated from OVH or Hetzner. Good and bad stories abound, I've used them all and their core offering is sound.
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you asked fair question)
Not the OP, but I've been doing similar to what he describes (using twitter data for web hosting reviews). It has ~5 years of data: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare
My data doesn't agree with what he's saying. GoDaddy's reputation is on par with the majority of the EIG brands. A Small Orange was a good company post acquisition by EIG for a while. I wrote about that specifically here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of... basically it went to hell once EIG management got involved and the original people team/staff left and it got merged into the conglomerate.
I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
>I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
OP here - me, too :)
Question: are you including every tweet in your analysis, or do you ignore some as being irrelevant? I mentioned the example of people complaining about spam from public whois records; if you mark such tweets as negative, I could see that explaining a large part of it.
(I ignore them as I don't see it as being directly related to a host's performance, even though I know there's an argument to be made about public and "private" whois records).
FWIW I also ignore positive tweets that consist of short generic "great, thanks!" or "Yay, awesome!" - I've found that they most often tend to be talking about some sponsorship/promotion or meetup/party the host has held.
I would also like to add, I have seen people report that a domain they searched for, but not bought, was later registered and available for purchase as a 'premium domain'. However, personally, I have not seen any concrete proof of this. With that being said, it have seen this complaint multiple times.
I tell people thinking about setting up websites for personal or business project that you need to make your list of potential domain names FIRST, then buy immediately if you find any available. ISPs have been selling NXD data since 2007 to domain frontrunners [1] and I wouldn't be surprised if frontrunners are behind the plethora of free whois services that show up on a Google search.
I worked at Godaddy in Sunnyvale for about 8-9 months, and left recently (for personal reasons unreleated to the job). It was a great place to be, the leadership was very down to earth and aware of the business, and the work-life balance was great. In addition, the pay was good, the benefits and perks were reasonable (but not awesome). Teams were encouraged and backed to try out new tech they felt was helpful (vs having to go through a process). I also worked with some super smart people. Also, if it matters to you, I thought it was refreshing the way they acknowledged diversity issues internally, and how they approach hiring. I recommend it as a great place to work, especially on the non-infrastructure teams.
A number of former coworkers have joined them here in Seattle, and it sounds like a pretty great place to work. I hear they're also great about letting people work on side projects.
I work for GoDaddy in the Office 365 Provisioning Team in Tempe, AZ. Our team's stack is Ember + some React / PHP + node / Linux... all running on OpenStack instances.
I think it's a great place to work... lots of interesting projects, nice people, wonderful work / life balance. (I just got three months off for Paternity leave, for instance.)
I can personally confirm the side project thing as well :)
Still the lousiest of the lousiest. After its IPO, GDDY became one of those companies that tweaks its numbers in such a way that it siphons off all the wealth created by its employees up into management salaries and executive compensation. You can spot companies that use this as their "strategy" by really high Debt:Equity ratios, and a few other metrics... a few interesting ones here:
GoDaddy Industry Sector
======= ========= ======
Revenue/Employee (TTM) 375,425 7,814,598 62,334,654
Net Income/Employee (TTM) -4,537 793,185 1,346,909
Receivable Turnover (TTM) 210.28 5.11 10.76
LT Debt to Equity (MRQ) 205.65 8.56 12.85
Total Debt to Equity (MRQ) 206.47 14.86 21.44
Interest Coverage (TTM) 0.09 37.70 15.70
Godaddy is terrible. I do small business websites so I run across clients with GoDaddy all of the time.
Their legacy "deluxe" hosting is as terrible as always. Simple things like extracting zip files with their file manager will hang/fail at random.
Their cpanel offering is terrible because your IO is throttled to a snail's crawl. 1MB/s is not enough for much of anything.
Their managed WordPress group did a dog and pony at our meetup group when it launched. It had a good "we're listening" marketing spin. That service has turned to garbage as well. I tried migrating a site from a cpanel dev server to their hosting and it turned into a week long project because their import tool craps out when encountering mysql 5.6 or newer. Their tech support scripts don't acknowledge the problem so they will waste an hour of your day asking to "disable plugins" and try the default 2016 theme for migration when clearly that's not the issue.
In general while their telephone people are nice enough, the antiquated versions of software (max php 5.5), over burdened servers, and severe resource throttling are reasons to avoid them at all costs.
Gandi.net have been great. Control panel is techie-friendly, and support seems unbeatable. Their "no bullshit" tagline seems to work. You don't get a ton of upsells either.
I used to be OK with Namecheap but the Web 2 redesign makes doing most things a pain.
I use both Namecheap and Gandi, a couple of my observations:
1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates.
2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP.
3. Agreed, their redesign is awful.
I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and:
1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing
2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API
3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing
4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.
For those here asking about alternatives (rightfully so as GoDaddy is one of the sleaziest companies in the field), I recommend Gandi.net as domain registrar. Namecheap is also good but they have a lot less TLD coverage.
I hate Gandi. A long time ago I lost 2 really valuable domains because they sent the renew reminder only to my account email, not the whois emails. Godaddy is anoying as hell but at least they keep me updated no matter if I want it or not.
Despite recommending them I have some gripes with Gandi but I have to say that's a really weird thing to hate them for. You have valuable domains behind an email address you're not checking?
Seconded. Gandi also includes email hosting with domains, so you can easily handle email without having to run a mail server. And their server hosting works well too.
For domain name registration, I can't recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] enough. I moved all my domains there (around 30 at the time) from GoDaddy about 3 years ago and never looked back.
Normally just lurk, but decided to create a throwaway to pile
on love for NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
If you're a no frills, I know how DNS works, don't annoy me with marketing and gimmicks type of hacker, this is the registrar for you.
Switched to them in 2009 (crazy to see in my email how long it's been!). I get an email when things need renewing, and an email when there is some stupid hoop ICANN requires me to jump through, which to be fair has only been like 2-3 times in 8 years.
I only manage 10-15 domains at any given time. If you have more, I don't know how well this works with huge numbers, but for my load, they work perfectly.
I've used GoDaddy, Ghandi, and others. I prefer the minimalism of NFS by far.
It's not really clear from their website but to register a domain only ( no hosting ) you have to deposit into an NFS account first including 'deposit fees' that they charge, plus any international payment fees charged by your institution.
Slightly awkward and seems likely to leave an unusuable residue, as opposed to just paying the required amount directly.
You can deposit an arbitrary amount of funds into an account, while simultaneously calculating the fees charged by payment processors, so unless you deposit an odd amount, you'll never have residual funds in your account. Here's what's on the deposit page:
We charge a small deposit fee on each deposit. This fee is designed to to cover the following costs we incur:
Fees charged to us by third parties to process your payments.
Banking and accounting costs.
Dealing with payment fraud.
Developing and maintaining secure payment infrastructure.
To keep this fee from being too large, we also apply an instant rebate that can vary widely by payment method, deposit amount and other factors. For most payments, the deposit fee and instant rebate are not the deciding factors in determining which method to use. However, for extremely small deposits, they can be very important.
Honestly, I'd rather be charged a fee once for "funds" (and transparently explained) than for each domain.
Are your domain registration services intended for general-purpose usage?
No, our domain registrations services are provided on a cost-recovery basis as a service to our hosting members, and are not intended to be used as a standalone product. We are not, nor do we have any interest in being, a general-purpose domain registration provider.
Consequently, while we do not impose any restrictions on the use of our domain registration and RespectMyPrivacy.COM services, our system is specially designed to facilitate use of registered domains with our hosting services. If you wish to use these services for other purposes, you are welcome to do so, with the following caveats:
• it may require additional effort on your part to set up,
• our prepaid balance model is not optimized for domain-only usage, and
• we will not be able to provide technical support for usage of domains in conjunction with third-party services.
Google Domains isn't available in every country, and has poor TLD coverage.
As for SOPA/PIPA those were my main initial drivers towards Gandi. They were one of the first to be vocally against SOPA and to offer massive discounts for godaddy transfers.
Can't you just create additional, unassociated Google Accounts? It's probably good practice for any registrar anyhow.
I ended-up doing this for GANDI after receiving this out of the blue:
It is very important that you confirm that your email address works and that we can reach you at this address. If we do not get your confirmation, the domain names that are associated with this email address will be deactivated on 2016-08-12
Consider that if the e-mail address hadn't worked then I wouldn't have had any domains after a week and wouldn't have known why.
Not a risk that I can accept. So I split each domain onto a new 'handle' so that there's less risk of total loss, and now I am planning to spread across other registrars.
GoDaddy still hasn't recovered from Bob Parsons and all the drama around super bowl ads, sopa, elephants, etc. Not sure how they ever get past that, at least in the WordPress space their product is technically pretty decent.
I have to second that Gandi recommendation. NameCheap is cheaper, but its site has pretty bad usability (to the point that I needed to call support once), and does not support DNSSec (or, at least didn't when I decided to switch).
I hope I am mistaken... It is far from clear as an outsider.
But the 10% or 3% limit respectively is per TAG (handle). HostEurope have multiple tags (HOSTEUROPE, 123-REG, WEBFUSION, WEBFUSION2, DOTUKDOMAINS, ... )
I work in a senior position in Host Europe operations. There are no plans that I am aware of for anything to change on an operational level.
As it stands, the sale has not yet been completed, so nothing will change within the next 6 months. Even after the sale completes, these sorts of large organizations move very slowly. I would not expect to see any customer-facing changes within the next 2 years. Host Europe has not even finished properly absorbing some of its previous acquisitions, and we're about 1/10th the size of GoDaddy!
Any other questions about Host Europe, feel free to ask and I'll answer them if I can.
I've been a customer since 2006 and just cancelled my account. Not sure, where I'll move, but I need a provider that supports .de domains. I'm leaning towards uberspace.de, but will consider Hetzner as well.
Did HEG make any acquistions after becoming part of Cinven? If it's the exact same assets, going from $667 million to $1.82 billion in three years is some pretty good work.
The GoDaddy service has a history of terrible user interfaces, advertising imagery that objectifies women, and the former CEO / founder Bob Parsons who's shot wild African animals, still sits on the board.
How do new customers over look that to save a couple bucks per year? How do existing customers ignore it because it'll take some time/effort/cost to make the change?
Just in case there's anyone else like me, HEG also owns (owned) Paragon Internet Group which is a problem as all my personal projects and domains are with TSOHost...
57 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadEverything I saw looked like they were trying to lock in uninformed customers to things they don't need. Or make it very hard for them to switch.
In short, customer-satisfcation-wise, they seem to have vastly improved, and are leagues ahead of the likes of EIG (A Small Orange, Arvixe, BlueHost, BigRock, Host Gator and fifty thousand other brands). Their hosting packages seem usable now - a vast improvement.
The difficulty in judging hosts is that plenty of people have basic needs that are well served, and will go to the ends of the earth to defend a company. (A Small Orange comes to mind). The people who have bad experiences tend to shout very loudly, which can give a false impression.
The other issue is that people also shout loudly about things which, while not exactly a given host's fault, are connected with hosting, and so they get upset. Typically this comes about from leaving public information on a domain's WHOIS record, leading to spam calls and emails - which leads to some people accusing hosts of selling their customer lists.
Interestingly, EIG have been shutting down a number of their brands' affiliate programs (Site5, A Small Orange, Arvixe - may be others), which makes me wonder if they're going to consolidate some of their brands soon. They seem to be starting with the brands with the worst (recent) track records.
If you're after shared hosting, either go with SiteGround, or go with InMotion hosting (who have the occasional network outage like every shared host, but meh, the rest of their company is sound).
For anything else, grab a VPS from OVH, DigitalOcean, or dedicated from OVH or Hetzner. Good and bad stories abound, I've used them all and their core offering is sound.
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you asked fair question)
My data doesn't agree with what he's saying. GoDaddy's reputation is on par with the majority of the EIG brands. A Small Orange was a good company post acquisition by EIG for a while. I wrote about that specifically here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of... basically it went to hell once EIG management got involved and the original people team/staff left and it got merged into the conglomerate.
I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
OP here - me, too :)
Question: are you including every tweet in your analysis, or do you ignore some as being irrelevant? I mentioned the example of people complaining about spam from public whois records; if you mark such tweets as negative, I could see that explaining a large part of it.
(I ignore them as I don't see it as being directly related to a host's performance, even though I know there's an argument to be made about public and "private" whois records).
FWIW I also ignore positive tweets that consist of short generic "great, thanks!" or "Yay, awesome!" - I've found that they most often tend to be talking about some sponsorship/promotion or meetup/party the host has held.
Do you have a link to your site? Be curious to look at what you're doing.
Their stance on SOPA and PIPA didn't help them much, either.
So called premium domains are set by the Registry managing the TLD, and Registrars offering those domains for sale pass along the premium price.
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-fro...
I worked at Godaddy in Sunnyvale for about 8-9 months, and left recently (for personal reasons unreleated to the job). It was a great place to be, the leadership was very down to earth and aware of the business, and the work-life balance was great. In addition, the pay was good, the benefits and perks were reasonable (but not awesome). Teams were encouraged and backed to try out new tech they felt was helpful (vs having to go through a process). I also worked with some super smart people. Also, if it matters to you, I thought it was refreshing the way they acknowledged diversity issues internally, and how they approach hiring. I recommend it as a great place to work, especially on the non-infrastructure teams.
I think it's a great place to work... lots of interesting projects, nice people, wonderful work / life balance. (I just got three months off for Paternity leave, for instance.)
I can personally confirm the side project thing as well :)
Hit me up on the nova channel or PM on IRC when you get a chance.
-S
Their legacy "deluxe" hosting is as terrible as always. Simple things like extracting zip files with their file manager will hang/fail at random.
Their cpanel offering is terrible because your IO is throttled to a snail's crawl. 1MB/s is not enough for much of anything.
Their managed WordPress group did a dog and pony at our meetup group when it launched. It had a good "we're listening" marketing spin. That service has turned to garbage as well. I tried migrating a site from a cpanel dev server to their hosting and it turned into a week long project because their import tool craps out when encountering mysql 5.6 or newer. Their tech support scripts don't acknowledge the problem so they will waste an hour of your day asking to "disable plugins" and try the default 2016 theme for migration when clearly that's not the issue.
In general while their telephone people are nice enough, the antiquated versions of software (max php 5.5), over burdened servers, and severe resource throttling are reasons to avoid them at all costs.
I used to be OK with Namecheap but the Web 2 redesign makes doing most things a pain.
1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates.
2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP.
3. Agreed, their redesign is awful.
I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and:
1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing
2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API
3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing
4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.
Digital ocean for small scale hosting, too.
[1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/
That review is on a WordPress-oriented site, but it includes screenshots of the interface, which might interest some of you.
If you're a no frills, I know how DNS works, don't annoy me with marketing and gimmicks type of hacker, this is the registrar for you.
Switched to them in 2009 (crazy to see in my email how long it's been!). I get an email when things need renewing, and an email when there is some stupid hoop ICANN requires me to jump through, which to be fair has only been like 2-3 times in 8 years.
I only manage 10-15 domains at any given time. If you have more, I don't know how well this works with huge numbers, but for my load, they work perfectly.
I've used GoDaddy, Ghandi, and others. I prefer the minimalism of NFS by far.
That link again! (call mr plow):
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/
Slightly awkward and seems likely to leave an unusuable residue, as opposed to just paying the required amount directly.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#gp_domains
Are your domain registration services intended for general-purpose usage?
No, our domain registrations services are provided on a cost-recovery basis as a service to our hosting members, and are not intended to be used as a standalone product. We are not, nor do we have any interest in being, a general-purpose domain registration provider.
Consequently, while we do not impose any restrictions on the use of our domain registration and RespectMyPrivacy.COM services, our system is specially designed to facilitate use of registered domains with our hosting services. If you wish to use these services for other purposes, you are welcome to do so, with the following caveats:
• it may require additional effort on your part to set up,
• our prepaid balance model is not optimized for domain-only usage, and
• we will not be able to provide technical support for usage of domains in conjunction with third-party services.
No fuss, and the pricing is reasonable. They do email forwarding, and a few other things, but otherwise is just a basic registrar/dns provider.
Since the whole SOPA/PIPA fiasco, I've been moving all my domains from GoDaddy to Google Domains as they expire.
As for SOPA/PIPA those were my main initial drivers towards Gandi. They were one of the first to be vocally against SOPA and to offer massive discounts for godaddy transfers.
I ended-up doing this for GANDI after receiving this out of the blue:
It is very important that you confirm that your email address works and that we can reach you at this address. If we do not get your confirmation, the domain names that are associated with this email address will be deactivated on 2016-08-12
Consider that if the e-mail address hadn't worked then I wouldn't have had any domains after a week and wouldn't have known why.
Not a risk that I can accept. So I split each domain onto a new 'handle' so that there's less risk of total loss, and now I am planning to spread across other registrars.
GoDaddy still hasn't recovered from Bob Parsons and all the drama around super bowl ads, sopa, elephants, etc. Not sure how they ever get past that, at least in the WordPress space their product is technically pretty decent.
https://iwantmyname.com
Nominet (who run the .uk ccTLD) allocate votes proportionally to registrars based on how many domains they have registered. [1]
GoDaddy will now likely control the majority of the votes.
1: http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015...
They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.
But the 10% or 3% limit respectively is per TAG (handle). HostEurope have multiple tags (HOSTEUROPE, 123-REG, WEBFUSION, WEBFUSION2, DOTUKDOMAINS, ... )
As it stands, the sale has not yet been completed, so nothing will change within the next 6 months. Even after the sale completes, these sorts of large organizations move very slowly. I would not expect to see any customer-facing changes within the next 2 years. Host Europe has not even finished properly absorbing some of its previous acquisitions, and we're about 1/10th the size of GoDaddy!
Any other questions about Host Europe, feel free to ask and I'll answer them if I can.
2013 acquistion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-bu...
Think Intergenia was probably the biggest from memory.
How do new customers over look that to save a couple bucks per year? How do existing customers ignore it because it'll take some time/effort/cost to make the change?
What a PITA. RIP TSO, you will be missed.