Poll: Will you move your domains from GoDaddy today?

118 points by B-Scan ↗ HN
Today is a day. What is your choice?

149 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] thread
I voted for "I don't have domains at GoDaddy" since I moved from GoDaddy years ago before all this mess.
I was thinking to add option for people like you, but I think that "I don't have domains at GoDaddy" is enough.
Yes, 3 of them, I was just waiting until today to move them.
I wish I could. I still have to wait a few days because all of my domains on GoDaddy are less than 60 days old. Yeah, I decided it was the cheapest and assumed they had changed since '08. Boy, was I wrong.
I'm still on the fence. (should this be a choice?)

They do have an exceptionally crappy web interface, and their marketing is distasteful. On the other hand, I've called them several times over the last couple years for random support, and my experience with that has always been excellent.

So yeah, still on the fence. And all this Godaddy backlash has just a tad to much witch-trial feel to it. But man their web interface sucks...

Here's a tip: SWITCH, they suck ass.

Basically, the CEO hunts elephants ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy... ), they helped redact SOPA & support it, they are exempt from SOPA, have a bad attitude, refuse to respond to requests at random / throttle ( http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm ).

What else do you need to hear to not "be on the fence" any more?

P.S.: I don't have domains at godaddy and never will. I also don't tell you or anyone else to what company to switch, just to switch from them.

Your experience with their support was excellent because mine was very poor ... in the sense that they charged me money and didn't gave it back - they have auto billing enabled by default.

So yeah, go enjoy on the expense of other people both money-wise and liberty-wise, support the damn bastard

No. But I think people should make up their own minds.

The process of whipping up an internet hate mob with the aim of destroying <person>/<company> etc is one of the parts of the internet I detest the most. It's ugly bullying.

It rarely concerns itself with facts, just how big the internet hate mob can grow to and whether they can succeed at destroying their chosen enemy.

So, despite the fact that GoDaddy helped write SOPA, never officially withdrew their support from SOPA, and even has special exemptions written into SOPA for themselves, it's a hate mob?
Yes. Regardless, protests like this never achieve anything apart from wasting peoples time.

If you don't like GoDaddy, or disagree with some of their policies, don't use them. It's the whipping people up into an internet hate mob unconcerned with any facts that I find distasteful.

> If you don't like GoDaddy, or disagree with some of their policies, don't use them.

... that's exactly what we're doing. What, do you think we're firebombing GoDaddy's headquarters and killing its executives?

You're also posting endless articles (Not you personally ;) ), trying to poke everyone else into doing the same.
Uh, yeah. A boycott isn't a boycott if nobody knows about it. If you don't want to join us, then don't. Nobody is making you move your domains away.
Regardless, protests like this never achieve anything apart from wasting peoples times.

It's ironic you should say this. The type of people who think exactly this, is imo the reason nothing ever gets done as well. What I'm seeing is people doing something (voting with their wallet). As the saying goes All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

If you don't like GoDaddy, or disagree with some of their policies, don't use them. It's the whipping people up into an internet hate mob unconcerned with any facts that I find distasteful.

You may have a point. Many people don't take the time to check facts, they instead rely on the moral compass of their peers to take a direction. That's how the world usually works and it won't change tomorrow. However, in this case precisely, I fail to see which facts you'd like to bring to light, that would play in GoDaddy's favor, or how someone would take the time to move their domains without some prior understanding of why they're doing it. Also, what exactly qualifies this as a 'hate mob' rather than an angry mob?

While GoDaddy is made up of complete schmucks I'd never do business with, and I believe all the hate is justified, it should be noted that there are no special exemptions for them in SOPA. The exemptions are for all registrars.
> has special exemptions written into SOPA for themselves Source? I've been seeing that posted a lot today but haven't heard anything about that.
Hello, GoDaddy employee.

GoDaddy needs to learn their lesson for the mistakes they did in the past and for SOPA.

I wish I could have downvoted you.

I'm in no way affiliated or connected to GoDaddy. I don't have any domains registered with them. I dislike internet hate mobs, which as you say are designed to "teach them a lesson".
What they're getting is well deserved.

If I go out and do bad things, I go to jail, people will hate me / dislike me and wish that I stay in jail for a long time because I'm a criminal.

Why should people & companies who threaten important civil rights and liberties be treated differently? It's not OK to do crimes which affect 1-100 persons, but it's OK to affect the basic civil liberties & free speech of hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions?

Any entity, a company or a number of individuals, which does something like this should suffer consequences. If it's a company, then it should really go away.

A company is responsible for its image. People don't owe them anything, so that the said company deserves the money of their clients. They must have a good image and keep their customers happy. Either they do that, or they should go out of business.

All in all, keeping customers happy means you must also uphold some moral values and protect civil liberties.

There's a thing called due process. There's law.
Due process? You mean like paying 50 millions to the congress to get a law to pass? Yeah, we can see how good this is.

Law? You mean like the 1st amendment of the US constitution? Yeah, we can see how easy new laws can override the previous laws.

Actually, the law has a funny way of working. It seems it works for you when you're rich and against you when you're not a millionaire.

Keep talking about the law & due process.

I choose to tell everyone I possibly can about these companies and not use their services & not buy their products.

And it's legal to boycott someone!!!
I personally think GoDaddy has brought this on themselves. They have made it extremely easy for people to hate them, and I would bet that in most cases, those that are now publicly hating them have privately hated them all along -- long before SOPA.

And then they only made things worse by flip flopping on their stance with a thinly veiled, half-hearted attempt to win customer support back.

I think that's the difference between GoDaddy and most of the other SOPA supporters -- this hate was there all along, this is just bringing it out of everyone.

My peer pressure / herd mentality / mob detection shields always get activated at times like this.
Indeed, and I just got myself another domain Yesterday through Godaddy. They are really the Wal-Mart of domain name selling, disliked by snobs and hipsters but everyone will buy from them at some point.
They're cheap, they work, they're not going to go out of business....

Couldn't care less if their CEO likes hunting, or if they help the US government with its internet censorship agenda. Hate the US government for that, not random companies.

I don't think you understand how the government works. Most dystopian legislation is written and paid for by those "random" companies.
So fix the bit that's broken - the government. Companies are just playing by the rules.
They're both broken. HTH.
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Thank you for denigrating everyone who chooses not to do business with a reprehensible company as a "snob or hipster", jerk. Go read their ToS. They suck for more reasons than the one everyone is talking about now.
I already did when Bob Parsons killed that elephant
Yes, but not today.
In the process of moving 24 domains.
I left GoDaddy earlier this year, when Bob Parsons made his childish Great White Hunter video killing that elephant.

With the stories I've heard since about how GoDaddy already handles copyright complaints and otherwise mistreats customers, not to mention Parsons' support of torture, and of course SOPA, I can't imagine why I would ever consider giving them money—especially with how well NameCheap has treated me since I joined them.

Exactly the same for me. Except that I went with name.com.
quite happy with name.com also , also using enom.com and dynadot.com

i have also used godaddy before , but did not like it too much

It's amazing how much a person can bullshit to do stuff they want but they know it's not right... This Bob Parsons should be arrested.
Every time i hear the name Godaddy, i remember the elephant killing.
Moved to NameCheap after the elephant story broke.
Oh boy do I want to, but I need to figure out where to move them to! GoDaddy's support is in Arizona, clear, well trained, and answer the phone quickly, 24x7. Admittedly, I don't reedit often, but good/fast/easy support is important, and can be vital. I am not sold that the support will be acceptable with the others. I desperately want to move away from goDaddy, but don't know where to go to!
Namecheap. They're running a promotion right now, use promo code "SOPASUCKS". Have fun!
I've heard excellent things about namecheap. I'm going to be moving a few less critical domains to them as a trial.
I moved all my domains when the former CEO shot and killed an elephant, then gloated about it on video. It was both shocking and saddening for me.

Now the elephant killing is kind of a Voight-Kampff test I use. Anyone who isn't bothered with the elephant shooting wouldn't be my friend. I wouldn't want that type of person as a business partner or employee either. I don't think I could trust them.

I certainly wouldn't want to do business with a company that endorses or associates itself with killing intelligent, peaceful animals.

Personally, I want GoDaddy to GoDead.

He killed the elephant because it was destroying the communities crops, and the community got fed well from the meat.

I don't think it's quite as one sided as you propose.

He killed it for sport, the rest is an excuse. If he were concerned about the community food supply he could have donated food. Anyone who hires "booth babes" for spokespeople and is a fan of 24 (a show I used to work for) hunts because he enjoys it. Bob Parsons does not spend thousands of dollars to kill elephants for humanitarian reasons.
So you are offended by the intention? Plenty of people enjoy hunting. Does that make them bad people worthy of contempt?

This whole elephant thing is ridiculous.

> Plenty of people enjoy hunting. Does that make them bad people worthy of contempt?

If they kill animals for fun, yes.

He paid $70,000 to shoot the elephant. He's sick.

Well I think you'd be hard pressed to find a hunter in the US that hunts only for the food gained. Maybe spending 70,000 dollars is sick, but I would hardly call those who hunt for "sport" sick. I myself have never hunted, but I imagine it satisfies some urge in those who do it.
You bought that lie? That story was a PR cover-up to stop people from leaving GoDaddy. I guess it actually worked.
I've got reasons to suspect that guy is working for godaddy as he keeps defending them.

I really wish I could've downvoted him.

I'd really like to see proof that it was made up. It sounds reasonable on its face, rogue elephants trampling crops and people isn't unheard of.
It also sounds reasonable that you can pay the local authorities in Zimbabwe to get the privilege to fulfill your own great white hunter dreams by shooting a problematic elephant.

I personally think how much of the video is spent justifying it is quite pathetic, and can also see how others might be offended by the great white hunter style.

Watch the video, he's killing the elephant at night far from any village or crops. The crops thing is an excuse.
I don't think killing an elephant away from any village or crops proves that the elephant isn't a nuisance for that village, or that it routinely destroys the crops.
If you watched the original un-cut video, you would've seen the hungry villagers in Godaddy T-shirts and Caps skinning and chopping the elephant. That was disgusting. He thought of making it as a campaign, but when it backfired, they edited the video,
Do you really think there were a bunch of villagers sitting in Africa, saying to themselves "our crops are being destroyed by this elephant, and we are so hungry—if only a rich American could fly halfway around the world to shoot an elephant for us?"
No, I have more important things to worry about.
We need a "Maybe" option, eventually, maybe today - only have a few domains at GoDaddy, most are already at Namecheap.
No, for multiple reasons:

* I never had problems with it.

* I registered my domains via google, I have no idea how to move to a different registrar, and I'm not motivated enough to find out.

* If I started to stop using services where I don't agree with either the company's decisions, or whatever their prominent staff members chose to do, I would have to stop using all such services, not only one. I would have to go offline and live in a cage, pretty much.

Just because I am using a service does not mean I agree with whatever choices the provider makes. As long as those decisions don't affect me, I honestly don't care, because doing otherwise leads to a path of constant anger and depression. Don't need that, thank you.

Exactly, a lot of us uses Apple products after all.
While your view might be acceptable for some things, it's not acceptable when it comes to godaddy.

Their CEO is a bad person, they do a lot of bad things, they're exempt from SOPA, they support it, they helped redact it, they never withdrew SOPA support for real.

They threaten the 1st amendment of the US constitution - except it wil affect far more people than just the people of the US, the people for whom the US constitution was written for.

Please take these arguments somewhere else where they hold.

A lot of other companies were involved in writing SOPA, and even more support it still, that are not treated the same way GoDaddy is. There are a lot of other CEOs who did very bad things - but I don't see people boycotting them, either.

Just boycotting one SOPA supporter won't buy you anything, either.

Do tell me though, why GoDaddy is exceptional, and why the same treatment doesn't apply to the rest of the SOPA supporters.. because I honestly don't see the difference: they're all bad.

I didn't say anything about not doing the same to the others.

Please feel free to list up others along with what they did / are doing and I will support actions against all of those as well.

I only said the boycott against godaddy is OK for many reasons.

You can pretty easily get a list of SOPA supporters (eg, from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_that_supp...). Good luck boycotting them all!

However, I didn't say the boycott wasn't OK, either. It sure is, and it's well deserved.

I just said I'm not participating in it. If others do, that's their choice, and I don't see anything wrong with doing so, either. I just said I'm not going to, because (among other things) I consider it wrong to select one from the many, and punish only that, when there are others who are guilty of the same thing (and some even guilty of more).

I think the main factor here is that GoDaddy is probably the one SOPA supporter that many of us have used or are using. It's also very simple to switch away from them, and there are similar services with better interfaces.
In the words of Elie Wiesel, "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor. Never the victim. Never the tormented." It obviously doesn't feel quite right to equate this whole fiasco to what Wiesel was talking about, but I just cannot think of a quote more fitting than that.

Too often people think inaction implies neutrality . It does not. It's an enabling behavior. Passivity is a free permission slip for the status quo to persist onward.

In the end you do have to pick and choose your battles. For me personally, this time I simply had to do it -- I transferred. It was a very clear choice for me, frankly I don't see why it isn't also a clear choice for you either (it's not that difficult to make the change, if you have the docs handy, etc.), but hey, whatever suits you.

It isn't a clear choice, because the service they provide is something I didn't have a problem with, and moving would mean extra work and effort I'm not willing to pay. Why am I not willing to pay the price?

Because, as I wrote, I'd have to do the same thing with every other company who's services I use, when I don't agree with their decisions, or find their CEO someone who should be locked away and never spoken of ever again.

If I'm starting to boycot companies based on what they support, then I will do it with all of them, not just a single one. However, that is not possible.

I'm not neutral, either. I'm not going to use GoDaddy for any more domains in the future (partly due to their support for SOPA, partly for other reasons). I just won't move my domains from there, because it's not worth the effort.

Not to argue about this particular decision so much, but in general the argument that you can't do X good thing because it's not possible for you to do the same in all similar contexts in your life simply doesn't hold water. It's your prerogative to draw the line for effort you'll allocate to this particular goal. Some decisions will fall below that line, and some above it.

It's basically saying you can't pick any of the cherries off of the tree, because some are on much higher branches than others.

That's fine; if you don't have the time to clamber around on a ladder -- e.g., research the ethics behind every company you give any money to -- you pick the low-hanging fruit. So when you can make a fairly low-cost choice to move away from a company with a history of dubious ethics that you already know of, you do it.

Or if you have an hour to spare, you can choose the single largest flexible expense in your life and improve your related decisions based on a little research.

There's always low-hanging fruit. If you want to make your life (and the world) a better place, that's where you start.

Just because I am using a service does not mean I agree with whatever choices the provider makes. As long as those decisions don't affect me, I honestly don't care, because doing otherwise leads to a path of constant anger and depression. Don't need that, thank you.

So you found solace in the notion that apathy is the exemplary path to happiness? I'm not religious, but I'll borrow a saying

Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I find it unfortunate that more and more people are not granted that proverbial wisdom.

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I have my SSL certificates with them. These are cheap multi-domain certificates. But I'm willing to pay the extra buck, any suggestions?
Gandi.net offers free standard SSL certificates with each domain name, however they don't have multi-domain certificates.
Secret option number 5: I never used GoDaddy in the the first place as their marketing and UX are incredibly shoddy.
Thanks to the SOPA mess I started transferring to NameCheap. I am glad I won't have to deal with their annoying UI for much longer.
I've run an OpenSRS reseller/affiliate registrar thing for years. I've never understood why people don't do that.
I've never heard of OpenSRS. Can you elaborate on what it is, and the benefits?
Companies are not political parties and therefore they cannot express political thesis. If they do, then they loose, it's simple. Music, Cinema and all these forms of Art are signs that we are civilized. Civilization means that the civilized person copies the behavior of another civilized person and customize it with his own way. So this is a similar situation like maths, and physics and science. Every scientist helps building the science by putting his own piece of stone to the great miracle of science. If you want people to copyright your Stigma of Civilization or "Intellectual property" (you call it like this) first you must pay your debts to Shannon, and Babbage and Euler and many many other great persons who passed leaving their signs for ever and not just for 1 month.
What surprises me is that it took the SOPA fiasco to get people to move their domains from GoDaddy. A while back, I bought one domain from them and it took less than a month for me to transfer it out. The service was just that bad.

Not only is GoDaddy a morally reprehensible company, but more disturbingly they're not even a good registrar. They constantly try to upsell you, they plaster your domains with ads. They don't even allow certain certain kind of DNS records… (their UI doesn't allow for a wildcard CNAME for example). I don't need elephants or congress bills to stay far away from GoDaddy, their crappy product is more than enough.

To be fair, editing DNS records has nothing to do with being a registrar. Free DNS servers aren't even a service all registrars provide, and they're one most customers don't use -- they use their web host's. For anyone building a tech business, you have no excuse for tying your DNS service to your choice of registrar.
Most people running a tech business use an unmanaged VPS or dedicated server. Running your own DNS server is kind of a pain—so, when all registrar run their own DNS servers and most have pretty good UI for record management, why not use them?

For what it's worth, I use domainsite.com. They're a solid and cheap registrar, and though their UI isn't the prettiest, managing domains and DNS records is fantastic. I use them for everything.

What surprises me is that it took the SOPA fiasco to get people to move their domains from GoDaddy

Yeah, they suck, but in the last 5 years I've logged into godaddy exactly 5 times to renew all my domains and then forget about them for the next 11 months.

Its easier than transferring.

Not today, but within the next few days. Looking forward to joining NameCheap.