Yep - any site I've seen hosted on GoDaddy is LAMP or just plain HTML/CSS/JS. I had to do some LAMP work on a site hosted on GoDaddy and it was pretty annoying to configure, with poor support. I can't imagine any Rails developer using them for hosting over Heroku, etc - so if Rails is maybe 1% of their hosted sites, they might save money by not having to support it.
The user experience of buying domains through GoDaddy is very grating. They try to upsell and tack on services and features literally every step of the way. If all you want is a registrar, there are less annoying competitors at basically equal prices.
Quality of user experience: Can I register a domain without being bombarded for ads for other add-on crap?
Social responsibility: Am I supporting a company that relies on horrible and sexist and demeaning ads to get attention?
Social cachet: Would I be embarrassed to have people find out who I was using for my domains/hosting? It may be shallow, but working with GoDaddy looks as sophisticated as having an @aol.com email address.
Features like: Locking. Ease of transfers in and out. Properly authorizing requests for changes. Customer record privacy. Providing their own zone hosting. Not injecting evil wildcards/redirects. Supporting more than the basic record types when hosting the zones.
I'm sure there are other things that could be added.
As the person who asked: I do in house database programming, so while I am aware of GoDaddy (they are the biggest registrar, no?), I wouldn't know what to expect differently from one registrar over another, as I don't use them. I registered a domain for my Mum's business over ten years ago, but haven't used a registrar since.
In my experience a few years ago the process of transferring away from GoDaddy took as long and was as complicated as it possibly could be by law. Like absolute limit. If they were able to send me harassing emails before the transfer was completed, they did. Link bating with anti-agreements. I stuck it out for months jumping through every hoop they raised because I wanted to transfer away that badly. Maybe things have improved.
GoDaddy supported SOPA, their advertising campaigns are notoriously sexist, their CEO once posted a "white man's burden" video of him "saving some poor Africans" by killing an elephant, and they're constantly in the news for sleazy anti-consumer business tactics that add up to an awful, socially irresponsible corporation.
They've since recanted their SOPA support, but I think it'll take more than a calculated business move to regain any consumer trust. Personally, I'd advise being familiar with the organizations that have ever supported SOPA, and cutting ties with them for any future endeavors:
SOPA Was the biggest misstep for me, and was the breaking point for me to migrate all my domains elsewhere. I ended up at Namecheap because I liked the way they addressed the situation.
Exactly, I mentioned further down that their ruby customers are probably made up of people with very little experience. So these customers are probably characterised by quite low spend and very high support costs since they're still quite new to it.
This is making the assumption that only someone who was quite new to Ruby (and development in general) would use GoDaddy for hosting.
Michael Hartl's immensely popular Railstutorial.org was registered thru GoDaddy. (Definitely doesn't use them for hosting though, as per http://builtwith.com/railstutorial.org)
I'm a PM at GoDaddy and can verify that the number of Ruby sites we host is extremely low. There are a lot of great Ruby offerings (Heroku kicks ass) so we are focusing resources to be really great at fewer things.
My guess would be it's more that no experienced Ruby developer would use GoDaddy for hosting. So most people they've got using it are probably inexperienced people (on that basis if you had experience, you'd use something like Heroku) who would probably be characterised by low spend and high support costs.
You are absolutely correct (I'm a PM at GoDaddy). There are some terrific Ruby hosting offerings (personally, I love Heroku) so we are focusing on being great at a few things. We've come a long way in the past 6 months with our hosting performance, but still have a ways to go.
Yeah, I don't know what's most predictable about some Hacker News readers, the fact that they are in love with Ruby or that they are not good at detecting sarcasm.
Feels like GoDaddy tried desperately to gain mind-share of ruby/rails developers, realised it was costing more than it was making and hence shutting it down.
Hi everyone, Product Manager from GoDaddy here. A lot of you have made the correct assumption. We simply host very few Ruby sites. We are radically improving our hosting, and with all the great offerings like Heroku (kicks ass) it doesn't make much sense to continue to invest in what will be a less than great user experience for Ruby developers. I'm happy to answer any more questions here!
Thanks! I joined GoDaddy 6 months ago, and although 7 months ago I would have laughed if you told me I would be working at GoDaddy, the company is undergoing a remarkable transition with new leadership. We are becoming hyper customer focused and making our products world class.
I know the organization is changing, may I respectfully suggest that you suggest someone take a look at this language on the web site?
Like a Stanford dorm room on steroids, our Sunnyvale office is 40,000 square-feet of Bay Area badassery, brimming with some of the biggest brains on the planet, dreaming up digital masterpieces and keeping time in agile sprints
Because... yuck. I get what you're going for, but I'm sure you can do better.
That's too bad, sorry that broke. I'll get it over to the right team. We're launching a dramatically improved front of site experience soon so it might be fixed in that release.
Hey... I'm a dev over at GoDaddy. While that area isn't my direct area of development, I work with those guys -- we're cleaning all that stuff up very dramatically. I think you'll be pleased...
It seems like a lot of the ruby community would use PAaS solutions. Even if they wanted to run their own server It's highly unlikely that they would be using a shared godaddy server. Not really that big of a deal.
Even if they wanted a shared server, I suspect that the number of people who'd want a shared server with primary support for Rails 1 and alternate, "development" support for Rails 2 is vanishingly small.
I had the pleasure of trying to get a Rails site running on GoDaddy, primarily because my client had already purchased their hosting plan. This was circa 2009, and it was the first and last time I'd ever attempt such a thing.
I don't really blame GoDaddy, since their shared hosting infrastructure is just not built for long-running processes. For rails, CGI is laughably slow, and FastCGI, while faster, still wasn't performant enough and was causing intermittent 500 errors.
I ended up converting the entire project to static HTML (getting rid of the rails CMS component) and it was smooth sailing from there. Thankfully the client required very few updates to the site after that (otherwise I might have tried to move it onto Drupal or something).
56 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadUsing them for hosting your site? Double-cringe.
Social responsibility: Am I supporting a company that relies on horrible and sexist and demeaning ads to get attention?
Social cachet: Would I be embarrassed to have people find out who I was using for my domains/hosting? It may be shallow, but working with GoDaddy looks as sophisticated as having an @aol.com email address.
I'm sure there are other things that could be added.
In my experience a few years ago the process of transferring away from GoDaddy took as long and was as complicated as it possibly could be by law. Like absolute limit. If they were able to send me harassing emails before the transfer was completed, they did. Link bating with anti-agreements. I stuck it out for months jumping through every hoop they raised because I wanted to transfer away that badly. Maybe things have improved.
I hate GoDaddy.
Their past ad campaigns have been very trashy and sexist as well.
Their pricing is higher than other registrars, unless you play their discount/coupon games.
They've since recanted their SOPA support, but I think it'll take more than a calculated business move to regain any consumer trust. Personally, I'd advise being familiar with the organizations that have ever supported SOPA, and cutting ties with them for any future endeavors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_offi...
Here are some previous mentions of GoDaddy/SOPA on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393477
But, yeah, I wouldn't use them for hosting anything.
This is making the assumption that only someone who was quite new to Ruby (and development in general) would use GoDaddy for hosting.
My life is better for it too, I felt really agitated every time I had to touch Ruby code.
So yes, I doubt anyone is still using GoDaddy for Rails hosting.
"If you have Java enabled for your hosting account, it will conflict with Rails."
"Currently, Rails version 1.1.6 is supported in the default directory, while Rails 2.2.2 is considered an alternate "development" environment"
etc...
Like a Stanford dorm room on steroids, our Sunnyvale office is 40,000 square-feet of Bay Area badassery, brimming with some of the biggest brains on the planet, dreaming up digital masterpieces and keeping time in agile sprints
Because... yuck. I get what you're going for, but I'm sure you can do better.
http://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/about-godaddy.aspx?ci=9079
I don't really blame GoDaddy, since their shared hosting infrastructure is just not built for long-running processes. For rails, CGI is laughably slow, and FastCGI, while faster, still wasn't performant enough and was causing intermittent 500 errors.
I ended up converting the entire project to static HTML (getting rid of the rails CMS component) and it was smooth sailing from there. Thankfully the client required very few updates to the site after that (otherwise I might have tried to move it onto Drupal or something).