GoDaddy launches AWS-style servers and apps | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy launches AWS-style servers and apps

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42 pointschatmasta52 comments

We used them as a domain registrar long ago. Somebody was able to contact support, have them unlock the domain, and transfer it.

And I am supposed to trust them now with my infrastructure? No thank you.

were you able to get the domain back ?. This isn't the first time i've heard of using social engineering to steal domains.

It's funny because when anyone else wants to transfer their own domain it takes like a week, the process is extremely confusing, and there is no way to contact support. (Look at that, another excellent selling point.)

Yeah they're pretty horrid for that. We found the same problems at Rackspace.

Also you're only allowed to have one contact on record and it has to be an actual person, so if that person for some reason forcibly leaves your organization or worse, gets hit by a truck, you have all kinds of crazy fucking hoops you'll have to jump through to change it.

Yeah, but it is GoDaddy.

My number 1 issue with them is never having had a good custom support experience with them. Dropped calls, no return emails, barrier after barrier.

And that is for a rinky-dink little brochure website. No way their rep supports something like this. For me of course, ymmv.

> that is for a rinky-dink little brochure website

The less you pay for a service, the less profitable it is to provide support. For higher-priced products, GoDaddy's support may be better.

But, yes, it's still GoDaddy.

They screwed up a migration of simple Wordpress MySQL databases for me from one of their hosting products to another (lost half completely, and half the data from the others). Even for cheap hosting you'd think for the number of customers they have they could afford to test a database migration.

Apple and Google have lost data for me during migrations in more egregious ways. There's unfortunately a subculture of the software industry that cares more about delivering products on time than delivering safe products.

Indeed. I'm not sure which is the sub-culture any more.

Yeah, that's certainly fair, I took it as a lesson on making sure I had backups.

GoDaddy?

No thank you! http://www.businessinsider.com/godaddy-ceo-videotapes-himsel...

Assuming that what he did is not illegal, I don't see why videotaping yourself hunting an animal is a cause to dislike someone or their company. A bit odd, but a big deal I think not. Particularly if elephants are considered pests in the area.

There are already many reasons to dislike GoDaddy, no need to manufacture some.

Yup. Additionally, Radiolab had an episode about this too[1] and it changed how I now think of "exotic" hunting.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/

Just because something might not be 100% illegal does not make it right. Last time I checked taking a life was not exactly something which is generally encouraged.

And as for "pest", there are plenty of examples in history where this "reasoning" was used as justification for murdering, killing, genocide, you name it.

It is my choice who I do business with and for this I do not need to "manufacture" reasons but only need to look at facts. Personally I do not feel comfortable doing business with people who literally butcher beings.

> Last time I checked taking a life was not exactly something which is generally encouraged.

Wait, what? Have you ever eaten meat, worn leather, or taken Tylenol? We kill hundreds of thousands of animals daily.

And two wrongs make a right?

No longer the CEO fwiw.

Still a board member though.

Yeah, fair, and he shows up at their holiday party and hands out money (no joke, I had the "pleasure" of attending one). I get the impression his whole life was dedicated to the company for so long that he doesn't want to let go of some involvement at any cost. I know that he's barely involved in decision making these days; kinda pity him a little bit. (Ok, not really.)

People don't trust them with domain registration. Why do they think they can be trusted with our servers?

Many people do trust them with domain registration as well as hosting. HN is probably filled with people who know better (or have had enough time to have a bad GoDaddy experience), but GoDaddy is still the first place many people go when they want to build a website.

Mostly because of their successful ad campaign for many years.

No problems here with simple registration, though wouldn't trust them with DNS or anything beyond that.

One complaint is that they do have some dark patterns in their UI that tend to always work out in their favor: like a funky cart and auto-defaulting to 5 year registrations in only certain undefined scenarios.

> GoDaddy believes it’s filling a niche that AWS is not actually serving that well right now: smaller businesses that need cloud services

im having a really hard time believing anyone will use this "cloud" unless they are clueless and are baited into it by some salespeople.

All clouds are not equal. It's difficult to maintain uptime and especially security. The skilled engineers who do it right are expensive and not easy to come by, and you're competing with places like FB, Google, and Amazon. What will godaddy offer these engineers to win them over? My guess is that they'll hire cheap and the quality will show through.

And how is AWS _not_ filling this niche? With their generous free tier, you can practically launch and run a business for a year without paying anything. Even after that, AWS is great for small businesses. Sure, you actually have to pick a product and launch on it, but AWS handles the uptime, (most) security, etc.

> run a business for a year without paying anything.

Is their free tier limited to one year?

> The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Tier is designed to enable you to get hands-on experience with AWS Cloud Services. The AWS Free Tier includes services with a free tier available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date, as well as additional service offers that do not automatically expire at the end of your 12 month AWS Free Tier term.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

There's a list there of what does/does not expire.

Here is GoDaddy's original press release. I had a hard time finding it.

https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/news-releases/news-rele...

Worst company ever. Need a domain asap for a tech demo with weird DNS requirements. Their systems fucked up horribly, ended up buying 5 domains trying to checkout, then refused to refund any of them as 'domains are non-refundable'.

I find Godaddy to be serviceable for registration. But, I wouldn't do anything beyond registering the domain name, then immediately updating its DNS servers to Route 53 or otherwise.

Funny side note: Just learned that my Android keyboard auto-suggests "godawful" when "godaddy" is typed.

Are you sure you didn't just accidentally check out with everything in your cart? From what you wrote, it seems the "system messing up" was on your side (pebkac). It's much easier to blame someone else though.

No, the site was riddled with 500 errors, their CDN was down which made all the fonts not load, etc. They had it on their Twitter that they were having a weird system outage after I realised and was sure after I tweeted them they would refund the domains. No dice. 100% refusal to refund.

That should have been a good hint to not use Godaddy

Will never forget the one time they simply locked our entire account with approx. 20 domains. Without providing a full copy of my passport and credit-card (front & back) we would have never gotten the account back. Transfered all domains the very next day to another registrar. Never again GoDaddy.

I'm curious who the target market for this is. Any tech worth his salt wouldn't go near GoDaddy for even a domain registration. Who the heck would trust them to run cloud servers?

I'm not saying they don't have customers. The advertise to non-techies and tons of non-techies use them as a registrar and mail host. I just don't see that same set of people running cloud servers. It's too low level.

It seems to me that GoDaddy's new offering is more similar to Digital Ocean's than Amazon's. Makes me wonder why they didn't just buy Digital Ocean? Or maybe they tried and were met with laughter.

> Makes me wonder why they didn't just buy Digital Ocean?

Please no.

I work on the GoDaddy Hosting team. I'm based out of Sunnyvale, CA but the cloud team is mostly in Gilbert, AZ. I didn't personally work on this particular product, but I'd be happy to provide insight where I can. (i.e. I'm not a PR rep) I see some concerns in this thread regarding support: Our hosting products go through a different dedicated support team.

I am not sure if this is AWS-style. More like CPanel app installation with Magic wizard for most of the installations. For RoR and Django, more like Herkou (but does GoDaddy have its own buildpack/deployment/development workflow)?

Tell me GoDaddy is using some of the Nodejitsu team they acquired to implement this. If GoDaddy is going to overcome their reputation as seen here in the comments, they're going to need some tooling and ops with a proven track record.

Do they try to put you through a 10 page up sell process every time you launch a sever?

Probably not only then. The moment when you want to restart your server via the web UI would be another good moment to upsell you. And thinking about how many features would be there, a 10 pages might not be enough for their cloud offerings.

Why not give it a shot and find out? :P

This news is a long time coming but I am super pleased that they got this announcement out before the OpenStack Summit next month.

After the failure of the HP public cloud Openstack needed this validation.

I don't understand how GoDaddy provides any significant validation when there are so many prominent companies using OpenStack in production[1]. The list of companies who support the OpenStack Foundation is huge as well.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#Users

In the context of a public cloud we need more users.

I wouldn't trust GoDaddy to host the most trivial of websites. This is a non-starter.

On the question of whether GoDaddy is reliable; well AFAIK they are the biggest domain name registrar, so they should be reliable. And they seem to apply the .NET Framework quite successfully on their website.

David Russell Dennis

Godaddy is the Comcast of Hosting.

GoDaddy is the comcast of the tech world.

The cloud has officially jumped the shark.

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