GoDaddy CTO and Cloud VP Heads to Google | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy CTO and Cloud VP Heads to Google

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46 pointsarchielc41 comments

Unqualified comment, I admit, but GoDaddy as well as other domain shops seem to be stuck in the late 90s. With UI, tech and support quality. Also Namecheap, which I'm using primarily. They just put a fresh UI on top of parts of their customer acquisition facing system couple of years ago and still run the same core system.

When godaddy had one of their big SOPA snafu I switched to name.com.

name.com prices are good, UI is good, seems like a decent company. I guess they were bought last year by a larger company and I've noticed no negative changes.

gandi.net is a little more expensive but they are highly regarded as a company.

Name.com refused to do DNS properly if you used their bundled DNS service. They'd resolve any hostname, but if you hadn't defined it, then they'd resolve it to some search or ad page?

That's why I stopped using them. Namecheap, despite the idiotic name, seems pretty good.

The name.com bundled DNS service no longer does this, and hasn't for a while now.

I switched to buying domains from Google (http://domains.google.com) two years ago. They give free private registration, let you use google for authoritative dns and setting up Google Apps is super simple.

Been a stellar choice so far!

Last I checked it was for US residents only. I couldn't sign up from Canada.

Thinking about trying AWS domain registration services soon.

Look into Namesilo. I've had an incredible experience with them thus far. Not pretty, but insanely functional.

Two thoughts.

* If it ain't broke don't fix it.

* Google could take some tips from a lean tech company that creates a legacy product that requires minimum upkeep while staying respectable profitable.

What tips could Google glean from the Blockbuster Video of registrars?

Maybe Google is becoming interested in the lower end of the hosting market? GoDaddy is at roughly $1+B/year of revenue with a 5% market share. The revenue is split pretty evenly between domains and hosting, and there's obviously synergy between the two. A 5% market share netting $1+B implies an overall market of $20+B.

Google has all the pieces, but doesn't seem to have made any notable inroads in that space. They haven't made any real attempts, thus far, to compete with GoDaddy, 1&1, EIG, etc.

But...really it is broken, because, as a long-time Namecheap customer, their shitty legacy systems have got me looking for a better option. I recently complained that they sent me an email warning about a pending expiration, followed immediately by an email about auto-renewal on the same account. Their response was basically to shrug and explain that their email notifications suck. That's garbage customer service no matter how you cut it, and the domain registration/hosting business is 100% customer service.

And GoDaddy is all of the above, but a thousand times worse.

For reference, ICANN requires that upcoming renewal notifications are sent in specific intervals, so it results in very noisy registrars.

Namecheap could note within that renewal notice (and subsequently avoiding the auto-renewal notice) but, I can see where they're coming from.

That's definitely interesting. At the end of the day, the messages are misleading at best, arguably negligent, and definitely sloppy. They could fix it, but their whole site just seems like five or so legacy systems glued together without any overriding consideration for the user.

Accidentally down voted instead of up voting, so I'll just pipe in to say that this is exactly my impression. It's as though they felt like putting an Ajaxy new UI on top of their collapsing backend would make things better, when it really made them worse because it's harder to tell if your request has been sent or the system is lagging out, or what. I was with Namecheap for something like ten years, but now I'm migrating everything away as they start to get close to renewal.

I switched all mine to EasyDNS... a quick scan of their blog gives a good idea of their philosophy: http://blog.easydns.org/

Been using Namecheap for years but recently I had to use GoDaddy cause a client insisted. I had to use their support, the experience was awful and I am not talking about UX but to actually get to speak to a human who knows what you are talking about was nearly impossible. On the other hand Namecheap's chat support was very helpful in multiple occasions. So if we are not comparing UI's from my personal experience I wouldn't say namecheap is as bad.

Check out http://Uniregistry.com - seriously next-level domain management + free privacy & no annoying upsells. Been very impressed.

I wrote about the reasons why recently here - https://startablog.tv/move-domains-to-uniregistry/

Namecheap refreshed their UX, but still really difficult to handle any sort of volume of domains.

>> GoDaddy as well as other domain shops seem to be stuck in the late 90s

I'm surprised that no startups (or existing vps/cloud providers) have tried to jump into this lower-end space of domains + shared hosting. The market size is pretty big, and the competition is, as you mention, pretty stagnant. At the moment, it's mostly GoDaddy, 1&1, and the various companies owned by EIG.

There also seems to be quite a bit of room for disrupting that market. It's fairly tech support intensive, partially due to things that could be improved, automated, etc. For example, most of them depend on "Cpanel", which is more than showing it's age.

The relative success of Wix.com (close to 1B mkt cap), which only went after a very specific sub-slice of this segment seems to indicate there's room for a bigger play.

It's more interesting why Google hired her. I agree with statements above that GoDaddy is someting from 90s. GoDaddy isn't famous for tech innovations. What's kind of expertise potentially she can bring to Google?

She has only been at GoDaddy recently, there is a career before that.

They probably tried to modernize GoDaddy and the efforts didn't take. Look at the folks she's brought over from MSFT.

This is just moving on to greener pastures as the market shifts its expectations. This is potentially a well timed career move as well depending on what she's going to be doing at Google.

A bit unrelated, but I'm curious how GoDaddy is so big. All their products are overpriced and they don't sell anything you can't get somewhere else at a better price. Their tools are just as user-friendly as any other service as well.

They make up for it with Superbowl ads.

It's sort of like dialup modem providers.. You would be amazed at the volume of non-tech people who simply don't care. Small business needs a website and GoDaddy offers a mountain of either partner or full service offerings in one convenient place.

Marketing expertise. They are good at:

- Initially low prices that go up at renewal time

- Cross sell and upsell

- Stickiness. Like the (since removed) 60 day lock on domains if you changed the whois info...even if it was removing privacy so you could transfer it.

- Affiliate (kickback) programs

- Advertising

They also use real people to call and remind people to renew and upsell. Probably annoying to HN demographic, but that is pretty savvy business foresight for the rest of the universe. Part of market building and maintance, the "ignore that customers are real people you can talk to" attitude of many shops like Google are a reality distortion.

The 60 day lock is mandated by ICANN, not Godaddy. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-03-07-en

The ICANN policy is 60 days after TRANSFER. GoDaddy extended that to include "any change to whois data". ICANN, in fact, issued several advisories to stop this sort of thing.

Interestingly enough, the CIRA (.ca domains) implemented a policy that says quite the opposite. Any domain changes result in a 60 day lock.

A long, long time ago, they were one of, if not the, cheapest domain reseller(s) out there.

AFAICT this is exactly it, they were very very cheap. And so they captured a lot of domains, and if you asked someone about getting a domain it was "oh I got one from GoDaddy it was cheap, the service was bad but what do you expect?" and lots of people had domains from them. Then they started raising their prices until they had a nicely profitable business. They had become "established" and they continue to use name recognition to this day to attract business from people who either don't want to, or can't, shop around.

I think for three reasons:

1. They handle a lot of mom-and-pop business with actual live people on the phones and web chat.

2. For the "you're a computer guy, right?" relatives of those mom-and-pop business owners GoDaddy is large enough that most hosting sites have instructions for it directly.

3. Changing registrars is a pain. I know that GoDaddy is going to stay around. I can't be so sure for smaller dedicated registrars or that Google won't decide to discontinue their registration service and force me to change down the line. My time is limited and the peace of mind that I won't have to change is worth a few dollars a year.

They have north of 90% of all .com registrations either directly or through companies that they acquired.

That sounds a bit high. Based on numbers from the last few months, GoDaddy has about 40m of the 127m .com domains, or 31%.

Sources: http://www.registrarowl.com/report_registrar_total_domains.p... https://www.verisign.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-regi...

You're ignoring all of the companies they bought.

One of the happiest days of my life was when I finally migrated 100+ personal domains away from GoDaddy over to Namecheap and was able to close my GoDaddy account forever.

Now it makes sense why Elissa is on the CNCF TOC.

Mildly related - whatever happened to Nodejitsu after Godaddy ate them?

So now we can expect annoying up sells and unsolicited pressure marketing whenever we buy or register for a Google product?

The last straw for me with Godaddy is when they started sending me e-mails warning me my "domain was not secure" trying to get me to buy some phony domain secure service with a bundled drag and drop website builder. No thanks.

What does the CTO have to do with sales and marketing?

Good choice.

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