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Comment by derFunk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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