GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group
aboutus.godaddy.net
aboutus.godaddy.net
Digital ocean for small scale hosting, too.
If you're a no frills, I know how DNS works, don't annoy me with marketing and gimmicks type of hacker, this is the registrar for you.
Switched to them in 2009 (crazy to see in my email how long it's been!). I get an email when things need renewing, and an email when there is some stupid hoop ICANN requires me to jump through, which to be fair has only been like 2-3 times in 8 years.
I only manage 10-15 domains at any given time. If you have more, I don't know how well this works with huge numbers, but for my load, they work perfectly.
I've used GoDaddy, Ghandi, and others. I prefer the minimalism of NFS by far.
That link again! (call mr plow):
That review is on a WordPress-oriented site, but it includes screenshots of the interface, which might interest some of you.
Slightly awkward and seems likely to leave an unusuable residue, as opposed to just paying the required amount directly.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#gp_domains
Are your domain registration services intended for general-purpose usage?
No, our domain registrations services are provided on a cost-recovery basis as a service to our hosting members, and are not intended to be used as a standalone product. We are not, nor do we have any interest in being, a general-purpose domain registration provider.
Consequently, while we do not impose any restrictions on the use of our domain registration and RespectMyPrivacy.COM services, our system is specially designed to facilitate use of registered domains with our hosting services. If you wish to use these services for other purposes, you are welcome to do so, with the following caveats:
• it may require additional effort on your part to set up,
• our prepaid balance model is not optimized for domain-only usage, and
• we will not be able to provide technical support for usage of domains in conjunction with third-party services.
We charge a small deposit fee on each deposit. This fee is designed to to cover the following costs we incur:
Fees charged to us by third parties to process your payments.
Banking and accounting costs.
Dealing with payment fraud.
Developing and maintaining secure payment infrastructure.
To keep this fee from being too large, we also apply an instant rebate that can vary widely by payment method, deposit amount and other factors. For most payments, the deposit fee and instant rebate are not the deciding factors in determining which method to use. However, for extremely small deposits, they can be very important.
GoDaddy still hasn't recovered from Bob Parsons and all the drama around super bowl ads, sopa, elephants, etc. Not sure how they ever get past that, at least in the WordPress space their product is technically pretty decent.
No fuss, and the pricing is reasonable. They do email forwarding, and a few other things, but otherwise is just a basic registrar/dns provider.
Since the whole SOPA/PIPA fiasco, I've been moving all my domains from GoDaddy to Google Domains as they expire.
As for SOPA/PIPA those were my main initial drivers towards Gandi. They were one of the first to be vocally against SOPA and to offer massive discounts for godaddy transfers.
I ended-up doing this for GANDI after receiving this out of the blue:
It is very important that you confirm that your email address works and that we can reach you at this address. If we do not get your confirmation, the domain names that are associated with this email address will be deactivated on 2016-08-12
Consider that if the e-mail address hadn't worked then I wouldn't have had any domains after a week and wouldn't have known why.
Not a risk that I can accept. So I split each domain onto a new 'handle' so that there's less risk of total loss, and now I am planning to spread across other registrars.
Nominet (who run the .uk ccTLD) allocate votes proportionally to registrars based on how many domains they have registered. [1]
GoDaddy will now likely control the majority of the votes.
1: http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015...
They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.
But the 10% or 3% limit respectively is per TAG (handle). HostEurope have multiple tags (HOSTEUROPE, 123-REG, WEBFUSION, WEBFUSION2, DOTUKDOMAINS, ... )
In short, customer-satisfcation-wise, they seem to have vastly improved, and are leagues ahead of the likes of EIG (A Small Orange, Arvixe, BlueHost, BigRock, Host Gator and fifty thousand other brands). Their hosting packages seem usable now - a vast improvement.
The difficulty in judging hosts is that plenty of people have basic needs that are well served, and will go to the ends of the earth to defend a company. (A Small Orange comes to mind). The people who have bad experiences tend to shout very loudly, which can give a false impression.
The other issue is that people also shout loudly about things which, while not exactly a given host's fault, are connected with hosting, and so they get upset. Typically this comes about from leaving public information on a domain's WHOIS record, leading to spam calls and emails - which leads to some people accusing hosts of selling their customer lists.
Interestingly, EIG have been shutting down a number of their brands' affiliate programs (Site5, A Small Orange, Arvixe - may be others), which makes me wonder if they're going to consolidate some of their brands soon. They seem to be starting with the brands with the worst (recent) track records.
If you're after shared hosting, either go with SiteGround, or go with InMotion hosting (who have the occasional network outage like every shared host, but meh, the rest of their company is sound).
For anything else, grab a VPS from OVH, DigitalOcean, or dedicated from OVH or Hetzner. Good and bad stories abound, I've used them all and their core offering is sound.
(I don't know why you're downvoted, you asked fair question)
My data doesn't agree with what he's saying. GoDaddy's reputation is on par with the majority of the EIG brands. A Small Orange was a good company post acquisition by EIG for a while. I wrote about that specifically here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of... basically it went to hell once EIG management got involved and the original people team/staff left and it got merged into the conglomerate.
I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
OP here - me, too :)
Question: are you including every tweet in your analysis, or do you ignore some as being irrelevant? I mentioned the example of people complaining about spam from public whois records; if you mark such tweets as negative, I could see that explaining a large part of it.
(I ignore them as I don't see it as being directly related to a host's performance, even though I know there's an argument to be made about public and "private" whois records).
FWIW I also ignore positive tweets that consist of short generic "great, thanks!" or "Yay, awesome!" - I've found that they most often tend to be talking about some sponsorship/promotion or meetup/party the host has held.
Do you have a link to your site? Be curious to look at what you're doing.
GoDaddy Industry Sector
======= ========= ======
Revenue/Employee (TTM) 375,425 7,814,598 62,334,654
Net Income/Employee (TTM) -4,537 793,185 1,346,909
Receivable Turnover (TTM) 210.28 5.11 10.76
LT Debt to Equity (MRQ) 205.65 8.56 12.85
Total Debt to Equity (MRQ) 206.47 14.86 21.44
Interest Coverage (TTM) 0.09 37.70 15.70
I worked at Godaddy in Sunnyvale for about 8-9 months, and left recently (for personal reasons unreleated to the job). It was a great place to be, the leadership was very down to earth and aware of the business, and the work-life balance was great. In addition, the pay was good, the benefits and perks were reasonable (but not awesome). Teams were encouraged and backed to try out new tech they felt was helpful (vs having to go through a process). I also worked with some super smart people. Also, if it matters to you, I thought it was refreshing the way they acknowledged diversity issues internally, and how they approach hiring. I recommend it as a great place to work, especially on the non-infrastructure teams.
I think it's a great place to work... lots of interesting projects, nice people, wonderful work / life balance. (I just got three months off for Paternity leave, for instance.)
I can personally confirm the side project thing as well :)
Hit me up on the nova channel or PM on IRC when you get a chance.
-S
Their legacy "deluxe" hosting is as terrible as always. Simple things like extracting zip files with their file manager will hang/fail at random.
Their cpanel offering is terrible because your IO is throttled to a snail's crawl. 1MB/s is not enough for much of anything.
Their managed WordPress group did a dog and pony at our meetup group when it launched. It had a good "we're listening" marketing spin. That service has turned to garbage as well. I tried migrating a site from a cpanel dev server to their hosting and it turned into a week long project because their import tool craps out when encountering mysql 5.6 or newer. Their tech support scripts don't acknowledge the problem so they will waste an hour of your day asking to "disable plugins" and try the default 2016 theme for migration when clearly that's not the issue.
In general while their telephone people are nice enough, the antiquated versions of software (max php 5.5), over burdened servers, and severe resource throttling are reasons to avoid them at all costs.
[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-fro...
So called premium domains are set by the Registry managing the TLD, and Registrars offering those domains for sale pass along the premium price.
Their stance on SOPA and PIPA didn't help them much, either.
Everything I saw looked like they were trying to lock in uninformed customers to things they don't need. Or make it very hard for them to switch.
2013 acquistion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-bu...
Think Intergenia was probably the biggest from memory.
What a PITA. RIP TSO, you will be missed.
How do new customers over look that to save a couple bucks per year? How do existing customers ignore it because it'll take some time/effort/cost to make the change?
I used to be OK with Namecheap but the Web 2 redesign makes doing most things a pain.
1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates.
2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP.
3. Agreed, their redesign is awful.
I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and:
1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing
2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API
3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing
4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.