It's cheap and it's a big company. They are basically the Walmart of domain registration. Out of having to deal with something like 40 or 50 registrars and resellers over the years I give them a slightly above average rating. Really, for all the bashing this thread people are giving there are far worse. They aren't great, but things will probably work with them.

I'll talk about alternatives now. Yeah, I know Gandi is cool, but they want too much money so majority of people pass them by.

If you want a really horrid example: 1and1 is a company that sets the bar. They buy up superbowl and print ads to lure in old people with cheap domain registrations (like $1 or so). Once sucked in they use a careful reading of the ICANN regulations to maximize difficulty in doing anything.

Oh, you want a transfer? That's going to be a week. Most things either go over the phone or through a panel that's down or nonfunctional half of the time.

Want to change nameserver delegation to your own DNS servers? Fuck you then. They wipe the current DNS records and process the change in a couple days. Your site can take a vacation.

Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there. They finally got off being an ENOM reseller, which is great. ENOM are assholes. I had a client that hired an ENOM reseller some time ago to register their domain and host their site. The reseller's company's owner got arrested and/or deported and while we were able to save the client's files the domain expired with no way for us to renew it. The good news is you can gripe up the chain to ENOM which will require a 5 year domain registration for $200.

That's it in a nutshell. They are a large company which has a service that mostly works for a cheaper price than arguably better options like Gandi.

Shout out to other terrible registrars like Yahoo Small Business (ugh)

GoDaddy has crazy marketing and dominate search results in that regard.

They bait and switch their customers into buying a really cheap domain for the first year and then rake up the price for subsequent years.

It's annoying for businesses to switch everything over to a new provider, especially not so technical people that don't want downtime, so they eat the cost.

GoDaddy alternatives which aren't shady are:

Namecheap

iwantmyname

AWS Route53 Domains

Google Domains (wouldn't be surprised if they kill this service though)

People keep talking about domain registrations and competitors in this area, but the majority of GoDaddy customers don't know what means. The majority of competitors in the shared hosting space are part of the EIG conglomerate, which is largely more of the same.

All the options we might call "better", including deploying a static site to Netlify or GH Pages, using a cheap VPS or a complex AWS deployment, aren't actually options for the people buying these services, who expect a one click Wordpress deployment.