GoDaddy competitor offers discounted domain transfers to save elephants | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy competitor offers discounted domain transfers to save elephants

community.namecheap.com

114 pointsmakeramen52 comments

The video headline should actually read:

GoDaddy CEO helps with controlled thinning of population of dangerous animal while still managing to appear masturbatory, insensitive and self-aggrandizing.

More like "Godaddy competitor tries to capitalize on PR stumble with thinly veiled promotional campaign"

By dangerous animal you mean humans, right? ;)

Zimbabwe is home to over 100,000 elephants, when they state the eco-system can only handle half that many. The video even starts off with a "hunting problem elephants". I also wouldn't call it hunting for sport when the village eats every remaining bit.

Isn't this just a cheap shot? The video won't play on my computer, but I'm fine with putting down animals that are attacking humans or human civilization.[1]

Sure, sending Westerners over to do it is nonsensical, but presumably profitable. GoDaddy has lots of real issues (e.g. Google "godaddy fyodor"), but I don't think this private "sport" from their CEO is very relevant.

[1] You're allowed to disagree, but please keep a sense of perspective. Eating a couple hundred domesticated animals a year and telling a vegetarian not to kill one genuinely dangerous specimen is just silly.

They killed the elephants because they were damaging crops...

Why don't just relocate them? He has the money.

It's like the people saying "why didn't he just pay for chili peppers and/or tobacco dust to repel the elephants?"

He had an opportunity to shoot an elephant in a debatably ethical way, and he wanted to shoot an elephant.

Indeed. That's my point. Why?

> Why don't just relocate them? He has the money.

Where?

Almost all of the comments on this subject are Western in the most offensive sense of the word.

We see elephants as wonderous beasts. However, we're not living with them.

For the folks who live with them, elephants can be horribly destructive. They don't kill many people, but they do cause food shortages and the like.

It takes a lot of nerve to say that our desire to have a cool animal somewhere else should take precedence over their lives.

Elephants in the wild won't exist unless they're "good neighbors". That requires making sure that they're profitable to the people around them.

Parsons paid them lots of money to kill an elephant that was going to be killed anyway. Realistically, his alternative was to do nothing.

What have you done to help those people benefit from living near elephants in the wild?

Maybe they should take the hint and move the fuck away from elephant country? Nah, easier just to kill them.

Bob Parsons flew all the way to Zimbabwe and trekked into the wilderness to save the village's crops and do his small part in keeping down the country's elephant population? What a stand-up guy!

Here's a more likely narrative: Bob Parsons wants to kill elephants for sport. Bob Parsons finds out where in the world he can do so legally and with some semblance of morality. Bob Parsons goes there and has a hell of a good time shooting elephants.

Wait! That reads like I support him. There's was a definite tone of sarcasm when I wrote that!

My bad for misinterpreting.

The swarm of locals butchering the elephant carcass while wearing GoDaddy hats is by far the most disturbing part of the episode.

Or the civil war that he incited between the GoDaddy hats and the non-GoDaddy hats.

Maybe they cut the scene where the other village were wearing Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl XLV Champions t-shirts. A tacky hat still blocks the sun better than no hat.

It doesn't really matter if it was ethical or not, it is a picture that will offend people and sounds like a good topic for pundits on 24-hour news networks to argue over. If you are a CEO, don't do this stuff.

Unless that is your M.O. and it has consistently worked for you.

Is this the same guy who supported torturing prisoners at gitmo?

Well I will never buy another domain name from Godaddy again! In addition to being more expensive their CEO clearly has no heart!

But what about all their employees who rely on us continuing to buy domains from their company so they can have jobs? Are they all heartless?

So, you are against slaying a single elephant that jeopardizes an entire villages food supply AND you are for not giving money to a company that pays the salaries of hundreds of people.

Hmm.

CEO Bob Parsons' sickening behavior is reason enough to quit Godaddy, but by coincidence, I'd already decided to transfer my domains to Namecheap. Here's why 1) Godaddy's domain admin web site in almost un-navigable. Beyond being an awkward design, the site makes it difficult to avoid purchasing add-ons I do not want, 2) Godaddy's grossly sexist advertising, 3) namecheap is cheaper, even without this promotion, 4) namecheap has more features (e.g., mail forwarding) included in the basic fee, 5) Goddaddy robocalls me. It's possible to opt out of robocalling now, but that doesn't make up for all the robocalls in the past.

Done. Checkout on namecheap is slow. I wonder if they are getting a lot of new customers.

I feel sorry for Bob Parsons being so ignorant. Of course, I am ignorant too. May everyone become less ignorant.

Oh, for the love of Pete.

I use namecheap for all my domains, but this sort of pandering crap may well be enough for me to transfer everything elsewhere. Don't know if I'm willing to use godaddy or not, but I must may.

Actual "live chat" with Namecheap's support:

Gregory: Hey Asia

Asia K.: Hello Gregory, you've contacted Live Support! How can I help you today?

Gregory: I heard you have a discount for people wanting to transfer domains from the scumbags at GoDaddy. Is this true?

Gregory: ...

Gregory: Wake up.

Gregory: ... Nevermind. With "support" like this, I don't think I want to use Namecheap.

No thanks.

Domain transfer's or not,they are getting enough eyeballs to make this a successful promotion.

fyi the discount code is BYEBYEGD and it's a discount on domain transfers. I just transfered my domain from enom to namecheap. So you don't have to be leaving go daddy to take advantage of this.

Isn't namecheap an enom reseller?

No. See my response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2392095

After I transferred my domains, they are listed in whois as:

   Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)

Hungry people or an elefant? I am actually on godaddy side on this one..

Really? Because I am sure it cost a lot more money to fly over and shoot the elephant himself than if he had just donated it to hungry people to buy the food or means to protect their food supply.

So you are arguing that the part of the money was wasted?

By that order of thinking, its always better to send monies to the native population than to transfer even one Westerner to the area since the cost of their ticket would have been better spent on actual resources.... right?

No!

This is not a humanitarian mission---its a vacation in disguise.

The man clearly wanted to kill elephants. Why he wanted it is of no consequence. It's better to allow him to exorcise this bloodlust when there is a positive benefit to humanity than it to either fester or be released via investment into illegal poaching.

I think you misunderstand my point. I was trying to say that if he was concerned about the amount of good he was doing, just sending the money would have almost certainly been greater than traveling over himself. The point being, he didn't do that, he wanted to shoot an elephant and used this as an excuse.

Namecheap is a trap.

They get you in cheap but there is NEVER a discount on renewals, always full price.

So be ready to transfer again in a year.

How much is the full-price of a domain?

Verisign charges registrars $7.34 for .com and $4.65 for .net

(if that's what you mean)

(why the hell ICANN gave Verisign the contract again is the most dumbfounding politics I've seen)

So Namecheap loses $2 on the transfer and then hopes to make it up on the renewal.

and loses 1$ donating to elephant charity.

I'm donating directly to that charity anyway.

(wow the godaddy ceo is a jerk, killing elephants for sport - for anyone thinking of defending it as a necessary evil, note how he went out of his way across the world to "help out" by killing it)

Obviously if he wanted to "help out" he would have just donated the money to some good cause in the area, and this was all just a thinly veiled vacation. However, in certain areas of Africa (namely Zimbabwe and Botswana, I've spent time in both), they have more elephants than the ecosystem can really take. Hunting elephants in Botswana is all but encouraged (as long as it is done with proper permits of course), because they need help to control the population.

Elephants are not a threatened species everywhere, even though they struggle in some parts of Africa / the world.

I wouldn't call it a trap: they don't claim renewals are taken at a loss (and I wouldn't expect them to).

They charge $10.16/year to renew a .com (including the ICANN fee). Pretty reasonable to me, plus they let you specify your own nameserver for the domain.

I've been very happy with NameCheap: I was originally on GoDaddy (I was young and stupid), moved to 1&1 (still young, still stupid), and I've been with NameCheap ever since (~4 years).

plus they let you specify your own nameserver for the domain

It's not "plus", it's requirement for any registrator, isn't it? I've never seen anyone not allowing to specify nameservers.

It's backwards: "plus" is the ability to have free DNS hosting :-)

Oh, I meant NS record delegation (I think, terminology might be wrong, it's been a while since I futzed with low-level DNS stuff), so that you could use ns1.mydomain.com as your nameserver, even if you registered mydomain.com through namecheap.

Can you name a registrar that doesn't permit this? I certainly wouldn't use them.

They all allow it - just they don't all make it a simple control panel process. Either email support, or do a search and it can be taken care of on all registrars.

Domain names are pretty much a set-and-forget thing.

You can get into a cheap registrar and pay for 10 years in advance.

I'm paying $7.75 elsewhere and perfectly satisfied.

Oh and by the way, NameCheap is essentially an enom reseller,

remember the registerfly/enom fiasco a few years ago?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RegisterFly

Where are you paying $7.75? I've been looking for an alternative to Godaddy.

Search "register domain GoDaddy" on Google and click on their sponsored links. They contain an embedded coupon code bringing down the .com price under 8 USD (the ad is targeted for most countries).

It may have been unclear in my message, but I'm looking for an alternative to Godaddy for reasons other than pricing.

I use Internet.bs. They're great and a .com only costs $7.49

They don't upsell anything, unlike the others do, and private registration/transfer is free.

They were an enom reseller, but that is no longer true (since around the start of 2008).

Sources: http://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&... http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

well, thats how most places work, including godaddy. but i notice you didn't say that godaddy is a trap.

plus, calling them a trap is rather disingenuous when the world is full of snail mail spammers who try and trick people who have expiring domains, and their ilk

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