Go Daddy said to be near $2B+ sale to K.K.R. and Silver Lake | Hacker News Reader

Go Daddy said to be near $2B+ sale to K.K.R. and Silver Lake

dealbook.nytimes.com

23 pointsjonknee17 comments

Oh, Silver Lake, the private equity firm that apparently screwed Skype employees out of their stock options! I think these guys deserve each other.

GoDaddy is the armpit of the tech industry. It preys on uneducated users (generally "business" people), sells with sex, and offers mediocre products at best - and even that is quite liberal. It just goes to show you how important marketing is.

How important marketing is in a marketplace that's relatively standardized. A domain name is a domain name, no matter where it is bought (relatively so), making marketing your company crucially important.

I would argue that the marketplace isn't well standardized, but rather that some information information (eg. on practices related to domain transfer and takedown) is unavailable to or ignored by most of the consumers in the market, causing the observed irrationality that results in GoDaddy remaining solvent.

If you isolate GoDaddy as a domain registrar then I would be likely to agree. However, I have been forced to work with hundreds of people that use GoDaddy hosting for instance which is certainly not standardized. GoDaddy has thousands of products - just try buying a domain and see how much upsell there is.

Everyone knows that GoDaddy isn't a great company (including the small business owners that use them); it's interesting that they don't have a strong direct competitor. There are many registrars, but none that have nearly the level of traction that GoDaddy has.

Seems like an opportunity for some company to be the Zappos / Southwest / Amazon of domain registration - easy to use, no-frills, low-cost, excellent customer service. I wonder why that company isn't out there yet.

Hover.com

Would $15 be considered "low-cost" in the domain market?

* They are the people who own common last names as URLs and sell josh@finnie.com for $35 a year too!

The $15 includes free whois privacy. For GoDaddy that's an extra 7 or 8 dollars (last time I checked) on top of their 11.99 domain cost. Hover also has excellent customer service and 0 upsell. I'm sure you can find cheaper registrants out there but Hover is the very definition of a customer focused company.

Whois privacy makes the registrar the legal owner of your domain, not you. I'm not OK with that. http://www.circleid.com/pdf/solidhostnamecheap.pdf

Whois privacy is worthless. For the most part, it's pretty clear who owns the domain if you actually visit the website.

Everyone knows that GoDaddy isn't a great company (including the small business owners that use them)

I have had previous employers force me to move us off of GMail to GoDaddy email because they thought "Gmail sucks".

People also continue to host with GoDaddy (which I do not believe to be in order to save $10-$15 per month) even after I have showed them better alternatives from a performance aspect.

I agree with you that there is an opportunity in the market but as I stated in my original post I think GoDaddy preys on the uneducated who believe the most popular/largest ad budget is certainly the best option.

It's probably a futile exercise in semantics, but I believe that there is a difference between opining that GoDaddy is the best option currently available and thinking they're a great company.

Does anyone else think Google would be a good company to make a play for this space? They have the right consumer facing brand to offer this type of product.

I think Google's customer service is atrociously bad. Or rather, entirely non-existent.

That was a conclusion I came to as well, however, with that aside, they could build the tech in a way that can be more easily understood and consumed by the masses.

I think we all agree that GoDaddy is a hosting company for the masses, but.. what's wrong with that? The money is out there for someone who will create a better, cleaner, more pleasant GoDaddy.

There is still plenty of small business owners lost somewhere in the google search results that would love to get a decent website, affortable SEO services and "all that jazz" resulting in more customers coming to use their service/product.

If someone would create such Hosting Groupon that will offer a simple package combined of domain registration, 5 MB hosting, simple CMS + variety of themes and basic SEO services, all that with techie-wording cut off from the message and sold by direct calls just like Groupon does, there seem to be a nice market waiting for him or her.

Really, GoDaddy is still pretty technical in their message, and regular customers do not want just "a domain", they want to make their business present in the internet and it should be up to you to get this done right practically.

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