Startups should not use GoDaddy. Ever | Hacker News Reader

Startups should not use GoDaddy. Ever

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354 pointsjustnearme160 comments

I moved away from GoDaddy a couple of years ago. Now I have a few expiring domains left on there.

Last week I got a notice they were going to charge me for a renewal, which I did not want. So I called the support guy. Twenty or so minutes later, he sent me to a link to fill out a form where all would be taken care of.

Except it wasn't. Just like my previous few encounters with GoDaddy, when I went to the link I learned some obscure detail about my contract with them prevented me from getting what I wanted -- yet allowed them to charge me in full. I'm not going to go into details. It's a perfectly reasonable request on their part. The problem is they have created this monster of add-on services and items, all with little footnotes and gotchas. And it's all geared to extract more money from me.

Last time I had a domain going to expire that I wanted to keep, I went to transfer it over to my new domain guys. The domain was expiring in a month, but I had to complete a GoDaddy form online to make it happen (sound familiar?). The only way to complete the form online was to check a checkbox. The checkbox said that once I checked it I couldn't transfer the domain for another 90 days. Fuckers got me again.

I could tell you a few more like that. It's always some finely-detailed bullshit that ends up with you paying them more. Last week they got me for around 180 bucks.

So now I plan on using the domain I couldn't cancel. I go to the DNS settings. Looks like the new DNS manager is overly complicated and impossibly to use easily. The "adventure" continues.

I swear I hate those bastards. I consider myself a nice enough person, and I have been disappointed by online services in the past -- no big deal. Some online companies "get it" and some not-so-much. But GoDaddy has crossed a line with me somewhere. I'm not sure if it's the used-car-salesmen experience I get checking out or the policies that exist seemingly to endlessly screw me over in various and sundry ways, but it's just a really, really, really bad service in my opinion.

Did I mention I didn't like it so much?

Counter anecdote: I've quite a few domains on GoDaddy. I've transfered a few over the years, both to and from GoDaddy, and while the steps where not explained clearly I never had an issue where I was prevented from controlling my domains.

I also used their DNS service for the first time last month and found it pretty straightforward. Maybe I wasn't trying to do something that would have been complex (I didn't set up mail, for example, or any wild-card entries), but it wasn't to "impossible to easily use."

YMMV and all that.

I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it.

I've tried some other registrars (names eluded) me that were purportedly better/cheaper but found their UIs annoying and troublesome in other ways. Maybe it's a case of "the devil you know ...", but I don't find GoDaddy to be the Great Satan some make it out to be.

"I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it."

That is the worst part from my perspective. I use namecheap and it is very simple and fast to manage my domains using the namecheap interface. Godaddy seems to bury your domain management under a bunch of add-on services. I really dread helping out anyone on godaddy because I have to wade through all kinds of crap before I get to the screens I want.

Another nice touch by namecheap is that it takes 1 click to setup your DNS for google email services. I feel like godaddy makes MX configuration difficult just so some people will give up and pay for email through them.

Ditto to this. Got so fed up with the others and GoDaddy's registrar setup is the only one I've had that's still issue free. I use Rackspace for my servers and I have no issues.

Ditto here. I use GoDaddy for domain registration, and an InMotion VPS for hosting. The interface is confusing and cluttered, but their call-in support is always really friendly and reliable. Nothing makes my blood boil hotter than bad customer service, so despite GoDaddy's sins, their knowledgeable, friendly customer support team makes it worth it to me.

The purchasing process IS super greasy car salesman - I'd never ever refer a client to GoDaddy. They'd end up buying 20 things they didn't need, 20 times the cost it has to be. That gets obnoxious, but oh well - at least I know what to expect every time, and I can just say no. It beats talking to the unqualified or rude techies at other hosting companies.

Ditto - we use Godaddy's sister company's (Wild West Domains)API to register domains - nice and simple. Each domain is dirt cheap, takes one api call and we're done, we never even leave our app. Of course since we host a lot of sites for our customers we have to register a lot of domains. Setting up API access may not be worth it otherwise.

I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.

Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?

I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com).

The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.

I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.

There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.

Sorry for asking this under such a nice idea but what happens to those who have domains with a company that goes out of business?

I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.

Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.

I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.

How do you deal with increasing registry fee of 7% annually then?

Good question. I did not mean to be misleading. I was referring to having an initial yearly fee of, say, $8.99 but hidden in the fine print a renewal fee of $12.99. I can't control the yearly rate increases but I'll always just have one fee regardless of transfer, renewal, or initial registration. Sorry for the confusion.

That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.

The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.

All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).

I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.

Wow. Well... Wow. Domain registrars are things you touch once every few years, and their entire goal is to make it more time consuming to remove yourself from them then switch since its such an insignificant task, most people ignore it and keep with the same one.

Is this even legal?

If vendor lock strategies (which this plain and simply is) were illegal, we wouldn't have some certain monopolies - I doubt, for example, that Windows would still hold such a big market share.

DNS management very often sucks, whether with GoDaddy or any other I've tried.

I founded a cloud management company for EC2 (and later other infrastructure clouds), and one of the first things we included was decent dns record management. It's integrated into your apache vhosts and whatnot, but the value is really just keeping your sanity when all you need to do is add an MX record.

Yours is a widespread feeling. The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR

"The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR "

BTW, what's with E-mailing me about this? I consider it spam, especially since it ends with "Please do not reply to this email."

If people want to write to me person-to-person, fine. I don't really want impersonal ads (the E-mail made no mention of my name, another spam tip-off) about people's products.

I agree with GoDaddy being horrible, but this really isn't just their fault. Certificate revocation does exactly what it says. It's a technical term that everyone using SSL should know and understand the implications of. Their offer of creating a new certificate for you for $15 actually sounds pretty decent.

And, you don't have backups of all your data and domains? While running your sites on a shared host? This really sounds like something that was bound to happen to you. Be glad you got it fixed and I hope you learned your lesson.

I ran into the same situation the author did when getting SSL for a freelance client of mine.

The problem is that nowhere in GoDaddy's certificate purchasing or setup process do they ask you what domain name you want the certificate to apply to. They just apply it to the "primary" domain on a hosting account, which is basically the first domain you set up and associated with that hosting. I kept expecting that the next step in the setup process would ask me what domain I wanted to use the certificate for until there was no next step and the cert was pending setup on the wrong domain.

At no point did they indicate that their single-domain certificate only works on the primary domain until I was on the phone with customer service before revoking it. We ended up going with a multi-domain cert (which they did give us a discount on) rather than change the primary domain on the hosting account because their service representative said that would require downtime for all the sites on that hosting account.

Backups don't matter in this case. What is he going to do with backups?

His sites were down for "days". If he had backups he could have restored the sites to a different server.

Yes, but isn't the problem related to the domains not the hosting?

It seems that GoDaddy created a certificate for the wrong domain in the first place. Still, the author should have pointed out the problem and ask GoDaddy to fix it instead of revoking the certificate himself.

I swore off GoDaddy years ago when I was setting up a website for a friend. It took an entire night to FTP up about 100k worth of files to his account. His website was extremely slow as well, so it wasn't just me.

We're talking about a website that got maybe dozens of hits per day.

He was a paying customer!!!! I've never had such a bad host, even from free ones.

Also, I absentmindedly signed myself up for their WHOIS privacy protection. Holy crap was that a mistake! I can't cancel it because it's actually offered by another company Domains By Proxy, but they won't let me log in because the account was magically setup using some bogus credentials and information which they got from the ether or something. So I can't even migrate that account away without sending them a driver's license, and THAT's assuming they have my correct name on file (which is a real possibility that they don't, since nothing else seems accurate). GoDaddy is no help, I have to call DomainsByProxy (which is GoDaddy, btw). DomainsByProxy is no help either, unless I send them a scan of my driver's license.

It pisses me off so much I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it. It's cheaper just to keep paying. Yuck.

I noticed transferring a domain to different Godaddy account immediately cancels that domain's privacy-protection service. You can probably try that first before transferring your domain out of Godaddy.

I will definitely look into that one.

It totally worked. I have to wait 60 days before transferring it out, but I don't mind that at all.

Thank you!

Domains by Proxy emails you credentials when you sign up. People don't pay attention to this delete or never look at the emails, then get pissed when they can't login.

Their hosting blows, but I've never had a problem with registrations.

That's what they told me too, but I have every (non-spam) email I've ever gotten going back to 1998, including the emails when I bought these accounts, and there is nothing from DomainsByProxy at all in there.

It's possible these emails got sucked up by the spam filter and are therefore lost to history. However, looking at how it works, and after talking with "both" companies, I'm inclined to feel and believe that they were intentionally deceptive.

I had the same problem, but finally discovered that DomainsByProxy uses the same password as Godaddy. The hard part is finding your customer id.

when you make a new purchase at godaddy, it gives you the option to link your new domainsbyproxy purchase to a previous account. it lists all your previous login ids.

so just grab those login ids and use your godaddy password for each of them.

Once I was able to grab the right login id I was able to use my godaddy password (the original password you used when you purchased the privacy protection, if you changed it since then, it will not be the same as the new password). Once logged in it was easy to remove the privacy protection and godaddy immediately reflected the new status.

Here's the thread that helped me... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=272435

No one should use GoDaddy, ever; there are many other registrars in their price range that don't share their onerous practices with regards to transfer, takedown, security and privacy and which have much better customer service.

which 1?

Namecheap as well. I used to be on GoDaddy and sure, everything they do is spelled out but why do they have to make every transaction so annoying and difficult? So many screwy add-on options. Namecheap just keeps it simple to me.

The only thing with Namecheap is that I got a little confused when the whois guard stuff (or whatever they call it) didn't apply like it expected. My memory is a little fuzzy about the scenario right now but I bought three whois guards, applied one and then the other two couldn't be applied to my other domains. I ended up having to get support involved but they cleared it up within an hour. A little confusing? yeah. Annoying? no.

I like Namecheap personally

How long have you been using it?

I'll chime in. I've been using them since 2007. For me, they're nice and straight-forward. They don't offer any bulk discounts (NN% off for 5 years, etc), but they do occasionally hold sales.

They also raised their rates a few times. When I first joined, they were $8.88/mo. Then they went to $9.29/mo, then $9.69/mo, and now $10.16/mo. Arguably, this may be one of their downsides, but I've never minded. I believe other registrars were also raising their rates around the same time too. (NOTE: prices include the ICANN fee.)

You realize VeriSign increases the registry fee 7% each year. NameCheap from my calculation is actually eating into their own margin each year slightly.

I used to use them back in around 2004, love the company, owner is wonderful. Only reason I don't use them is I got a much better deal at Fabulous.com which is designed for large portfolios. I still recommend them to basically anyone looking for a registrar that isn't holding 100 domains or more.

Ah, I didn't know that. Good to know. Although, I didn't see an increase each year. Just the few times I listed.

In any case, I highly recommend NameCheap as well.

Not the person you asked but I've used namecheap for 3 years now and haven't had any issues, the whoisgaurd they offer is cheap when it comes up for renewal and you don't have to have a card or anything on file for when renewals come up, they do email you a bit when they do but I don't mind that.

The interface isn't going to win any awards and most of my domains use linodes dns so I can't say how well their dns stacks up.

I also have a few domains on nearlyfreespeech which is quite a bit down on the interface but their terms are great.

>The interface isn't going to win any awards and most of my domains use linodes dns so I can't say how well their dns stacks up.

Their DNS has been fantastic for me. Very straightforward interface, and even has a few nice touches like being able to automatically set up mx records for you if you use Google Apps on that domain.

Only a couple times in the last year, just used them to register the name for the startup my wife and I are hacking on, however they came highly recommended by a friend of mine and Googling turned up many happy customers.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966647

I've got most domains with omnis.com now - still have some with godaddy, but I move them over when I can. omnis has been fine for me for the past 2-3 years, haven't had price increases yet, and I get a small discount > 50 domains - my per domain cost is $8.20/year IIRC.

Be incompetent, blame others, profit. Host your site on a shared hosting, with another 1000 users, blame godaddy when it goes down. Don't understand ssl, blame godaddy when you make mistakes.

GoDaddy are freaking excellent! for domains that is. All other services are crap, and if you bothered to actually check your facts, read some reviews, you would know that.

One of the only reasonable posts in this thread, sounds like it was more like the users fault than godaddy. I would agree for the kind of low tech shared hosting they provide but I have set some VPS servers up on godaddy that have worked quiet well. As long as you don't need their support and build from scratch without a plex/cpanel type setup they have been fine.

It turns out GoDaddy only issues the certificate to the domain attached to the hosting (which is somewhat of a stupid association, really, because it shouldn’t matter what domain you use as long as you’re accessing your content via a correct route).

If hosting with GoDaddy was the first mistake, this assumption was the second. The whole point of an SSL certificate is to say that the server you are talking to is a server that is authorized to speak on behalf of domain xyz and, as such, they are generally tied to one or more domains.

I don't know exactly how GoDaddy works but on my namecheap account, I can issue purchased SSL certificates to any of the domains I have registered there. I assume I may even be able to issue them to domains I do not have registered there (though I have not tried and may be wrong) because they have a verification process.

Regardless of where your domain is registered, you can indeed get an SSL cert from Namecheap. I bought a Comodo PositiveSSL for $9/y and couldn't be happier. When I ran into some issues installing it on a Mac mini server, their CS was responsive and friendly.

No one should ever use GoDaddy for any reason. I thought that was geek 101 by now.

Also, incidentally, you never host a startup on shared hosting. If a day or two of downtime is a big deal than you gotta go VPS at a minimum.

Agreed 100%. Shared hosting will take you down - or rather, someone else on the shared host WILL take you down.

I'm so glad to see so many people were having trouble with GoDaddy too. Glad we transfered over a few months ago.

That's not true. For low traffic sites, NFSN and Webfaction are more than capable.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if a typical DIY VPS webserver can beat nearlyfreespeech.net's uptimes and resilience to burst traffic.

Doubtful. Largely in part due to the average 'vps' user not managing things properly -- or knowing how much they need to scale, etc.

Entities that have been doing it for years have things optimized quite a bit to handle the spikes. I suspect the average shared hosting kicks the ass of the average VPS -- particularly in the IO department.

Are you guys serious? No doubt there is good shared hosting, but most of it is oversold to shit. "Average shared hosting" is a race to the bottom.

The reason I say VPS is because that way you have guaranteed resources and the ability to debug and fix problems yourself. I guess if you know the right shared host you can get some good value there, but it still seems like a terrible risk to me due to undisclosed limits, or vulnerability to neighbors traffic spikes. When I said "startup" I thought it was implicit that it would not be expected to be a low traffic site, at least not for long.

Sure, "low traffic" sites. But if you are running a startup (as in, a business, and not a little hobby project), you should never use shared hosting.

If your "startup" is really just a hobby, then you shouldn't be making generalizations like "startups should...".

OK kids, here's what you need to know. There are three levels of your relationship with Godaddy:

Level 1: You're in balls deep. You register your domains with GoDaddy, use their DNS servers and host your shit on their servers. You also get your SSL certs from them. That's what the OP was doing.

Level 2: You're in up to the balls, but that's where it stops. You register with them, host your DNS with them but your website lives on another providers servers and you get your SSL elsewhere.

Level 3: You wearing a condom and don't give them their own key or underwear drawer. In other words, you register your domain with GoDaddy but you host the DNS somewhere else like DNSMadeEasy which costs, but is reliable. You also host your site somewhere else like Linode for example. And your SSL cert is something that costs more but is reliable. I have an EV cert from Verisign which costs but you get better conversions.

Level 3 is the only place you want to be. Pay them the bare minimum, immediately delegate the DNS hosting to a reliable rock solid provider that doesn't black-list DNS servers and use that provider to point your A record to whatever web host you're using. You get cheap domains and the only time you have to wade through GD's cluster fuck interface is when you change DNS providers or want to register another domain.

My primary domain did over 27 million DNS requests last month via DNS Made Easy with a 12 hour TTL and it's been registered with godaddy for over 4 years now with no problems at all.

I would still be worried about the domain.

If my DNS provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within 72 hours (at most). If the mail provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within X hours (where X is the TTL set for the domain). If my webhost messes up, I am back within X hours (because I of course make offsite backups), etc.

The only part where one needs a 100% reliable business partner is domain registration. And after hearing all the horror stories about Godaddy, I would not trust them, not even if I was wearing your methaphorical condom.

And people wonder why there aren't more women in computer science...

I agree with hosting your site and DNS elsewhere but isn't it OK to get SSL from GoDaddy?

Does this really even need to be said here? A single visit to GoDaddy and their insane upselling strategies should be enough to disuade anyone that they are in it for anything but ripping you off.

namecheap.com has been quite pleasant so far. I used joker.com for years before that without complaint as well. Plenty of reasonable options out there.

Another vote for joker.com. I use them because they are not based in the US, but in Germany, which may result in a smidgeon more sanity when it comes to yanking delegations without court rulings. Maybe.

Also, they are nerds and pgp sign all of their outgoing emails.

I could have sworn that Joker was hosted in Switzerland, which is the big factor in my recommendation of them to people worried about government interference in domain handling and DNS. Maybe I'm wrong on that, though.

I could have predicted this thread would turn into a PTSD support group for GoDaddy survivors.

I have my horrible stories too (all from freelancing days); suffice to say I learned a couple of things:

  * Cheap hosting almost never is. 
  * GoDaddys support is designed to minimize their costs, not yours. 
  * if their support cannot help you with a problem they will try to upsell you on a plan they claim *will* fix the problem.

Dealing with them on a handful of occasions ranks among the most painful experiences I've had in 15 years of building stuff on the web.

Has anyone here used Nearly Free Speech (www.nearlyfreespeech.net)? I have finally started to make my migration away from GoDaddy (I have been planning this for years), and NFS seems pretty good.

I can't seem to find any horror stories about them... but I rarely see them brought up in discussions about registrars. Am I missing something?

I've been using NFS.N for over three years now. I have a number of small sites and domains with them. The sites cost pennies a month, the feature set is staggering, and the domain registration process makes Gandi and Namecheap look clunky in comparison. They're also painstakingly honest. They recently corrected a billing error of $56 over three years over their entire client base. [1] My only complaint with them is the lack of SSL, but that's what a VPS is for.

In fact, I like NFS.N so much I made a simple webmail app to interface with their e-mail forwarding service. It's highly experimental though. [2]

[1] http://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2011/04/07/a-small-billing-... [2] http://www.github.com/kijin/nearlyfreemail

Cheers for that! Thank you for reinforcing my decision. I may just move the rest of my domains over there this week.

Let me preface this by saying that I am a very big fan of NFSN and host almost all my stuff there.

If you are considering them for domain hosting, consider this tough:

* They are not a domain registrar, they are reselling from PublicDomainRegistry. They actually mention in their FAQ that webhosting is their core business and that they only offer domains as convenience at a cost-recovery price.

* Their DNS service is made for webhosting as well. They support the most common records like A, AAAA, TXT, MX, but you can not freely edit your zone.

* NFSN's DNS servers are all in the same place (they offer a second location for an additional fee I think). I don't remember any downtime, but if you need 100% bullet-proof DNS uptime, consider using another provider for DNS.

* Every additional item costs a little bit (although it is still pretty inexpensive): DNS costs $0.01/day, Email forwarding costs $0.03/day, Whois privacy costs $0.01/day.

I've used them for domain registration for several domains for about 4 years now. Very much a satisfied customer, honest and responsive crew behind it. I moved to them after having a nightmare experience with 1and1 a few years ago. I pay very little to maintain about 7 sites domain and hosting annually.

They host my website (but don't hold the domain - it's .nl). I've never had any problem. They are also wonderfully cheap for low-traffic sites, especially static ones.[1]

Of course, they assume that you know what you are doing.

[1] In fact, I've lost more money to the continuing fall of the dollars in my account than I've actually paid them. I'm not sure how to feel about that...

I've done small sites with them and have no complaints.

NSFN has a good interface for registrations, but it's worth noting that they're just a reseller for register.com (they even say so in their FAQ).

I've used them for years. no problems.

Paul Graham says "I use EasyDNS. They're expensive, but reliable and never do anything evil."

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150565

Note that that comment was posted over three years ago. Does anybody have any more recent experience with them?

DNS wasn't really the problem here, it was the hosting and setting up a ssl cert. I use GoDaddy for my DNS stuff and have never had any problem with them for that. Most of the horror stories come from people hosting with them.

They also provide registration and SSL.

Actually, after posting this I found an article that said that GoDaddy is selectively denying DNS requests, so they are now being crappy with DNS as well. I guess I need to move to a new registrar and DNS host.

i've been using them for years, and am quite happy. i use them for almost all of my domains.

I can't believe people are still bitching about GoDaddy shared hosting. I feel like a quote from Richard Pryor is in store: "Boy, it's 1975 you betta get your shit together!"

My point is that if you were smart enough to use GoDaddy shared hosting then you probably weren't smart enough at the time to have a VPS. Take what you have learned from GoDaddy and learn some more stuff and then sign up for a VPS or build a server. GoDaddy can be a good start for those just jumping into webdev and hosting, but after you have the equivalent of a yellow belt, its time to move on.

GoDaddy is the worst company ever. Earlier this year I finally took the step to transfer all of my domains to a different company, and I haven't looked back. Instead of transitioning slowly over time, I just decided to pay the money and transfer everything - it felt a lot better to just be free of them. Imagine a company so awful your customers are willing to pay extra to not be a customer!

One painful part of the transfer experience is that their "DomainsByProxy" service is entirely separate, even though it is sold alongside their domains as an add-on. My problem was that I had originally signed up with it years and years ago, and they do not keep your email or password in sync with your GoDaddy account. So I couldn't "release" the domains from DBP to be transferred without going through this crazy process of sending in forms and a copy of my drivers license to reset the account info. It was awful.

Please fix the link. It goes the blog's homepage which makes it difficult to find the article later.

I cant stand GoDaddy's hosting product. Their interface is awful, they're constantly upselling you, and changes via their Control Panel never happen instantly.

I have a lot of clients who came to me using GoDaddy and continue to use GoDaddy. So I interact with GoDaddy in some form every day.

But GoDaddy really shines in one area: their support. They're professional, they don't treat me or my clients like idiots, they don't bullshit me, and they're always quick to resolve issues.

(Personally, I prefer name.com and prgmr.com)

I've seen a lot of issues raised about godaddy recently, but any suggestions for domain registry that work better?

I use gandi.net, for both personal and business domains. They're awesome.

Specifically: they have policies that strongly support the domain owner, they make a point of saying the domain owner owns the domain (not the registrar), they give back to many different Open Source projects, their management software works quite well, and they provide free email service for your domain so you don't have to run a mail server if you don't want to.

Their hosting works quite well too. Not the best for disk performance, but they have good unmetered bandwidth, tons of flexibility, and good management software.

Seconding Gandi. I've test driven them with a new account and I'm very pleased with the level of control and no-nonsense control panel. Where GoDaddy's is very messy and tries all kinds of sneaky tricks to make you shop for more, Gandi keeps it clean and straightforward.

Single best feature? Total access to domain zone files. I also like that as an individual you can hide your contact information from being displayed in the whois records.

gandi.net also provides a free ssl cert for registered domains. They're just awesome.

Only for a year, then you have to pay to renew it. Still decent, though. But if you want a free cert, try startcom instead.

Here's the list that i post every time someone asks this. There are plenty of other ones, but these are the "tried and true" top list.

  * Gandi.net

  * Namecheap

  * Name.com (Some very sleazy practices, see child)

  * Moniker

Name.com is pretty evil too. They opt you in to a "service" that displays ads from your domain (where they keep the revenue, of course), and say that you are responsible for ensuring that the content is legal

See http://nathanhammond.com/namedotcom-another-unscrupulous-reg...

I just bought a domain from Name.com yesterday (in an effort to escape from GoDaddy) and I'm surprised at how nasty their interface is. These big registrars really try to make their users suffer.

Thanks, I've updated the post.

A vote for Moniker from me as well, having settled for them 3 years ago, after a few years with 1and1 and some with Godaddy and having tried various other registrars.

I use their control panel once every couple of months and although it doesn't have the "pretty" element to it, it's quite an easy and intuitive tool to work with and I even dare say it, is the most functional domain management tool I've seen.

At a glance you can see which domain is locked, private, auto-renewed, etc and changing any of this is just a matter of selecting a couple of domains from the list and applying the action you want in a batch.

For example, you want to transfer 5 domains away: 1- go to the domains manager 2- from the list, check each domain you wish to transfer away 3- click on the Transfer Domains Out action 4- simply follow the flow and provide the extra info where required.

You could be done in less than a minute.

One more vote from me to Moniker — their control panel might be a little bit more awkward and buggy than it should be, but the services are stable and non-disturbing.

And in general, it is usual a good idea to have separate service providers for domain name registering and for hosting.

I'm almost extremely happy with Dreamhost as a registrar. (I got a year of hosting from them for $10 during one of their quite-common sales, and then let the hosting go but got to keep them as a registrar.)

Their interface is a little clunky but reasonably nice, and they make some stuff, like setting up Google Apps, super-easy.

Unfortunately, their password recovery scheme is to email me my password in plaintext, and I'm really not comfortable having my main domain that controls my email and online presence protected by bad security, so I'm moving off of them very soon, at least for danieljackoway.com

I've been happy with dnsimple.com, not the cheapest but has a clean UI, intelligent features, and intelligent support the YC crowd here would appreciate.

I'll second my vote for DNSimple. We were using GoDaddy before and we had an issue where they were returning faulty DNS records from certain hosts (which was such a pain to diagnose). After trying to deal with support at GoDaddy we were done.

We switched everything over to DNSimple and I'm happy paying them $3/month so I never have to look at another GoDaddy config/upsell screen again. They also have a status page (powered by Pingdom) http://status.dnsimple.com.

Yeah, totally agreed. I met one of the principles of DNSimple at MagicRuby earlier this year. Definitely worth giving these guys $3 a month for the amount of time they save me. The time their configuration templates for Heroku and Tumblr have saved me much more in time than I'll ever pay in subscription fees. They also make it super easy to get SSL certificates.

In light of everything that has been in the press recently about GoDaddy I did some research on good, yet reasonably priced, services - here's what I came up with:

* Registration: Gandi.net (at time of posting $15.00/yr for .com with 1yr SSL cert + some other junk I won't use) * VPS / DNS: Zerigo.com (for a 512MB RAM slice it's $20/month with significantly more storage and transfer than, say, Linode. Performance states no oversubscription (we'll see) - their DNS service looks good for the money comparatively, you get 20domains @ 20/yr with, what looks to be a nice API) * DNS runner up: Dyn.com (more expensive than what I'd like to pay with limits that seem like they could be a problem until you scale to the more expensive stuff. That being said, they look to be very reliable.) * SSL: RapidSSL.com (who knows anymore with CA's based on the DigiNotar fiasco and Comodogate, but the price is right)

There have been tons of "domain registration" threads on HN. Consider this one, just one day old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2964201.

My personal domain, registered through GoDaddy is up for renewal soon. Ashamed to say that I was in the dark about them until now. I'd also love to know about legitimate alternatives.

Just moved all of my domains from GoDaddy over to Namecheap. Interface is slick and very easy to use. First year for privatized whois info is free too!

I use domaindiscount24.de for all my domains. Despite the name that might imply a somewhat cheap quality they work really well and I never had any problem's so far.

I've only used GoDaddy once when someone transferred a domain to be and wanted to do this over GoDaddy's internal transfer feature. The first thing I did was transferring the domain to domaindiscount24.

I've been using domain.com and they've been doing fine for me. No parked domains or anything underhanded. Although they do shove "private domain registration" in my face every time I log in, the rest of the site is pretty quiet and gets out of my way.

I use Dreamhost. $9.95 is reasonable, and it's great for placeholder, static or otherwise low-traffic, low-importance sites (which of course are the majority of domain registrations).

Same. They also offer free anonymity, and I find their interface for both registering domains and hosting easy to navigate. I share their hosting with a handful of friends, mostly for testing and extremely low-traffic, personal use stuff.

I know two non-techie people (one a friend, one an acquaintance) who've used GoDaddy and gotten confused by all of the upsells and promos. My friend ended up purchasing a few extra services by accident and had a hard time trying to cancel them. The acquaintance was much less cognizant and ended up paying hundreds a month unknowingly.

I've also used them too, because a cofounder had registered our domain name with them. In Aug 2010, I noticed that GoDaddy had been charging us for an extra service we never purchased. I know this because none of us had logged into the GoDaddy account in a while. Fortunately, I'm really anal with accounting records and noticed the discrepancy in our bill.

After several emails and attempts to get this charge removed, I tweeted this issue with @GoDaddy included in it. THAT got an immediate response. Eventually, the charges were removed and we got a refund.

Moral of the story: Don't recommend GoDaddy to your non-techie friends, and consider avoiding it yourself. But if you must use them and have a problem, tweet about it to get a quick resolution.

One of the reasons godaddy is successful is that they are the registrar of referral for people (web designers, programmers, ISP's) that have customers that need domain registration or renewal. When an end user has a domain they need or one up for renewal godaddy is the registrar that is suggested to them by their "tech guy".

This is similar to how Microsoft gained power in a way. They were supported by a huge network of people that made money off of Microsoft. Additionally traditional tech guys want to appear smart and love (even if they don't make any commission) telling people they can get their domain registered cheaply at godaddy. "Wow I'm overpaying" says the customer.

What many people don't realize is that all registrars pay exactly the same price for a domain. Any registrar charging less than a certain amount (say below or near cost) is making it up elsewhere. In the case of godaddy it is by selling you things that you don't need that have no value.

One and only one example of this is "privacy protection". This is like a FUD from Microsoft.

Many godaddy domains have privacy protection that have no need for privacy and in fact privacy, because they are an operating business, with a business address, is the opposite of what they should be using. While having privacy is of benefit in some cases (to criticize your employer as only one example) it is almost always safer to have a real address in the whois records if you can do that.

This of course isn't limited to godaddy. Register.com is the registrar for Fred Wilson's avc.com. Avc.com has privacy protection even though Fred has a business address that he could use and has a public email address.

Domain Name: avc.com Created on..............: 2008-07-18 Expires on..............: 2019-04-30

Registrant: Domain Discreet ATTN: avc.com Rua Dr. Brito Camara, n 20, 1 Funchal, Madeira 9000-039 PT

The example of the "privacy protection" reminds me when I was a n00b (I still kinda am), but like 3 years ago I wanted a domain that was taken so I paid ~$15 for them for domain backordering.... LOL. I didn't really know what it was at the time (stupid me) but now I feel so incredibly stupid for basically giving away $15 and getting duped for my money.

I wouldn't say it was stupid actually. Stupid is something that you do that most people don't do. Many of the godaddy services seem legit on first glance. That's why they sell so well. The marketing language they use is good. There are cases where someone might actually stand a chance of back ordering a domain. But when godaddy collects $15 for a domain that there is no way they are going to get for someone (like a 3 letter name as only one example) that's taking advantage of what someone doesn't know.

If you want to backorder a domain use pool.com. Last I checked they don't charge anything for a backorder.

See also a previous post, "Alternatives to GoDaddy" at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2753471

This article is spot on. I can't fathom why anyone would put themselves through Godaddy, especially a startup. I feel like you're asking for trouble though if you use Godaddy's hosting, which has a reputation for being absolutely horrible.

Is it really a problem if I simply use them as a registrar? I have many domains there but that's all I use them for is to simply register my domain. I have liked them for that because they are cheap (if you avoid all the up-sells which is easy enough) and their prices have stayed fairly consistent over the last several years.

I moved to them from Yahoo. Yahoo always allowed you to register a domain for a cheap price of 9.00 but then the renewals were 34.95...a bit of bait and switch if you ask me. Anyhow, I've been happy with simply using GoDaddy as a registrar but after reading this thread I'm wondering if I should switch??

Which is amazing considering how much GoDaddy is used for YC companies: http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html?2011

I am stunned that anyone would ever use them in the first place. After going through domain registration with them, and being appalled at the amount of up-sale, I decided they aren't the company I would want to trust with anything.

I have been using dreamhost for years, and they make registration management painfully simple (and honest).

Also GoDaddy had an issue years back where they were apparently scooping up domains that people didn't finish checkout with and then selling them at a higher price.

I have used GoDaddy for their DNS services and have been very happy with their customer service. No issues so far after ~2 years. I may research other DNS though, comments of how easily they shut people down makes me nervous.

Note to Pinolio: I may have missed it, but I did not find a link to your service on your blog.

I've been using GoDaddy for years. Never had a problem. I dont' use their hosting, though.

Exactly what I came here to say. I don't use their hosting because I've tried it and it's painfully slow and I have had it go down intermittently for a number of clients who I know use it still.

I've had to talk with their support several times for little issues too, and I've actually had excellent interactions. Again, not for hosting however.

I use their SSL certificates as well, and it's a very easy process that I've never had a problem with.

I don't know why HN is the dumping ground for bad GoDaddy experiences. There are review sites for this. I've had miserable customer service experiences with countless companies, but I'm not posting them here, and they certainly wouldn't get voted to the top.

GoDaddy is so bad. My heart sinks whenever a client asks me to login and change some setting for them. They've managed to turn the entire process of every function on their site into a purist up-selling unusable monstrosity that confuses customers to such a degree they feel they need to pay more and more money.

If you want a good Domain host try http://www.webwiz.co.uk, the guy who runs it is very good and prompt at support, domains are a fair price and the interface is super easy to use. I have no affiliation to WebWiz but since moving all my domains over there it's been a lot easier.

I used GoDaddy when I first started, years ago, but quickly moved away from them. Been with Dreamhost for years now and it's been very good. Adding SSL can't be simpler, they even streamline the process, allowing you to buy the cert directly in the panel (or import your own from a third party), assign a static IP, and everything works inside an hour. Anyways, just wanted to share my experience.

Seems like everyone agrees that GoDaddy is terrible. What's strange to me is the interface has always sucked and gets worse as they've grown. You'd think with the revenues they see, they could get some good designers to make it much more usable.

I like Enom myself. The API works really well, prices are good, and the UI is clean and usable. I've been much happier since moving all of my domains over.

Nicer user interface doesn't always equate into more revenue. Sometimes it's even counterproductive (sales pages w. misspellings/mistakes can convert better!).

Are any of the big registrars trustworthy? I'm trying to consolidate all of my domains on Namecheap right now. I transferred one domain from Dyndns and they did the transfer within a few hours (nice!). Then I went to transfer another from Network Solutions and four days later I am still waiting. Do they think I'll change my mind if they refuse to release the domain for a week?

All the complaints here about GoDaddy have nothing to do with the one reason to use them, paying the least for a domain with free DNS. If you pay them anything else then you have just nullified this advantage as they can make back the few dollars you saved on the domain by charging you more for things like hosting and SSL (free at startcom).

It's only cheaper if your time is worth nothing. Digging through pages of upsells takes time. I prefer using a registrar where I don't have to do that. (I use both Namecheap and eNom.)

All the upsell checkboxes are defaulted off. I don't understand what the problem is clicking through a couple of pages without checking anything. I've done it dozens of times with no problems.

I hated using GoDaddy when doing development work for clients...I would never choose to use it for myself just based on my previous experience with them. I prefer self hosting on a fresh Ubuntu Server install on highspeed residential cable from a server I built myself..there's something satisfying about learning about all aspects of web development

My first rule is use a registrar to register domains. Never host your site or DNS at the registrar. My second rule is do not host your DNS where you host your site. It makes it easier to switch providers without downtime. With these rules, I use GoDaddy to register domains and never had any problems. For DNS, DNS Made Easy is cheap and reliable.

You can buy one service from GoDaddy and they'll give you a second service free for a year, then auto-renew that second unnecessary service. You can't cancel easily via e-mail and you can't cancel over the telephone. You have to log in and face an endless amount of confusion and upselling.

* This was for Domain Auto-Registration which includes GoDaddy Auctions.

I couldn't agree more. I've seen firsthand people using Go Daddy to check out a possible domain only to have Go Daddy squatting on it the next day. He was able to get a few of them back, but it such a hassle.

This was a couple of years ago; I can't imagine how much worse things are now.

GoDaddy has the best customer service if you pick up the phone and give them a call. They're not like Google - they have a phone number listed and people are always available to pick up the phone - 24/7 if I'm not mistaken.

Since this seems to be "my most/least favorite name service company" I recommend DynDNS. They're expensive, but they work very well in my experience. You can set very short TTLs, which obviates the need for static IPs.

As of this post, it appears to be working.

And I have to say, it's impressive. Those are some good-looking bookmarks. That's probably the oddest maintenance I'd ever think to write, but in this case, it's true!

Just had GoDaddy conveniently renew three expiring domain names for me for TWO years. These were domain names I didn't want any more. Thanks.

I think you are being totally unfair.

If they auto renewed, then YOU set them up to auto renew.

If they auto renewed, this means you let them keep your billing information on file.

They spam me once every week to remind me that my auto renew domains are going to auto renew.

And my own personal anecdote, right before one of my domains auto-renewed I got a polite call from a CSR making sure that I was aware the domain was going to auto renew.

I had this happen to me as well. I gave them a call and they redacted it and refunded me the money. I consider it pretty suspicious activity, considering every email I got from them was telling me it would expire. But just give them a call and they'll set it straight.

I was on a deluxe account at Godaddy, tried upgrading to a VPS, had a horrible experience and now I am a happy customer of PHPFog.

If this doesn't convince you to leave GoDaddy, just remember that the owner and founder takes summer holidays shooting elephants.

Where does he explain how and when the hosting died? He jumps from SSL revocation to hosting downtime.

Dynadot is the way to go

Does this only apply to hosting or registering domains as well?

I'm not a fan but I'll admit they're pretty good with domains.

I remember when GoDaddy was the David to NetSol's Goliath.

Nobody should use GoDaddy, not only startups.

likealittle.com suffered with them too. They are pretty darn evil, they ask for a ransom to let you move your site.

GoDaddy: not even once.

Why is this news?! I can't count the number of times this has come up on HN, let alone reddit, let alone random prominent blogs, let alone from other big names that have had problems with GoDaddy suspending service, locking them out of their control panels and/or siding with law enforcement and acting before asking. Stop using GoDaddy. It's trivial to find other registrars, and not hard to find better ones.

(Examples of better registrars: Gandi, name.com)

Honestly, not a reassuring way to advertise your new company. There first intro blob admits that they knew this was a risk. "Yeah, we knew people have problems with this, but we were lazy and didn't bother taking the 30 minutes to transfer our domains elsewhere."

> Why is this news?! I can't count the number of times this has come up

And yet GoDaddy is still in business and doing great.

You can't get past the cheapness of some people. $5 a month for hosting is very attractive to someone looking to bootstrap off of savings.

You can get much better supported, more feature-full (and also more "unlimited" and oversold) hosting for $5 or less from people less scummy and likely to shut off your box or domain than GoDaddy.

Seriously, is DNS so hard that typing in the nameservers of your shared hosting provider or DECENT VPS provider is so unthinkable? Or is it registering for a second account? I simply do, not, understand.

Maybe those superbowl commercials really do work.

So? That's not a reason to use it or a reason that they're any less scummy than they are. They have flashy commercial and people use them to save 50cents on a $7 purchase. Quite frankly, it's pathetic that people give them their business.

Oh, and if anyone uses GoDaddy for hosting, just leave your username after the beep so I can permanently ignore you.

It's news because too many 'businesses' are still trying to save a buck by using a hosting provider like GoDaddy. If you are hosting Grandma's blog...sure, use GoDaddy. Other than that, spend a few more dollars for something that won't taint your business some day.

Stopped using it years ago. A little research should prevent people using it in the first place. I know reviews for any host are usually bad on average, but with GoDaddy, there ought to be enough scathing reviews to ward people off in the first place.

When I was doing web stuff back in 2003 the common opinion on webmaster forums was that one should never ever use GoDaddy. (There were cases of stolen domains, etc.)

Maybe they changed now - maybe not. But I'm not going to find it out.

Don't. Ever. Use. GoDaddy.

Ever.

> It’s a good thing I don’t drink, because the blur of Saturday and Sunday spent on the phone could have really been dealt with better with a couple of stiff drinks to ease the pain.

What.

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