GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome

217 pointsmrspence179 comments

Only allows direct versions of Google Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox

See message here when using Brave, a Google Chrome (chromium) derivative: https://i.imgur.com/MV66H85.png

Triggered when trying to log in.

Heya, just logged into GoDaddy from Brave without any changes here, and it worked fine for me. This might be for a couple of reasons:

1) Perhaps GoDaddy is running a change on you that they haven't rolled out to me yet.

2) Perhaps I have a somewhat long history on this computer logging in using brave and that is overriding whatever heuristics they are using for 'that connection looks suspicious'. Have you logged into your account in Brave on this computer before? If so, for how long have you done so? In addition, if you turn off some of the brave shield (look at the lion in the URL bar), does the site load? It might be detecting that and using that as the heuristic that doesn't let you in.

3) Perhaps Brave rolled out an update that broke something. Unusual, but happens occasionally. Are you running standard brave on Windows, and if you go to Windows->About Brave is it saying that your browse is fully up to date?

As a note for all the people asking why people use GoDaddy, there are two things generally:

1) Sometimes, you didn't make the decision, and it's a pain in the butt to get things swapped over especially when your bosses are used to GoDaddy.

2) Their phone support is miles better than most of the competition. While sometimes you run into techs who don't help quite as much, sometimes you run into really good ones. This ratio of helpful : not helpful is quite a bit better than the competition. In addition, all of them are pretty understandable over the phone. (By the way, if any of you are looking to compete with companies like these, having good phone support really makes you stand out over the competition - you just have to make sure your support techs manage their support time well)

These things make them more difficult to replace.

"Your browser is a bit unusual".

Why, yes. Thank you for noticing. That is entirely intentional.

Welcome to the web.

Too bad there's not a chance to respond, "I assume all responsibility for my unusual browser."

I remember having to change the user agent string in Konqueror

You would do that rather than change domain provider?

Faking the User-Agent usually involves changing one configuration value in your browser.

Changing your domain provider usually involves finding a new provider, evaluating it, setting up payments, moving a bunch of records and so on.

I know what I'd do unless I was already planning on changing my domain management.

Agreed that changing a UA is definitely the easier short term solution.

The downside is that in the long run, you’re signalling to a consumer-hostile business that you’re happy for them to continue to be hostile towards you.

When dealing with duopolies, pragmatic solutions are all there are. When dealing with highly competitive marketplaces, ‘pragmatism’ and ‘laziness’ can often overlap in both positive and negative ways.

A positive pragmatic lazy solution I found to consolidate all the different registrars I used was to use Hover’s transfer-in concierge service. Of course, this now means giving money to Tucows instead, but they offend me less than GD.

I too would prefer to press a button once rather than change a domain provider, yes.

The way you assume that responsibility in this case is by unblocking the JavaScript GoDaddy requires.

I have a user agent switcher extension for Firefox. I have a linux machine for development work, and a Windows imaged laptop for email. There are some work related sites I have to switch the agent for. I know one of the sharepoint sites was arbitrarily "locked down" to Windows only, so I report that I'm running Edge on Windows.

Easy version of this is a FIDO2 hardware key.

This is because the browser fails to load some JS on the control panel because the browser blocks them. That's it.

This is an infuriatingly poor error message if the problem is disabled JavaScript. Surely they can detect that and show a proper error instead of trying to be cute with this "Your browser is a bit unusual" junk?

It's hard to differentiate between completely disabled JavaScript, some individual JavaScript files being blocked by an (overzealous?) ad blocker, and the browser not implementing some required JavaScript feature.

I don't envy web developers, that's a difficult situation.

I still stand by that the error message could be a lot clearer regardless.

The message is clear enough. It's intended for people who don't know much. Not people who mess with the browser features.

Easily solved, by sticking to web standards and not using any experimental JS features. Still them to blame, not the client browser.

I've been using NoScript for about a month full-time.. and it's insane the things you can leave blocked and still see a site as it's meant to be. Ads, trackers and internal tools that somehow I have to contribute my data to, and their accompanying libraries EASILY make up 70% of all JS.

> Ads, trackers and internal tools that somehow I have to contribute my data to, and their accompanying libraries EASILY make up 70% of all JS.

Citation needed. Literally 100% of the JS code i've written over the past 24 years has been 100% free of "ads, trackers, and internal tools that somehow users have to contributor their data to."

> Citation needed. Literally 100% of the JS code i've written over the past 24 years has been 100% free of "ads, trackers, and internal tools that somehow users have to contributor their data to."

It's a fair assumption that the majority of the code on the internet probably isn't written by you, so what you or any other individual writes isn't exactly a counter-argument.

I'd assume the poster you replied to was referring to the Javascript that gets delivered to their browser on a day to day basis by general purpose web sites, for which a significant percentage being ads and related unwanted content is entirely plausible.

If you were to capture all of the Javascript delivered to a randomly selected person's browser during a normal day I would easily believe somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of that Javascript was things that if the user was given a real choice they would not choose to load.

Actually it's trivial to detect if JS was completely blocked with the <noscript> tag. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/no...

And on the flip side you can trivially detect if some .js file was blocked from loading with some inline <script> tag that checks for whatever the .js file should expose.

The third case with the browser not implementing some feature is a bit more work but usually also rather easy to do.

The error message linked from the post says "Try disabling ad blockers, enabling JavaScript or using a different web browser".

This feels to me like they used too many abstraction layers to know what the exact error is in the place where the error message is shown.

If you want intentionally misrender the page, that's your right. But it's not their job to debug your setup.

It's also not their job to know what I'm using to view their website. If my browser misrenders the page, that's on me. There are zero reasons to put such checks in place and lock people out for sending a "wrong" user-agent string.

The error message isn't "you have the wrong user-agent" and the recommended steps aren't "use official Chrome" though. These were all assumptions about the error the OP made other people here have already disproven.

All the error message says is to disable extensions or try a different browser. It doesn't say what went wrong and it certainly doesn't say anything about needing specific user-agents, hell it doesn't even recommend which browser to switch to it just says "try another browser". As someone already mentioned it's not the site's job to figure out how your browser loaded the page wrong just to tell you it did.

I use brave and the ad blocker is on by default.

User agent discrimination will never make sense to me. It's such a trivial thing to work around too. Are there legitimate use cases for describing yourself to the web, or could we all just hard-code the bullshit magic string chrome uses and be done with it?

Ad tech is the only reason I believe this garbage continues. Maybe we can hope and pray for some kind of regulatory relief on the horizon. Alternatively, we can start building services the way we know they need to be built, and quit our jobs when our dickhead MBA bosses order us to do inhumane things with the products.

If someone in my organization ordered me to do UA/browser filtering for our web application, I would likely quit out of protest. The primary reason no one asks for ridiculous things like this in my organization is because they are convinced that I actually will. I have made it abundantly clear to the business that certain areas of technology are no-go. Being assertive about this trash fast & early can keep it from becoming a thing in the first place. Clearly, not an option for every career & job, but developers are in such huge demand that they have a non-zero amount of control over this destiny now.

I’d wager the primary reason they’re not doing it is they don’t have a use case for it (yet).

I've never understood why browser fingerprinting is so easy. Your browser gives up so much information and it seems entirely unnecessary for it to be providing such unique values. I would have hoped Firefox would have done more to eliminate this problem. They do have a resist-fingerprinting-option but it both breaks sites and also still doesn't pass any of the online fingerprinting test sites.

Vivaldi stopped exposing itself via User Agent, they're just telling they're Chrome. A lot of issues are magically gone.

I was using GoDaddy through Vivaldi yesterday without any issue. I guess this explains why, thanks.

I've been getting that message for over a year. I don't think it's browser related. I tried pretty much every browser.

I can't log in at home, but it works fine at work.

Whatever it is, I'm never using godaddy again.

adblocker / js blocker and privacy extensions can trigger that. I get similar error for different websites or gets additionnal captcha to answer because I use ghostery.

Yes, but in this case I tried chromium with a brand new profile, and even installed Windows in a VM to use internet explorer. Nothing worked.

I called godaddy support and was ultimately told to use a different ISP.

GoDaddy is a well-documented garbage fire. I used them once, then switched to Namecheap and I've never looked back.

> is a well-documented garbage fire

as I asked above, can you elaborate this? I am not aware at all

A particularly egregious example is "Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506303

uh, but I see there is a clear response cited there, too https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistere...

anything else?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies

All the way back to their Danica Patrick days they’ve been more focused on the bottom of the market (non technical users who don’t know better) than in providing a good product.

Namecheap locked my free DNS account for “security” reasons, and told me to contact them to unlock it. After contacting them, they advised me to open a new account. All this on a service that doesn’t let users export their data.

Perhaps they aren’t as terrible in their non-free offerings, but I doubt it.

I was using NameCheap but found Porkbun is less expensive and has an easier website.

I had never heard of Porkbun, so thank you for that info.

To be pedantic, "locks out derivates of Chrome" is a bit of a stretched interpretation.

What most likely happens is that there is some fingerprinting JS running trying to weed out bots; and as Brave has a lot of anti-fingerprinting measures built-in, some of the tests fail.

This has been my life for a decade now. As more and more sites become exclusively applications you run in a browser (instead of websites written in HTML you look at) I've been blocked more and more. Intention or accident, it doesn't really matter. The modern "web" is only for mega-corps and they're done pretending it's anything else.

Recently in GoDaddy, I've also had the "the 2-factor authentication key failed, try to insert it again" when I wanted to change important settings like the automatic renewal or the domain lock.

The point is, I used the same 2FA key to log into my account, so I know it works.

As a result I was compelled to do the intended actions through the phone by calling their support.

Has anybody got the same problem? Are they trying to prevent people from freely modifying their settings, or is it that somehow they want to "fire me as a customer"?

If they get you on the phone, they can tag you as a mark and upsell you.

That would explain it, indeed...

But that's a pretty dark pattern, isn't it?

Do you happen to have some confirmation that they do it in that intent?

Also, if this is the case, why don't we see more people complaining (here for example)?

Because the victim would not be here (I'm trying to compliment you, here!).

If you didn't get the upsell, maybe you "passed" for whatever their heuristics are :^D

Speaking of registars, what does HN recommend?

I was a happy namecheap user until they decided to go all political against Russian citizens. I am unsure as to what service I should migrate to.

I like easydns.

I like gandi.net but have no idea of their political stance re Russian citizens

I've been using Gandi for years and can highly recommend them. They have great user interface that doesn't get in the way and waste your time (as opposed to GoDaddy, which at least back in the day when I was using them would be showing several pages of worthless "offers" you had to decline every time you wanted to just renew a domain name). Gandi also has excellent and easy to reach customer service (although I didn't get much chance to interact with them).

https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one...

> Cutting off Russians and Belarusians would only encourage the creation of different closed worlds and digital networks. We have chosen to hold out our hand to these people. We are not at war with them. Only their leaders, and their madness, need to be stopped. We will of course react quickly against war propaganda of any kind.

Few points that made me choose them (though I would probably take Cloudflare if they supported the TLD of my domains):

https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit

https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports

I'm a happy INWX customer.

I use NameSilo and recommend them.

Google Domains is pretty no-frills. My only worry is if they randomly decide to nuke my Google account, as they are want to do to people sometimes, what happens to my domains.

google domains sounds like an awful, awful idea for the exact reason you stated.

> I was a happy namecheap user until they decided to go all political against Russian citizens

You should be unhappy with the Russian government who are the ones enacting a genocide, not companies that either due to conscience, internal or external pressure, or sanctions, decide to boycott the whole of Russia. Being against war crimes is not a political stance.

You can’t get any better than Cloudflare, they sell domains at cost and have really good DNS tools.

I really like Cloudflare too and have all my domains with them, they take 0 fees as a registrar, so I get domains at the same price as the registry price + ICANN fee.

However one downside with choosing them is, you're effectively locked into their DNS, since they don't seem to expose the ability to set your own Nameservers, which is ok if you planned to use them for Authoritative DNS anyway.

I have been using DNSimple for years with good results

Like I have said previously¹ about choosing a registrar: If you have regular backups, and if some downtime is not really a problem, it might be fine to use web site hosting, e-mail (and in extreme cases even DNS hosting), from some fly-by-night el cheapo provider. But your domain name registrar? Pick them carefully, don’t skimp, and make sure they have good support. Because when things go pear-shaped, you really want to be able to actually talk to someone to change your web server or e-mail DNS records (or even DNS servers) to somewhere else.

Big registrars can’t afford any support costs since they prefer to squeeze the price down as far as possible, and therefore they prefer to simply lose or outright drop any customer in case of any and all problems. Conversely, small registrars may charge more, but have better (i.e. actually existing, and sometimes even dedicated and personal) support for when things go wrong, and have a vested interest in keeping you as a customer.

A small registrar might also be so small as to know you personally, which will help monumentally against any social engineering attacks.

Full disclosure: I work at such a registrar, but you’re probably not in our target market.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30818950#30821221

Does your company have a website? You didn't divulge it in your linked post.

I’ve been asked this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21436448#21437951

Porkbun

Seconding this. It's the easiest interface I've found by far for domain management. Having only used NameCheap before; it's great. My needs are pretty basic though, just pointing at a couple VPS.

I use GKG for my personal domains. For all I know "they" are just a single person in her basement. Has worked fine for many years and isn't expensive.

I'm using NetCup for my DNS. They're based in Germany, operate from Nürnberg and expanded to Vienna (Austria) a while ago. DNS can be managed via Web UI (which I use) or API (but no ddclient support). I am not doing much with my domains besides mail, but afaict it worked as reliable as to be expected. I don't know their political views.

Speaking of ddclient, maybe check supported DNS services: https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient I don't think it's a good measure of quality, but if someone bothered extending ddclient for their service, it's probably not that bad. Plus if you ever find yourself wanting to use ddclient, it's nice having your provider supported. (NetCup is not supported, which is why I have to run an extra service on my Linux box instead of simply using the OpnSense).

Haven't had any issues with name.com since switching to them in 2018. Their interface leans form-over-function for my taste (massive waste of screen real estate), but I can always muddle through to the DNS record editing interface in less than 30 seconds, which is all that matters to me.

I’m a Brave user and tired of Godaddy even if they fix this. What is the best alternative registrar? I just want names, possibly mail forwarding, not hosting etc.

Namecheap or Google domains.

> I just want names, possibly mail forwarding, not hosting etc.

Another alternative is NearlyFreeSpeech.net. i'm using them simply for DNS with great results and fantastic prices. IIRC, if you _just_ use them for DNS it costs 1c per domain per day. If they are your registrar, that drops to 1c/3 days. i'm only using them for registration and DNS and it costs me about $1.20 per year. Their UI is... somewhat 1990s... but it works well and they have outstanding absolutely-zero-BS/marketing-speak docs (which was the thing which caused them to win my evaluation for a new registrar).

Porkbun has DNS and free email forwarding for 20 addresses. Less expensive than NameCheap.

I'm reminded of this:

https://www.technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-retur...

Also submitted here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094029

This website is optimized for Netscape Navigator again

Hey @mrspence, Enabled shields.

Test the following, add into brave://adblock (custom filters):

godaddy.com##+js(set, navigator.userAgent, '')

godaddy.com##+js(set, navigator.connection, {})

(logout and re-login into godaddy)

Works fine on Vivaldi (which is Chromium-based), unless the error is only supposed to occur after an actual logging attempt, which I can't test without an account.

So I don't doubt there's a limitation, but it doesn't seem to disallow every derivative browser (assuming I'm not misunderstanding you somehow).

Vivaldi workarounds these kind of issues by identifying itself as chrome. When a site blocks vivaldi because it is not chrome the site is added to a list and it will identify itself as chrome in the future (I know because it happened with the web version of whatsapp).

It's actually a whitelist. Vivaldi always uses the Chrome user agent, unless it's a website known to not block it, like vivaldi.com, and probably some of their partners too.

I though it was the opposite, I guess WhatsApp was doing something weird to detect Vivaldi. Do you know how they solve it?

No idea tbh. I haven't used WhatsApp for several years and deleted my account a year ago.

> Only allows direct versions of Google Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox

Where are you seeing that? The error message doesn't say that's the problem, and it's much more likely to be that Brave is blocking something GoDaddy uses for login.

This doesn't seem to be related to GoDaddy locking out derivatives of Chrome and is probably Brave / browser extensions blocking certain JS scripts. I can access my account fine with Brave.

Web apps were an error.

Hacker News is a web app.

I've been using GoDaddy as one of my registrars for 25+ years. Their tech. support is excellent.

However, their recent switch to MS Office 365 / Outlook for email has been a fiasco, and pushed me one step closer to dropping them.

That switch from their own webmail solution to Microsoft a year or two ago was the final straw for me and the single domain I still had with GoDaddy. If I had wanted to use MS email I would have been using it already. Transferred to Gandi.net and while the webmail isn't as featureful (Roundcube) at least it's cheaper.

Literally who uses godaddy on purpose. Might as well buy an oracle database instance as well.

use porkbun, great service that does one thing well. like postmark.

Seems to still work with Ungoogled Chromium.

Edit: Or do you need to try to log in to get this message? (That's what the screenshot suggests.)

When everyone becomes adept at changing their user agent to beat these filters, what so these whiz kids do?

I don't think it is user agent based. I think they just detected some js wasn't run by the browser.

I don't have any godaddy account to try it out but I very often get captcha to respond on on websites with a message saying my browsing has been flagged as possible bot access. I am using ghostery on firefox.

Cloudflare has started kicking people who forge or don't send their referrers. I'm pretty sure they'll ban you (based on customer configuration) if your user-agent doesn't match their fingerprinting/probing.

Works fine with Waterfox (with uBlock)

Fraud rates of 'other' browsers are over double that of mainstream browsers.

Nearly every metric is worse - from spam comment removal rate to adspam rate to credit card chargebacks.

I can completely understand a web host deciding to block any browser that isn't a major one.

None of that should matter if the services are only available to validated, logged in paying customers.

And then you decide on the basis of the customer whether to block, not the browser.

But it turns out a bot can look very much like a logged in paying customer, just they're paying with a stolen credit card and you'll only learn that in 2 months when the chargeback arrives...

Still not a reason to block by browser, bots don't even use them...

At any rate, based on what I've read this is a false alarm anyways, it's annoying and stupid but UA banning is not browser detection. This is more ass-covering - another commenter mentioned too many layers of abstraction which is probably closer to the mark - something broke somewhere and a customer complained, they don't have the time nor inclination, or perhaps even ability, to fix their issue, so they do the 'we don't know what's wrong, halp' thing, versus making a more robust site.

Which fits my impression of their site, shoddy service with mediocre hosting services. Superbowl/pornstar marketing though, so everyone has heard of them, in comparison to aws (you have heard you can host godaddy even if you think Amazon is just a place to buy shoes, and Amazon is both bigger and better)

I wonder if they are using some Akamai bot blocking feature.

Have you tried spoofing your user agent?

Do not use GoDaddy. A horrible company in my opinion based upon experience.

Turn Shields off?

You already shouldn't be using GoDaddy, so there's another reason

They're a pretty terrible registrar/host but their marketing is fantastically good. Every non-tech business owner I've met uses them. It makes me kind of sad.

I don't get disappointed at neophytes using GoDaddy. People who know better though should know better. Nobody on here should be using GoDaddy.

Like most things it's not as simple as that. I'm a long-in-the-tooth web guy (30+ years doing this stuff) and for Legacy Reasons I use GD. I wish I didn't, but all my domains (and all my client domains) are with them. Yes I could unpick, but do I have time / inclination? No. Do I want multiple domain registrars? No.

So - yeh, agree in principle, disagree in practice.

That's fine, you just have to admit you're supporting an incredibly slimy business. That's okay, many of us do/have done that even when we don't want to, but at least you gotta tell others to offset your GoDaddy use. Two people swayed away from using it by your opinion should just about do it!

I think most business are slimy if you dig deep.

I'm curious what the reasons are. I moved ~60 domains from Gandi to Namecheap and then back to Gandi over the span of 10 months. Namecheap was cheaper, but their support wasn't as good and their UI is a disaster (IMO).

Both times I had all domains moved over in less than 24 hours.

Can you say more about how this works? I find it intimidating. And I don't understand how the cost works -- if I'm in the middle of my term with the first registrar, do I get a refund when I move it over? Like when you moved from Gandi to Namecheap and back in 10 months, does that mean you paid 3x registration, or did you get proportional refunds when transferring?

this depends on the tld. for most tlds you buy another year of registration on transfer and thus extending the expiration.

for example for .de domains though, the remaining time on your registration is dropped and you start fresh from the transferal day.

For .pl the transfer is free, but it also does not extend expiration period (it stays the same).

I used to have about 50 domains there and moving everything to Cloudflare was pretty simple. Just start using it as a DNS first, which I was doing anyway.

Then the transfer process takes about 2 minutes per domain so the whole process was done in a little over an hour.

I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?

We offer a zero-markup registrar on self-service platform also - https://blog.cloudflare.com/registrar-for-everyone/

Ah, cool :)

I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.

That sounds interesting. Which static site generator?

(Currently happy with the bitnami wordpress image, but wouldn't mind going 100% static!)

Not OP, but I just downloaded one such WordPress business card website with wget and put it into S3/CloudFront.

Registering domains is very fast. To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS, but I already do that.

For the transfer it’s just like anywhere else. Initiate the transfer, get the code from the other registrar and wait for it to go through.

>> To transfer a domain Cloudflare insists that you use them for DNS

That feels… slimy…

I mean, 99% of the reason to have a domain with Cloudflare is their DNS/WAF/CDN and the options you get from having them at the edge. If CF isn’t handling your DNS they can’t provide those services without some very specific configurations that aren’t for the faint of heart.

You can use anybody as a registrar if you don’t want those tools though. CF sells domains at cost so it’s not something they aren’t making money on.

I had this problem. Then I learned that Hover has a concierge transfer-in service. You give them your registrar creds, they do the work of transferring everything seamlessly for you.

Sure, it’s Tucows, but it’s not GD.

I haven’t had a problem with them, I also know they have been around for awhile which is why I use godaddy.

why?

I'm just curious (I do not see any bad event in wikipedia: am I missing something?)

That's because they maintain their corporate identity vigorous and do their best to wipe anything bad.

> I do not see any bad event in wikipedia

There is a "Controversies" section of their Wikipedia article with 8 distinct sub-headings, and the section is prefixed with "For a more comprehensive list, see List of controversies involving GoDaddy" linking to another dedicated 15-section article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

thanks, I did missed that

(must say I do not see anything I consider that bad, imho)

Really bad security. They still enable broken ciphers like RC4 via ssh on their shared-hosting web servers. BTW - these servers use CPanel, which runs on CentOS 6 (or a derivative), which is EOL. If your company uses any security scanner, it will flag a lot on GoDaddy.

All the cool kids on HN hate GoDaddy. When prompted to elaborate the usual answer is "cuz they suck" or "I don't like their CEO". I first used GoDaddy about a decade ago, and thought nothing of it. I guess some people just like to hate. (or is it cancel nowadays?)

Educate yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involv...

Ah, I missed that, thanks.

anyhow, imho, I do not see anything that I consider that bad; they are sure selling products that anybody involved in IT may consider at "low level", so avoiding it. I have the same reaction anytime I hear the term "Wordpress", but no doubt is used by so many.

What's a better one? I've been using Google Domains, I don't really have a reason to complain about them, but I've always wondered whether parking everything with a big corporation like that will have its drawbacks one day.

Porkbun is really good. Cloudflare also sells domains at registry prices, very convenient if you already use their services.

I switched to NameCheap a couple years ago. I don't have anything to complain about.

I, too, use namecheap. In fairness I’m not as sophisticated as at least 95% of people on hacker news but it has certainly met all of my needs for the half dozen sites and 2 dozen domains I own

namecheap is fine as long as you don't have a problem. but if you have a problem you can be absolutely sure that they will never fix it.

Ive had the COO call me personally on a sunday before to iron stuff out. That's not true.

How many domains do you have with them/what's your monthly spend? I suspect this varies wildly.

Can't speak for aliquot, mine is around a low hundreds of dollars per year across two accounts (personal and professional, not linked) and service has been exemplary.

I have purchased a hundred or so since I got with them almost 10 years ago, but keep about an average of 5-10 at any given time. Monthly spend is minimal, I pay for 2yr+ up front.

Not my experience at all. Every time I've opened a support ticket, the initial response has been fast and the problem has been resolved quickly (based on the 3 or 4 incidents I've had over around a decade with them).

I got angered by the domains part of Google Workspace (technically it's not the same as the Google Domains team), as they "lost" my access to the root domain name that I was using for a Google Workspace account that I deleted later:

- there was no way to move the "root" domain name away from Google Workspace while the account was still in service,

- after deleting the account, any access was definitely lost (I spent a lot of time on the phone with them, but they provided no help),

- the lost domain name was never "released", it remained officially under my ownership until the very last day of its registration period, even though I had no way to act on it.

- when I called that out a bug, they firmly replied that no there was no bug...

So, the lesson is: never use a domain name important for your business as the root domain name of a Google Workspace account, unless you really are sure that you will never need to move it to another registrar nor to delete the account.

A clients domain that was purchased through Google Workspace was actually a white labelled Godaddy.

Yep, but GoDaddy Support refused to help as it was the responsibility of Google Workspace to manage it...

Moreover the domain did not belong to my GoDaddy account (which makes sense, as I created the GW account and acquired the root domain several years before I signed up to GoDaddy). So maybe it was a hidden GoDaddy account, something like a service account for the exclusive use of GW internal tools?

I use hexonet. Can't complain. They do everything right.

The website's homepage is deceiving. The control panel they offer is really for power users. They expose literally everything, and have APIs for most things that you'd want to automate. For people who have to manage multiple domains, it's helpful.

joker.com

i recommend porkbun. namesilo is good. and never use namecheap.

Most companies use some other company. The company I use, which is local to where I live because I want the local reliable support, uses Enom. I can't be bothered to get an Enom account so I pay them. Others use resellerclub etc. So instead of going with Godaddy or any of the big names, get a hosting provider with rock solid customer support and service. Either way, you'll probably end up with a domain from Enom but at least you'll have good service from a local provider.

Again, in case most people don't know this, most hosting providers are resellers of the big companies. They all do the same thing and have access to the same stuff. The only difference is that individual company's pricing and service. Pick wisely!

I miss dyn.com. They were my registrar for over a decade before Oracle bought then and made them suck. They were the one registrer where you felt like you were dealing with a professional company, not "Crazy Eddie's discount Domains". When Oracle closed them down, I moved to namecheap, which is pretty good overall.

I would love a Crazy Eddie’s Discount Domains website built using 90’s html where the domains are sold like timeshares. Do I even own this domain? Not clear, but at $0.90 cents a year who can complain. A counter for page visits and Eddie’s cocaine budget.

We use a combination of AWS and Gandi.

It's possible that whatever you bought the domain for will be existentially dependent on an urgent need to talk to a human at your registrar (such as in the case of transfer, fraud, hacking, or a mistake).

Never ever use any google product if you might need to talk to a human.

Moved all my domains to cloudflare. Never been happier.

Hover. Been SO happy with them for a lot of domains for a long time.

Most of my projects heavily use AWS, so I just use Route53's registrar for them. I ain't keen on parking everything with a big corporation like Amazon, either, but at least their transfer process is pretty thoroughly documented so I could always migrate elsewhere.

My main personal domain is through freedns.afraid.org, which in turn uses registryrocket.com for the actual registrar. I'm sure there are better options as far as nameservers and registrars go, but (aside from me forgetting to renew every couple years) it's been rock solid and worth every penny of whatever pittance I ended up paying for a premium account a decade-ish ago.

And then I've got a random .is domain registered through 1984 Hosting. Still haven't figured out a use for it.

Note that Amazon themselves only register com and org directly: for most other TLDs they resell Gandi.net or other registars.

I still remember how their jerk founder "saved" a village in Zimbabwe from a "problem elephant", and they have basically advertised their business using boobs for years. And that's besides all the scummy actions and questionable security practices of GoDaddy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Parsons#Controversies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

I wish that commenters on the Internet generally, and HN in particular, would lay off "murder and jaywalking" arguments.

If Gandi advertised with lewds, well. People would complain and they would probably stop.

The "scummy actions and questionable security practices" are both necessary and sufficient to persuade the informed reader not to patronize their services. Bringing in additional minor peccadillos weakens the argument by bringing out everyone who likes tits in ads.

No one likes the kind of bad behavior GoDaddy is known for.

This comment might seem a bit out-of-place if you don't happen to use showdead.

To me, using women to sell a product reeks of a bygone era and a certain mentality we’re working to get away from. I think that alone is a perfectly acceptable reason to think a company sucks and not use their product. Voting for behaviors with your dollars is important.

I wonder if it is more dehumanizing to the affected woman to show an attractive woman, or to not show women at all.

I think to be consistent with the 'don't use women for ads' approach, you need to be opposed to use human-based or non-product-related human interest advertisement at all, which includes, but is probably not limited to men [1], children [2], the elderly [3], people of a certain demographic and/or sexual orientation and/or gender identity [4], or national rivalries [5][6] or stereotypes [7] or even the concepts of such. You would also have to have a stern look at the art scene, because sex also sells as sculpture, on canvas, as a particularly suggestive voice or on the screen - it may be part of the work, but it also has an advertising effect.

And what a bleak world would that be.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C-vYY3SBDE [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqgSO8_cRio [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG4IaHgqH00 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw_gHMNs5iE [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWvKVE6rLI0 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g72KE8dmjc [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMQnPWjK5pE

While this is of course reductive, my counterexample is cosmetics and women's fashion generally, I'm happy to agree where internet services are concerned.

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