GoDaddy loses 72,354 domains this week alone | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy loses 72,354 domains this week alone

dailychanges.com

224 pointsjustinmares32 comments

Even if this was all the lost accounts (it isn't).. this article is irrelevant. Last year during the same 7 day span, 88,401 left. 12/17/2010-12/23/2010

http://www.dailychanges.com/domaincontrol.com/2010-12-17/

Also a month ago, between 11/10-11/16 110,278 domains left.

Relevant comment on reddit as to why this isn't exactly accurate:

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/npj2q/godaddy_lost...

It seems everyone is just too trigger happy to try to report success with the GoDaddy boycott.

The reality is that everyone need to be patient to get any real numbers. The domain registration transfer process is not immediate, it typically takes 3-5 days to complete, so it's improbable to actually know that exact number (unless you work at goDaddy and are pulling raw transfer request data). The real numbers on the success or failure of the boycott campaign will be seen in the upcoming weeks.

Jumping the gun also doesn't allow people like myself time to transfer after the holiday. As much as I would love to transfer now I do have to travel and visit family. Its on my todo list but won't happen till next week.

Most transfers complete within hours. Some take as long as 3-5 days, but a good registrar can make it happen very quickly nowadays.

To your point, I can say that our retail transfer rate for the 22nd was up 10x from the prior day, the 23rd, was 4x from the 22nd and the 24 looked pretty much like the 22nd. That's a ton of domains (I run Hover, the retail arm of Tucows - the second or third largest registrar depending on how you count market share...)

And registered more than that.

New Domains (32,437)

Transferred In (20,034)

Transferred Out (21,054)

Deleted Domains (31,047)

Noticed that too. Why are they growing that wildly?

A net gain of about 400 domains doesn't seem like wild growth to me.

1) They're the biggest domain company, with a very large marketing budget.

2) 99.9% of their customers wouldn't know what "SOPA" is, nor would they care all that much.

(Both of which are unfortunate but, in my experiences, facts)

Listen, no matter how large or small a domain is - it is still a single entity. Wikipedia moving off of GoDaddy is the same as thisisthebestdomaineverwtf.com moving off of GoDaddy.

Unfortunately, it is going to take a lot more to make an impact on GoDaddy. For GoDaddy, this is a fart in the wind.

It's hundreds of thousands of dollars of gross revenues.

Their brand took a hit too.

It's a real thing, they really didn't like that this happened.

Not really hundreds of thousands of dollars. They already have the money and none of it gets transferred to the new registrar.

If you move a domain name from Godaddy to Hover that has five years left before expiry, I have to support you for the next six years (the original five, plus the extra year that gets added when you transfer) for the $10 transfer fee I charge you when you initiate the transaction.

Its kind of screwed, but that's the way this industry works.

You can make the argument that transferring out affects Godaddy's future revenues, but to what extent isn't exactly clear.

Regardless, you make a great point - the brand took a hit, its a real thing and they really didn't like that this happened. I'm just not sure how financially material the action actually was.

The domains that I'm not sure about using all get registered on a yearly auto-renewing basis. That's most of my domains. I'd assume that most domains are registered that way, which means that it's probably at least half a million in yearly gross revenue that just went away for each of the coming years, not counting any services that went with those domains.

Edit: Assuming that that headline is accurate and that's a net loss attributable to this whole fiasco. Also, I'm sure their profit margins on domains are razor thin, so the profit lost might be pretty low.

If it doesn't make a difference to them, I wonder why they backed off from their decision to support SOPA (although essentially, only in public)?

Note: This is a repost from a previous thread.

This is great and all but I don't really see a boycott as being such an effective solution.

The problem with boycotts is they are based on the following things:

1) The spending power of the boycotter. 2) The potential spend of the boycotter on the relevant service/product. 3) The amount of influence you have over others to boycott.

So whilst you can move your handful of personal domains that you were using for your hobby website or small startup elsewhere, the biggest spenders on domains I would imagine are going to be medium-large businesses.

These are much more cautious to join a boycott unless there is obvious PR benefit (e.g fairtrade or animal testing free products spring to mind) because they are beholden to shareholders and are generally conservative when it comes to changing suppliers unless there is a clear cost-benefit. The only people in the organization that are likely to care about this will be the techies who unless they are the CIO/CTO do not have the influence to affect domain purchasing decisions.

The conversation probably goes approximately like this:

Boss: Good day underling! Please secure us the following list of 100 domain names from the great godaddy, lord of the DNS!

Techie: But sir , we shouldn't use godaddy. There is an active boycott because of SOPA, how about company X instead?

Boss: What is this SOPA of which you speak?

Techie: explains SOPA

Boss: Damn hippies! I neither understand nor care for their plight, godaddy is cheaper and we already have an account with them. I know not of this company X, do they advertise at the superbowl?

Techie: but...

Boss: Please do as I command and grace godaddy with our pieces of silver.

Techie: enters company credit card details at godaddy.com

While I can't find fault with your argument, it doesn't seem to match reality. GoDaddy very publicly dismissed the boycott and then rapidly turned around and caved in to it. If it's not an effective solution, surely that wouldn't have happened.

Except they didn't cave. They made a press release that they thought would appease the general public as a stop-loss measure. GoDaddy still supports SOPA privately, and likely even monetarily.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/23/godaddy-ceo-there-has-to-be...

True enough. But why respond at all? Seems like it has some effect, even if not as large as one might like.

The following companies companies have already joined the boycott: Wikipedia, Imgur, StackOverflow, and the Cheezburger network. Medium-large businesses are joining, and we have seen the effects of it already.

That's just a list of domains that left their name service. A lot of domains that used different name servers probably transferred away too.

Funny.. the site shows how 72k domains means nothing against 32 million domains and the new/leaving ratio is nearly 1:1. I am wondering why godaddy even cares... they could think "ok, some domains will leave, but nobody will talk about it in 2 weeks". :(

Sadly, at the very same time they have registered more than that, and above all, they are still managing 32,142,859 domains.

In other words, they make at least $350MM a year from domain registration only, let alone their other services such as php/asp hosting and POP3.

But there is no doubt there was an impact for that move-out-from-godaddy call.

Domain registration is a loss leader for them (especially with how easy it is to find coupons online). They're hoping that cheap registration will be enough to entice someone to use their other profitable services.

How does that compare to a normal week for them?

Also, is it possible for GoDaddy to register a bunch of domain names for themselves so to make it look like the difference (outgoing - incoming) is not that much? This will certainly cost them a lot but feels like right now they are more concerned about saving the brand name than the money. Also, in the long run they can sell those domain back (or even better for them - put the domains on auction).

How exactly is that number being calculated?

That's…not that many.

Maybe we'll stop seeing super bowl ads from these guys if people keep pulling their domains.

I am happy to say I moved my domains away from them 2 years ago.

If SOPA passes and you've moved your domain to namecheap, you're still stuffed. Suddenly all those Libya domains(.ly) doesn't sound to stupid!

> Suddenly all those Libya domains(.ly) doesn't sound to stupid!

I don't see what they change, the problem of SOPA is the DNS block, where your website is hosted (or registered) does not matter if all US ISPs blacklist your site in their name servers.

Well at least the rest of the world can see your website, while still censored in the US. Whereas if GoDaddy just takes out your website domain, nobody can get to it.

This is so inspiring.

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