Namecheap to Donate $1 to EFF for Every Domain Transfer on December 29th
namecheap.com
namecheap.com
GoDaddy is an already shady company, hopefully they take a big hit from this and change the way they do things.
They should be considered a Corporation Non-Grata.
It seems to me that the focus on HN and other sites is to move domains.
I'm not particularly up on GoDaddy TOS, but I imagine their not going to give refunds to prepurchased hosting. This would increase the friction involved in a total dump of GoDaddy. The customer would also have to allocate time to setup the new environments. Same with email, Dedicated and Virtual servers.
There are also SSL certificates. Again, I assume no refund, and the time it takes to gain and install a new SSL certificate from another provider would also increase the friction.
GoDaddy also provides alot of instant website tools. I'm not saying that SOPA opposers do not use these tools, but they tend to be marketed towards a non web savvy user that may not care/know about SOPA. This would reduce the effect of SOPA protests.
In summary I'd say that the tech savvy GoDaddy customer with a decent budget and the time to set up alternatives could dump all services, it's could be unreasonable to expect a total boycott of services from other GoDaddy customers.
I don't think that many readers of HN would have anything besides a domain with GoDaddy anyway.
I have ONE client with a GoDaddy hosting account. I picked up this client on oDesk last week. The GoDaddy account was pre-existing. We have been fighting GoDaddy support for the last week or so to fix an intermittent misconfiguration that other users occasionally also experience. They have heretofore not fixed it and it constitutes a serious disruption to the client's business.
GoDaddy is awful and any tech-savvy individual knows it.
Services that do need a domain registered with GoDaddy:
Domain Name Registration
Transfer Domain
Bulk Domain Name Registration
Bulk Domain Transfers
Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
Discount Domain Club
Domain Buy Service
Go Daddy Auctions®
Private Registration
Business Registration
Deluxe Registration
Protected Registration
Certified Domain
Premium Listing
Premium DNS
Domain Backordering
Domain Management
CashParking®
Web Hosting
WordPress Blog Hosting
Virtual Dedicated Servers
Dedicated Servers
Managed Hosting
Virtual DataCenter
Dedicated IP
Go Daddy Hosting Connection®
Website Analytics
Search Engine Visibility
Website Protection Site Scanner
Hosting Management
Go Daddy Email
Hosted Exchange
Online Calendar
Fax thru Email
Online File Storage
Email Marketing
Email Management
Webmail
Search Engine Visibility
Website Analytics
Email Marketing
Business Consulting
Business Solutions
Quick Shopping Cart®
Merchant Accounts
SSL Certificates
Code Signing Certificate
Website Protection Site Scanner
SSL Certificate Management
Turnkey Reseller Plans
API ResellerGoDaddy is the largest and most wellknown registrar out there.
From all accounts, they've lost less since this began than they gain -in a single day-.
This isn't affecting their bottom line much at all, it's just affecting their image with the techie/hacker crowd.
A vital crowd to have a good image with, but their business is literally built on taking advantage of NON-hackers -- let's be honest, how many people here have ACTUALLY bought anything but a domain from GoDaddy, and MAYBE some cheap/crappy hosting?
Well, we don't really know this yet, do we?
Are any HN'er going to forget this for their next startup? Or their next contract? Or when their buddy asks them to register a domain for them?
No, we are all going to remember that as long as we don't use GoDaddy we will be fine.
That is going to cost GoDaddy a lot in the years to come. I don't think bankruptcy is around the corner, but I think we'll hear about some down sizing in a couple of years.
FWIW, I am thrilled to see the karma fairy show up and pay GoDaddy in full for years of garbage.
"Oh you never want to use GoDaddy." "Why?" "They suck, use Ghandi or NameCheap" "Right... but WHY... ?" "There was this thing a few years back... they just suck." "Oh ok."
How many times do you think a conversation like that took place during the early years of the iPod before it was so mainstream?
Or Ford vs Toyota... or McDonalds vs. In-and-Out... or DirecTV vs Cable back in the day.
You forget the details of the conflict, but you file away the conclusion: "XYZ sucks!" and that is how people will remember GoDaddy until they make an active effort to redefine themselves as a customer-focused company.
Which I doubt they will; they don't know how to run that company and it would be a very expensive transition.
Instead they will just fade into the future until someone else steps in and redefines them and takes them to the next level (e.g. cloud hosting / SaaS offerings) or they dry up and die.
GoDaddy will just price themselves to be attractive to the vast majority, i.e. cheapskates. The 'elite' will probably also pile in by rationalising that this must be costing GoDaddy money, so by registering a domain with them they are actually costing them money.
Never underestimate the twin forces of "getting a good deal" and geeky self-deception.
Also, there's a lot of guesswork to try to gauge how much products vs customers they have.
Reference: Two sources on domains show; some gain vs 300,000 weekly loss.
I have purchased domain names from GoDaddy for years. And only from them, unless there was a TLD I required that they didn't offer.
Recently I started moving all of my domains to namecheap (before the SOPA shit hit the fan) for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I was being penalized by GoDaddy for aggressively SEOing my domains.
Just agreeing with you, that's it!
Dynamic DNS
No more need for DynDNS or another third-party DNS service for this simple but useful feature! Once enabled for a domain, you can simply use an update client to regularly update the IP Namecheap servers point to.
See Namecheap's knowledgebase articles to enable and use it: http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/category.aspx...
Update clients:
ddclient (unixy) - http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ddclient
inadyn (unixy) - http://www.inatech.eu/inadyn/
Namecheap's DNS update client (Windows) - http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
Also, if you have dd-wrt installed on your router, the firmware comes with a dynamic dns client that works well with NameCheap.
But, I'm surprised so many people tolerated godaddy for this long just because of their control panel. Every time I have to go in there and help a client/friend, I begin to feel like an idiot almost immediately. It's impossible to find anything intuitively and I feel like their design changes every few months.
Namecheaps panel isn't pretty by a long shot, but it's so clutter free I just don't care.
Also, as some people said before. This attack on Godaddy maybe a godsent diversion for SOPA supporters.
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...
Hurting Go Daddy over this is fine, but I suspect it is inconsequential to whether SOPA passes, and most of the key supporters aren't concerned about boycotts anyway.
The point is about how much awareness this event is raising and how much of an impact it is having on encouraging people to do something (anything) to express opposition to the bill. One example: I had not seen SOPA on the nightly news until now.
I don't think this event has been or will be considered "inconsequential". There's a small chance it will be one of the more important events in the opposition.
Are you taking a position on this? Or are you content to just hint that others might possibly have done so elsewhere...maybe.
Namecheap does quite a bit more than GoDaddy in terms of protecting you.
To GoDaddy, you are some cow that needs milking. (re: fines for various "infractions" that GoDaddy writes up themselves).
To Namecheap, you are a valued and respected customer. This means requiring proof to back up accusations.
I started the process yesterday afternoon. Still haven't seen anything on the GoDaddy side indicating any pending transfers. I imagine this sort of delay will only be worse come the 29th.
Update: just got a slew of form mail from namecheap. Apparently every EPP/authorization key code I entered, taken from the list generated by GoDaddy, is wrong. Now I have to re-do every transfer.
They sure have had a lot of funny accidents lately....
I also discovered that I cannot automatically transfer azhackers.com, apparently because it triggers some "bad, evil, we don't like it" domain name filter.
Are they really that upset with Arizona? :)
Also interesting is that I had no idea that Maker Bench existed, even though it's practically within walking distance.
Yeah, Scottsdale.
Also interesting is that I had no idea that Maker Bench existed, even though it's practically within walking distance.
MakerBench seems to do a poor job of promoting itself. I think their RSS feed, for example, used to be filled with posts from assorted other sites (e.g. make.com) such that I gave up on it as being to noisey. It looks to be more focused now so I re-subbed
A few user groups meet there, too, such as the Android dev group.
My AZ Hackers group had been meeting up in Scottsdale but attendance faded to zero after a few months. I've thought about reviving it down at MakerBench but got distracted with work.
Anyways I'll have to write to namecheap about getting the name approved for transfer.
I see it's every Tuesday night. I will have to plan on this ...
The laser cutters they have are pretty interesting.
(I also ran into the EPP code issue with indyhackers.com, and a long delay with a few recent recent transfers. Ugh. I am under the impression the issues are on GoDaddy's end, but, regardless, I've never had issues with transferring to Namecheap in the past.)
I'd be certain this is intentional since those characters are ALWAYS (20+ domains transferred over a period of months) at the end of the code, although I cannot fathom the purpose since at that point you've already paid for the transfer and aren't going to give up the money you just spent.
Anybody know WTF the registrars are playing at?
I took the CSV exported from GoDaddy, striped it down to multiple lines of
domain, EPP domain, EPP domain, EPP ..
and pasted that in.
That failed.
When I removed the space between the comma and the first character of the EPP key, it worked (so far for the few I retried).
My guess is that the space confused the form parsing code. Or maybe it was just a glitch.
In any event, I've been now moving domains successfully, and in the morning I'll be re-trying the bulk of the remaining names.
BTW, in my initial retry attempt I noticed that some domains were being flagged as not transferable, something I didn't catch when i attempted to moe 30 names at once.
One name was "questionable", two others were too close to the expiration date. I got in touch with Namecheap support and they arranged to get these names transfered as well.
And once all the ducks were in a row I've been getting pretty quick turnaround times from both namecheap and GoDaddy.
So, so far so good.
Namecheap FAQ says that since a transfer might take up to eight days(!) they will not automatically process transfer requests for domains expiring within that time.
However, they say you can open a ticket to see if they will do a manual transfer that completes sooner.
So, I opened such a ticket, and also asked for help moving the suspiciously named azhackers.com domain.
In the meantime the resubmitted domains are now going through; I've told GoDaddy to approve the transfers (via the control panel).
Keeping two or three domains on GD wouldn't be the end of the world, but it means I would not be able to just completely walk away from them (whihc is what I really want).
Ironically you'll be able to transfer back to GoDaddy in a year when they make some kind of "come back to us" offer for a few dollars to transfer in.
Remember .com/net prices go up January 15th (I think).
This comment is flat wrong.
I have a couple hundred domains with NameCheap. I always get a discount on renewal.
No, you can't just Google "Namecheap Coupon %thismonth%" but you can hop on chat, ask politely, and be given one. It's not the same full discount, but it's a discount nonetheless, and takes but a few seconds.
The problem with expecting to pay the same for renewals as the initial term is that the annual rates are raised to the registrars, so their costs go up year to year, leaving pennies per domain at the rates you pay Namecheap and eventually putting them in the red if the rate to you didn't rise.
(and if you have that many domains you can do better than NameCheap prices too)
I'm generally only renewing a few at a time. They've given me a coupon to renew just one, and they were doing that before I had more than 50 with them.
While there are cheaper options, I like Namecheap's bulk management tools, free DNS hosting with records management for all types of records, etc.
After leaving Internic, I stayed with DirectNIC for years because of their reliability (even during Katrina!), no hassle interface, and pro customer practices, but after crossing the hundred domains mark, that started to feel expensive even with their bulk wallet discount system. I'm still using DirectNIC for a few, but Namecheap for most.
Can anyone suggest a good, affordable registrar with broad ccTLD support and a decent mobile site/app? Preferably an independent company with phone support in the US. (I looked into Hover, but they're owned by Tucows. I also looked into Gandi, but they're based in France.)
I use gandi.net personally - Gandi has long supported internet freedom and is based outside of the US.
Con: Transfers are absurdly slow. It took 'em 5-6 hours to initiate the transfer after I ordered. I approved the transfer on both ends instantly. Within the hour the root registry showed the domains moved to Namecheap/enom ownership. 12 hours later, Namecheap still shows everything as pending in their interface. That means I have no management of my own domains -- if I needed to change nameservers or such I'm SOL.
For example, Tucows does a ton of great work to support various causes and we've always (at least as long as I can remember) supported the development of the Open Internet but we've never had a huge animal rights component to our activism, so we didn't feel right adopting an elephant rescue charity for our giving. A few other registrars did, but it just felt weird for us to change our stripes for PR & marketing purposes.
Same dynamics at work with this issue (and it is much more of an issue than it is an opportunity). We do a lot of work with a lot of organizations that oppose SOPA and PIPA and similarly stupid bits of law that might destroy or inappropriately restrain the Internet commons and we're going to continue to do that, but to buddy up to the EFF and promise donations based on business volumes just isn't something we're comfortable with. We think our activism can be expressed much more productively.
We're continuing to talk about what works best for us and our customers while staying true to our values and we may or may not stay our current course - it is always a live issue, but as one of the largest registrars, I can definitely say that it isn't a case of being too small or not wanting to rock the boat. :-)
Just consolidating vendors (domain and hosting) to simplify management.
http://help.hover.com/2011/07/07/hover-secures-passwords-wit...