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Comment by plusbryan | Hacker News Reader

The thing that surprised me most about this whole situation is that so many tech-savvy people use Godaddy. Their spammy marketing and variable pricing screams bush-league to me. I'll forgive my dad for using them cause he doesn't know he had options, but for something so fundamental, how does anyone trust them?

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A long time ago Network Solutions was the place to register domains for something like $30 a year (I can't remember), and Godaddy was the cheap, fast, up-and-comer. That's when I moved onto them, and everything after that was just an afterthought. I even got really good and completely ignoring the upsells and could navigate around pretty quickly. Some of it is legacy and if I was in the market for a first time registrar today, I may have chosen differently.

I agree with this. Plus GoDaddy you can always find domains for very cheap due to all of their "promotions" or "coupons". I've gotten so many $2 domains from GoDaddy that it's ridiculous.

But I moved my domains away about a week ago. No discount is worth supporting GoDaddy.

It used to be $35 a year at Network Solutions.

When I was moving all my GoDaddy domains to NameCheap earlier this year, I decided to go whole hog and take my Network Solutions domains there as well. I had about a dozen URLs with them, and at $35 a year, it would be worth the savings.

That's when I discovered that if you call Network Solutions in person, and tell them you're leaving for a cheaper registrar, they'll match the price. I kept my dozen or so domains there, and now have a locked-in price of $9/year with Network Solutions.

I still feel some loyalty to them from the early days when they were the only registrar. For some reason, I felt like they were more credible. I know they've actually got their own skeletons in the closet, but old habits die hard.

I had my ~10 domains registered with them for a while because they were the cheapest registrar around (with the abundant coupon codes). Now that I am no longer a broke college student I moved right over to namecheap which has been an awesome experience

It's because tech-savvy people are smart enough to click the "No Thanks" link. ;-)

I never really put much thought into my registrar before. Godaddy had everything I needed at a good price. They were also big enough that I was confident they wouldn't go belly up leaving me with a problem.

For me, it's because it's a one time deal. I buy the domain, set the nameservers and never go back. But I'll still move them to name.com later on.

""" I'll forgive my dad for using them cause he doesn't know he had options, but for something so fundamental, how does anyone trust them?"""

I hope this list is complete:

1) Cheap beats a lot of things.

2) They give you minimal trouble if you only use their registration services (I hear that their other offerings are terrible).

3) Popular and well known also attracts people -- "I need a domain name, hmm, this company sounds familiar, and almost everyone else is using it".

4) Domain registration is not something you're going to thoroughly evaluate. It's a 5 min process that doesn't cost that much anyway.

5) A hacker guy feels "clever" when he can navigate through all their extra offerings, specials, trap checkboxes etc and just order what he needs, like he somehow "beat the system".

6) Popular and hugely successful means they are going to stick around. People have been burned by web hosting/registrars/similar services that closed business after a while.

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