Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

I guess its just the power of advertising but its amazing to me that GoDaddy continues to be a popular solution for hosting, domain registration, etc given their absolute toilet of a reputation.

View on HN

An unofficial ranking of the most NSFW GoDaddy commercials ever:

https://www.golfdigest.com/story/an-unofficial-ranking-of-th...

The Woman(!) Behind GoDaddy's Tasteless, Effective Super Bowl Ads:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/06/the-wo...

Who Let These Commercials Be On TV?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rRopnyZaR0

GoDaddy's most infamous ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7yFCqOAb9Y

10 SEXIEST GoDaddy Super Bowl Commercials - Sexy Super Bowl Ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECUIQv9ruo

Hilarious to see all the takedowns on these videos. Who the hell DMCA's a reposted advertisement? It's literally free advertising. The only reason they would take these down is because they were ashamed of them - and they probably should be.

To be fair, they should also have a site gaydaddy.com and tv commercials that objectify sexy men.

They bought out another registrar I was a customer of. Now I am paying 40% more for renewals. If I want to migrate I need to expose my whois info. They're always looking to upsell me into some horrible hosting garbage.

They've bought up a whole series of services I was using and ruined them.

Anyway. Nice to see the FTC getting a few wins in before they are defanged by the new administration.

Can you temporarily change your whois info before you migrate to somewhere else?

I've had some registrars lock the domain from transferring for a few weeks after changing whois.

It's called the 60 day registrant change lock. Most changes to administrative or technical contact information will trigger it.

Although it's a real ICANN rule, the registrar is allowed to override it if they want. Of course very few registrars offer that kind of customer service, so that escape hatch might as well not exist...

Update your whois to bogus information, transfer the domain, restore whois information. Cloudflare is the cheapest domain registrar long-term, you might get cheaper ones for the first year or first 3 years.

Using bogus whois info is a great way to lose your domain. If you are afraid of exposing your phone number and address, rent a P.O. box and get a throwaway number to use in the interim.

You will not lose your domain for having bogus information for 7 days. Having bogus information takes months of not an entire year to ever go through and the worst you will possibly get is a very stern warning to update your information or your domain will be taken away.

I still have a .com domain that I've registered from when I was a child and I've just never bothered to update the information on it, the regulations on these are as lax as godaddys security.

If you're a site with millions of views a day this might be different.

How does this happen? I have a few throwaway domains on bogus whois info. How would they find out and wouldn't you get a chance to fix it?

Yes, you will receive a warning first, at worst your domain will go into reconciliation.

I don't use GoDaddy, but I had to transfer some domains of NetSol a couple months ago, and it made my experiences with GoDaddy look like a happy dream.

People will put up with all kinds of awfulness if they don't know better.

They got their product out.

Who else is there that the average person would know about?

Yup they dominate mindshare.

And their UI for choosing a domain name is excellent.

Squarespace advertises a lot too, probably more than GoDaddy nowadays, and they are also a domain registrar.

Maybe GoDaddy just sells themselves better? I see Squarespace as kind of an amorphous boring blob of internet business services.

Squarespace is not 'tagged' in my brain under the "domain registrar" category yet. When I blindly think of domain registrars, as much as I dislike them, Godaddy is the first to come to mind.

Squarespace positions themselves as a website builder more than a registrar. In fact, I doubt the average person would even realize they are a registrar, since that is abstracted away in the website building process.

Correct. And the average person isn't aware of their "toilet of a reputation".

This is the real key. They have an awful reputation amongst technical people (for good reason) but that reputation largely fades away the less technical you are. The average person knows them for their effective marketing, seemingly low prices, and seemingly decent products. They don't get into the weeds enough to expose how untrue those things really are.

For a long time, I worked in an office across from their (now former) headquarters in the Scottsdale Air Park. The number of clients we had come in amazed that we must work so closely with them and expecting great things made the location of the office so invaluable that when they moved to Tempe and Chandler, we had to seriously discuss internally if we needed to follow them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com