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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Millions of normal not-too-savvy folks use GoDaddy because to them it's synonymous with domain registration. They profoundly do not deserve their sites to be down for that.

For shame.

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True. However I think it is fair to say that if you are on HN, reading that comment, and use GD, then you deserve what you get.

What's shameful is that millions of not-too-savvy decided to make a serious decision without becoming savvy about domain registration. Profound? No, just pathetic.

How is registering for a $10 domain name a serious decision to make?

How come I can't reply to TomGullen's remark? F-you HN.

There are timeouts in place to prevent rapid back and forth flamewars/arguments. You can bypass the timeout (at least most of the time) if you know how (for example, I just did to respond to you) though that should be considered bad form. This functionality is not something targeted against you.

Try this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4501489

I don't care for the tone of "deserve" in this context, but there are two ways to look at the term.

One is in a moral sense - something along the lines of "If you use GoDaddy, you share its guilt for its bad acts and deserve punishment". That's unfair, of course.

Another possible meaning is that anyone who fails to research something as important as a domain name registrar is suffering the natural consequences of their actions when a poor choice causes them problems. A person doesn't have to be very savvy to read the Wikipedia article and see that GoDaddy has been involved in several high-profile controversies regarding mistreatment of customers.

I don't think someone asserting the second should be shamed, though it doesn't seem to be very valid. I didn't come up with much negative information outside of the Wikipedia article when I avoided search terms specifically related to known issues.

I'm not trying to be a jerk, but anyone would say the same thing if I complained about QoS on one of those hugely over-sold shared PHP hosting sites.

Are there really a lot of "not-too-savvy" folks who understand that they need GoDaddy to provide them DNS servers but know better than to use someone else for DNS services and/or registration? Maybe I underestimate the size of that population.

I should and do apologize... I'm getting a lot of flak for my tone. No one deserves for their sites to be down, but I have no sympathy for HN readers who experience downtime. This issue has been discussed to death too many times for it to be an honest surprise to anyone here.

'you deserve what you get' didn't go over very well, but was all the snark I found that could be judged unreasonable.

Edit: also, there is a great deal of inertia to overcome for a registar change, so a bit of shove (instead of gentle encouragement) may be warranted.

No, you're right. It was off the cuff and non-specific and honestly, motivated by a frustration of GoDaddy more than of people here (though I do still hope that they consider this the last straw and move if they haven't already). I just think that someone who's as much a behemoth as GoDaddy could get their shit together and offer a decent quality of service and a tiny ounce of transparency.

I'm a bit upset because this subthread is so vitriolic as a result of my tone and I am sorry for that.

I'm a bit upset because this subthread is so vitriolic as a result of my tone and I am sorry for that

What a classy bit of self-reflection. Keep up the good work :)

I would would guess there are is a huge population of not-too-savvy folks who use GoDaddy for registration... and they aren't even aware that registration and DNS can be separated.

At least, I assumed they aren't putting Danica Patrick in Super-Bowl commercials for the benefit of the HN crowd.

Agreed. All of my domains have used alternatives for the last few years (Google and Name.com). But my less tech-savvy self registered my legal name domain (and variants) around six years ago with GoDaddy and never switched the DNS management over. Big mistake. Now my blog is unreachable via DNS during a job search. Better update my resume links!

I totally understand what you meant-- definitely, anyone reading that comment had a chance to avoid this. But "you deserve it" is very harsh language for what is for the vast majority a well-intentioned mistake at worst.

So, no more shame, but just consider that it is possible to be sympathetic towards someone without endorsing their behavior.

Just pointing this out, it is entirely possible to be a HN reader and deal with clients who have set up their hosting and ignore your suggestions (pleas) to move to a better service. Sometimes clients with low budgets and non profits like to just "figure it out themselves" instead of let their developers handle the hosting arrangement (we do charge for that sort of thing). Enter: GoDaddy's incessant advertising.

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