GoDaddy Moves DNS to Competitor VeriSign | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy Moves DNS to Competitor VeriSign

wired.com

71 pointschrisacky23 comments

VeriSign manage .com so they are a supplier. The availability of DNS depends on 'competitors' working with each other. The bigger DNS hosts all have backup servers with each other.

So the headline is a bit misleading and not really the full story.

This isn't unusual, amazon.com uses a combination of UltraDNS and Dyn, not their own AWS Route53 DNS service.

Could someone explain to me why the majority of startups seems to use GoDaddy? Their user-interface is unintuitive and ugly and there are plenty of other good alternatives. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use GoDaddy, but why does a mediocre-at-best service have such a high market-share?

Price.

Does it really matter for a startup if they save a few dollar a year compared to any other solution? GoDaddy charges $13 per year for a .com. My current (random) German registrar charges around $16.5 per year incl. German VAT. Unless you plan to buy thousands of domains price shouldn't make a considerable difference.

After SOPA (or whatever that was called), ignorance is their only defense. Or that they are smitten by Danica Patrick.

It's tough to remember now, but at one point GoDaddy was the small nimble competitor to Network Solutions. They were much cheaper and seemed more 'with it'.

I've collected so many domains from various consulting jobs, weekend projects, favors for family, etc, etc over the years that are on Godaddy simply because they were the one I started with, it's a pain to maintain domains on multiple services and I've got freaking muscle memory for doing whatever it is I have to do with GoDaddy at this point.

TL;DR Inertia.

Doubt that a majority of startups are using GoDaddy. GoDaddy made themselves well-known and bought Super Bowl ads. That's the first company many people think of at one point of time when they think of domain names.

I wouldn't consider VeriSign and GoDaddy competitors. Verisign is a domain registry, whereas GoDaddy is a domain registrar.

VeriSign also offers large network availability services for much larger clientèle. While GoDaddy offers web hosting and web services for smaller businesses.

Horrible reporting: This article leads people to believe Godaddy moved all of their customers DNS over to Verisign.

All Godaddy did was temporarily move their single godaddy.com DNS to verisign so they could display a 'we are working on it' message to visitors during the attack.

In other news, Ferrari buys Yugo saying we need an entry-level model for our price-sensitive customers.

It's interesting that I don't have a good impression of GoDaddy or Verisign. One provides sleazy marketing for a substandard product on the cheap, and the other extorts vast sums of money just to provide a guarantee of identity.

I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee for both to get good customer service, but I'm guessing there's collusion between the certificate providers to keep prices high.

Good luck to both of them.

Verisign does not have an ssl/identity business anymore. This was sold to symantec in 2010.

Tomorrow's news: "VeriSign's DNS is down."

That would be interesting, because Verisign has, as these things go, a fairly sophisticated anti-DDOS system; I would, on the other hand, be surprised to hear GoDaddy had much of anything at all.

I would have thought that AT&T had a robust DNS system too, but a DDOS took it down for most of a day a few weeks ago.

Ain't gonna happen.

Besides, it wouldn't really matter. The data is mirrored everywhere. And anyone can keep a copy on hand for such emergencies.

A very large portion of GoDaddy's data is pure garbage anyway: it points to a single IP for a GoDaddy servers that serves PPC landing pages with no content. It's not a major loss to anyone but GoDaddy if this goes offline. Over 50,000 "websites" that are nothing more than parked pages with PPC ads and no content. We can see that a domain name does not necessarily equate to a website with content. And when GoDaddy quotes the "number of websites" they are responsible for, or the media reports on GoDaddy, they will quote the number of domain names registered with GoDaddy[1], not the number of websites with content.

1. Many of these are domain names for which GoDaddy themselves are the registrants, placing GoDaddy in direct competition with their registrar service customers. Who is responsible for the (lack of) rules that allow GoDaddy to compete with its customers? Your friends at ICANN.

The web can survive without GoDaddy but not without Verisign, and for all intents and purposes the .com servers will never "be down" because the data is mirrored in too many places.

Isn't this the definition of counterparty risk?

What happened with the big GoDaddy thread?!

Here it is: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4500993

The moderators must have removed it from the front page. In such cases, HackerSlide[0] can prove very useful.

0: http://hackerslide.com/

well i moved to namecheap after i heard godaddy help crafting the SOPA bill. I guess they deserved it

Just used namecheap, so much simpler than godaddy, no upsell, reasonable priced anon registration. Beauty.

I bought my last domain at Namecheap because they said that they provide a free secondary DNS service for your domains. After I tried to set it up I was informed that you can use their free secondary DNS only for domains that where not bought with namecheap!!!

Then I bought GoDaddys premium DNS solution for 35$/year and I use their DNS servers as 3rd and 4th DNS servers for all my domains (primary and secondary are on my servers).

This was really the best offer I could find for slave DNS hosting and it works pretty great, even when GoDaddy is down :)

AND NOTHING OF VALUE WAS LOST

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