GoDaddy CoFounder: Never give up (but be very quick to change). | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy CoFounder: Never give up (but be very quick to change).

bobparsons.me

Aside from the primary message of this post, which is a good one, something else fascinates me: almost everyone I know hates Godaddy. But Bob Parsons seems to think that he's created a great company with strong values, full of brilliant engineers, known for having great customer service. None of those things are things that I've ever heard anyone say about Godaddy. So why the discrepancy? Here's a few possibilities:

1. My sample is not representative, and many people do feel great about Godaddy.

2. Bob Parsons knows that Godaddy sucks, but he's a salesman and he's selling the brand as he'd like it to be.

3. Bob Parsons actually thinks that Godaddy is an amazing company and a strong brand.

Which is it?

almost everyone I know hates Godaddy

Pleased to make your acquaintance. You now know at least one person who does not hate GoDaddy.

I buy domain names there. They are cheap and have never treated me poorly. I used to buy hosting there. They were cheap and never treated me poorly (and I'd still be there if I didn't catch Rails fever, which means $4 a month Linux hosting is a bit beneath my needs these days).

I've never been particularly unimpressed with GoDaddy, other than the abysmal site design and inescapable attempts to sucker you into extra "features" with each domain purchase. Their support seems decent, and their prices _are_ very low.

I agree exactly. I truly DISLIKE Godaddy because their site is a huge mess - yet I still buy my domains from them. Its simple, cheap, and they have full dns control. That's all I need.

GoDaddy has the most horrible and confusing site design that causes me to waste a lot of time doing something as simple as trying to lookup which hosting plan I'm on.

However, I'm still a customer for all of my .ca (Canada) sites and hosting for my girlfriend's business because:

1. Prices are very cheap

2. They are the most credible and inexpensive .ca domain registrar that I've found

3. Customer service is decent

For my own startup it's AWS all the way...

The only thing I was impressed with about Godaddy was that I wanted to cancel my account, I called, had to wait maybe 10 seconds, told the person I wanted to close my account, and they did it and that was that. There was no "why are you leaving?" or "you might like these other services" or "if you stay with us, I can give you 50% off for a year" crap, they just closed the account when I asked.

Of course, FYI, I was closing the account because their website couldn't keep me logged in and the navigation was terrible. Also, the way they bind your account to a single "master" domain name, and then other domains are served out of subdirectories of that main domain's directory is bassackward, which made it really hard to work with someone else who wasn't technically inclined in terms of putting files on the websites I had hosted there.

Used Godaddy for about 4 years now. Never had any major issues. They pick the phone, they help you and they are cheap.

GoDaddy is scum.

They are known for selling domain searches to squatters. It goes something like this:

  1. You search for a domain
  2. Praise Jesus! It's available!
  3. You come back in 24 hours.
  4. :( sorry, a squatter has taken it because GoDaddy whored out your search to them.

They are complete sleaze. Their mascot is a girl with big tits. They try to offer every imaginable rip-off feature with a domain registration. They are the car salesman of domain name registrations.

I can't believe nobody else managed to get the "place where you buy domain names" brand. It's sad.

For your first point, I know network solutions was caught [1] doing that. Never heard of GoDaddy doing it. Your other points, I'm willing to ignore for the benefit of /really/ cheap domains. They're not the car salesmen of registrars, but more like the grocery store, putting the candy bars in the checkout isle.

Disclaimer: I have 4 personal sites registered with godaddy. I was using a couple others, but I transferred them all to godaddy for simplicity's sake.

[1]http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/01/08/networksolutions-scandal-...

I've never heard of GoDaddy doing this (heard of someone else who did though), and I've personally bought hundreds of domains from GoDaddy (and many times a few days or weeks after the initial search).

I do dislike some things about them (the cleavage in the ads is a cheap trick and their UI is terrible), but:

1. Great prices.

2. Amazing support(for the price).

3. I respect Bob Parsons and really enjoy reading his blog posts which always share hard data which is rare and helpful.

4. It works! (I have a number of servers with them and hundreds of domains and it's been 100% reliable for me in the past 5+ years)

If GoDaddy had an API so I could develop an alternative UI for their services, I would never consider leaving them (besides hosting--for big sites I use other providers).

Their web interface is horrible, but the few times I've had to call support, it's been top notch.

And their Total DNS control stuff is nice.

Mostly 2 and 3. Parsons got his start doing direct marketing and his tactics reflect that. All the "Hey! Look at me!" and "But wait, there's more!" are the sizzle the sells the steak of cheap domains. Parsons does it because it works and folks like us get dirt cheap domain registration because of it.

I admire Parsons because he built two successful tech startups from scratch a Silicon Valley outsider. When you think about it, all the GoDaddy girls and upsells are just a different flavor of the VC whoring that goes on in other parts of the industry.

My technotard mom raves about them for their technical support. They don't aim to be a developers dream service rather the much larger mom and pop population.

> I would dream that one day my company would have full page ads right along side the other big players.

I think that explains his desire to run Superbowl ads more than anything.

>People who are not risk takers (this pretty much includes over 95% of the population) cannot fathom taking a chance to make a business work, and not having it immediately take off. They especially cannot understand being involved in something that fails repeatedly, and instead of giving up, trying to make it work (while risking all of one’s financial worth) again and again.

I think something like this happens to a lot of people who do startups:

"Why on earth are you leaving a 50-100k job per year, with benefits, to do a startup?"

I printed out labels for all those names, and my entire family (myself, wife, and three children) put labels on the envelopes, licked stamps (I sent them all first class —- at that time I didn’t know about bulk mail) folded the brochures, put them in the envelopes, and licked them shut. I licked so many envelopes and had so much glue on my tongue, that I don’t think I talked normally for at least two days.

Bob Parson seems to have to made many honest mistakes and learned from them. One of the thing i liked about him was Persistence, he kept trying and trying until he succeeded. A true entrepreneur.

You know, I was listening to what Bob Parsons had to say back when this was actually posted, and he's a pretty sharp guy. And in complete contradiction to the GoDaddy site, he is a really no-BS type of person, at least that's what I gathered from his early podcasts.

So he is a millionaire, but lost his wife that according to himself was fundamental on his success.

That is pyrrhic victory to me.

I don't know, just because you work well together doesn't mean you should be married.

The fact that he's saying nice things about her makes me think the opposite.

It's only pyrrhic if his victory caused the loss of his wife, which isn't apparent from the story. It is however sad.

I think many people dull the sadness of loss with sour grapes. He has not. Respect.

Another great Winston Churchill quote: "If you are going through hell, keep going."

The structure and design of that article reminded me why I strongly dislike GoDaddy.

Why?

Because they add 50 parked subdomains to every domain you register? Because they spam you mercilessly to renew your domains every week? Because to make a simple DNS change you have to wander through 10 pages cluttered with cross promotional links? After using GoDaddy I feel like I need a bath and a full virus scan.

Agreed, and the upsetting part is there's nothing really better out there. The market is wide open for someone to do it right (ICANN red tape aside).

I use GANDI and I've never had any problems like those. The fact that GoDaddy is permitted to register domains demonstrates that ICANN has failed.

You're completely right... ICANN is the true source of this problem. They have a responsibility which they ignore. Instead, they essentially print money by issuing new TLD's and handing out trials of domains for free. I hate ICANN so fucking much.

I've been saying that there should be some other DNS system that's decided on by users. That is, flip FireFox from "default DNS" to "newDNS" and now "googel.com" goes to "google.com", because that's what the majority of people have suggested it go to, not because Google had to register this to protect from typo squatters. It would never be the case that "googel.com" goes to some squattors "what you want when you want it" bullshit page, because users wouldn't stand for that. It would get voted off the DNS system.

This system would of course use the proper ICANN DNS to resolve the main sites like "Google.com." So, now we have the situation where if you want a domain, go ahead and register fajsdf90234890342.com with ICANN, then suggest to newDNS that "mydomain.com" goes to "fajsdf90234890342.com". As users see that it's legit, it gets set. If it's obvious parked domain BS, then you lose it.

Finally, this system could be implemented today, because it's backward compatible. Unless otherwise noted, a newDNS entry goes to whatever the ICANN entry is. If users flag it down, then it gets erased. If users flag their own redirection, it gets updated.

This would be beautiful.

Sounds like something easily gamed.

In that case, it'd be no worse than the current system.

That isn't a strong endorsement.

It looks like OpenDNS.com does something very similar to this. You use them as your DNS gateway, and they claim to provide faster, safer, and (if requested) censored results.

It doesn't appear that they have a user generate database of domains, though.

We already have something like this --- Google Search. See http://www.google.com/search?q=googel etc.

Yeah my experience with GoDaddy was terrible too. I switched to 1and1 about 4 years ago. I have been very happy with its domain handling. I don't always use them for hosting, but I haven't found anyone better for domains.

Compared to the others, my experience with GoDaddy has been good, but unfortunately that says more about the competition than them.

1and1 is great. I use them too.

namecheap.com

That is quite the URL.

"When you love something, it tells you all its secrets."

So, you're chugging along but don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. Are you supposed to keep chugging (don't quit!) or "be very quick to change"? Hm.

Never quit. Maybe change.

Never quit changing.

Hmm... when I read stuff like this, I never can tell if these are good ideas / lessons or not. There is such an immense survivorship bias -- only successful people write this stuff, we never hear from the unsuccessful people that did the exact same thing -- in writeups like these that I doubt there is any real value. You can't say if these practices helped, hindered, or did nothing... particularly when massive business success is at least in part due to luck.

That's what you get for trying to interpret a conditional probability.

I think all we can say for certain is that if you give up you are guaranteed to fail. Not giving up is only a prerequisite for success, not a guarantee and anyone who is at the stage of having not yet given up but also hasn't hit the right success combination yet is just an unknown until either they give up (by either choice or circumstance) or they succeed.

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