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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.

When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

That's what makes this particular story so egregious.

Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.

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>It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin. When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

It's also literally one of the most criticized and awful registrars in the world, by a large margin. If decades of stories like this don't convince you to go with a more reliable registrar then I have very little sympathy.

This story is not egregious, it's in fact typical of GoDaddy. Every so often we get a HN post with a GoDaddy horror story. You'd think people would have learned by now.

They are the biggest because they undercut all the other registrars and spent millions on Superbowl commercials among other strategies. Size does not automatically equate to competency. Sometimes bigger can mean more mistakes are likely to occur and customer voices may be more likely to be unanswered in the ocean of support issues.

How many stereotypical male tech nerds flocked to GoDaddy after hiring Danika as "spokes" model. Did she ever speak? Glorified booth babe is more like it. After that, every non-tech dude would remember those commercials. Of course they are popular, of course for the wrong reasons. It goes to show exactly how well advertising campaigns work.

> Danika as "spokes" model

People who base their technical decisions on considerations like that likely deserve the level of service GoDaddy provides :(

Did she ever speak?

Sortof? [0]. All the commercials I saw [1] were just meant to get guys to visit their site so the speaking was just for fun. The later fake body-building commercials [2] were unusual.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1p9X8A2ruk

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o60YmD5_5-Y

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBNxfarlktE

> more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases

Whatever their process is, it's concerning. I wonder how many sign-offs are actually involved, or if it's just a ticket handled and closed by a rep.

Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.

>Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.

Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?

Porkbun. Their prices are very reasonable and their support team is consistently responsive and helpful. Honestly, even if their pricing was higher I would still choose to use them because it's clear their goal is to maintain a useful product, not infinite growth andendshittification

Interestingly, Cloudflare (don't shoot me for mentioning the name, HN!) identify Porkbun as "GoDaddy-Porkbun" but I don't know the relationship.

Edit: "Top Level Design [Porkbun owners] was the domain name registry for several top-level domains including .wiki, .ink and .design, until the company sold these domains to GoDaddy Registry in April 2023" --Wikipedia

Top tier is still MarkMonitor. Last I spoke with them, they had a five-figure minimum spend, but the per-domain costs are competitive. That cost buys you proper named support contacts, etc.

If you look up the whois for microsoft.com or yahoo.com, that's who you'll find.

Five-figure minimum spend sounds pretty expensive for the vast majority of businesses out there. Of course, just a drop in the bucket for major brands.

Definitely. I don't use them for my personal domains, of course.

But as others have pointed out, there's basically zero margin on simple domain sales. So if you want proper support, you need to go to someone who bundles it with other enterprise business (e.g. AWS), or who makes it their whole business (e.g. MM).

Hmm, Porkbun? Name.com? Something like Infomaniak if you prefer Europe?

> They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

In my experience the sentence is only correct this way: "They're more likely to have established processes for all sorts of cases"

They have lots of clients. They have big opportunities to streamline support (which is a cost center). ... do you see where it leads? Read the OP, if not!

> do you see where it leads? Read the OP, if not!

Read the last paragraph in my comment.

> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

But they proven over and over and over and over and over again that they are not a reliable business partner.

> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well.

For offline goods, definitely. For digital services, 10+ years ago, definitely. For digital services, in 2026, it's a bad strategy even if you're a business and want something reliable.

> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well.

That is a strange idea to me. Some people are real fans of the lowest bidder, no matter how awful they are.

> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well.

That is also at least 10 years old stale matter. Have you ever read people wrongly being locked out from a BIIIIG provider unable to get through to get remedy? Apparently no. I did. I am sure several other people here did too.

Motto: "Eat shit! A trillion flies cannot be wrong!"

Then a paid support plan at $500/mo for those mho want it?

Markmonitor touts itself as an expensive but reliable registrar. I don't know what it costs.

IIRC, when I used it for my employer .com was $100/domain year, registry lock for eligible tlds was $1000/domain year (I forget if that included the domain), and there was a minimum annual spend that I don't remember, but might have been $10k-$30k. They have new ownership since then, so I dunno.

The only issue we had was when we wanted to change our nameservers and our authorized contact for registry lock didn't answer the phone for the verification call, so we had to postpone the change for the next day. But that's what is supposed to happen, so no big deal.

Better than networksolutions changing our nameservers when one of their support agents got phished.

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