GoDaddy issues free SSL certificates to OSS projects
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A short list of reasons I refuse to use GoDaddy and actively encourage people to get away from them:
* Sexist advertising.
* The founder has repeatedly gone to Africa to kill elephants.
* They actively supported SOPA
* The founder expressed support for torture in Guantanamo Bay
* The customer support is a nightmare at best
* Hosting is inconsistent, slow, and of general poor quality.
* Constantly trying to upsell you the customer
* Godaddy mocks developers in its advertising
The founder is no longer a part of the company.
Agreed on SOPA, and think there are some cultural changes, and not sure where things like this will fall... I know Go Daddy has been militant on many, and similar issues.
Again, Bob Parsons doesn't run Go Daddy today, and hasn't iirc for over a year.
I have mixed feelings about support and sales being the same people. In some ways its' good, in others its' bad, and it really depends on the specific person you talk to.
Hosting, there's changes under way, but agreed as a general rule.
See above on sales/support.
I'm not sure that I've seen advertising really mocking developers.
I will say I've been a GoDaddy employee for about three months now, and the culture really isn't what it used to be in a lot of ways.. I was really apprehensive coming in, considering some of the above comments, as well as other insights into GD's past. That said, things have and are changing.. it's not quite my ideal, but then again what is.
Many of GoDaddy's competitors. I don't have, and have never had, such complaints about Hover, Gandi, Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, or any number of other domain/hosting companies.
My trust in them as a company is gone so far that excluding some truly revolutionary changes I'll never touch one of their services again.
* Advertising
If you haven't noticed, marketing has taken a completely different approach. At our last "town hall" meeting, the CEO confirmed that there will, "be no more GoDaddy girls". Now we have Jean Claude Van Damme playing bongos.
* Founder
Bob left the company when it was purchased by investors over two years ago.
* SOPA
This was an internal fiasco. It was driven by an executive in the legal department and was not known in other parts of the company. From what I'm told, Bob didn't really understand what she was doing. No one that works here agreed with that position, included senior management.
The justification she gave was that it would allow GoDaddy to more proactively take down "bad" sites. However, we already have a department that deals with that.
* Support
I haven't called so I can't comment directly, but I will say that at least there's someone to call. Google and many others don't even provide a means to talk to a real person. 2/3 of employees at GoDaddy are call center. Internally we do recognize that support can be improved.
* Hosting
There's current a big push with new infrastructure to improve this.
* Upselling
There's actually a common feeling among employees that this behavior is... not the best. It was brought up a few months ago at a corporate "town hall" and there has been work done to improve and simplify the customer experience. Changes are happening but there's a lot of work to be done.
* Mocking developers
Are you referring to that kissing commercial? That was weird. Again, there's been a dramatic shift in advertising and push to target specific segments, including developers.
Don't forget, we're developers here too. We want to build great products and our new management team has, at least in my department, given us a lot more freedom to be more innovative. In fact, my department is getting ready to announce new products aimed at helping small businesses.
I understand where your perception comes from and management recognizes that. The company is trying hard to do things differently now.
Don't forget it.
The company's history has a few blunders, but there is also a lot of good - millions donated to charities, thousands employed - creating jobs in a down economy, great benefits, and from the inside, I can say, customers come first. There has always been a do right by the customer mentality. For every poor customer support story, there are a hundred positive ones, untold. I've liked working at GoDaddy because the value of the product I help create is high. This is no rip off, everyone wins and I can be proud of who I work for.
The new CEO and new executive leadership team are leading a great new vision focused on helping small businesses kick-ass. It's really very moving and makes me proud to work as developer at GoDaddy.
See https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for-free?hn for a walkthrough.
Even if you ignore the whole SOPA mess, and the scumbag CEO, and the shady marketing techniques, all in all you still end up with shit service, which is the thing you're trying to buy.
It's worth mentioning that I just joined GoDaddy a few months ago as an employee, feeling a lot of the same concerns. Hosting really needs to get their changes under way, I don't work in that area. I also have mixed feelings about "sales and support" being the same people.
I will say the checkout isn't nearly as bad as it once was, and there's movement to improve things.
As to the advertising, most of that's pretty much changed the past couple years as well.
Don't get me wrong, for my own projects, I'm far more likely to use linode or digital ocean if I'm hosting somewhere... I also feel that movement towards things like docker.io are far better in terms of direction than a lot of enterprise VM infrastructures being implemented. It takes time to change course for an aircraft carrier.
If it weren't for a lot of the internal changes coming from the top down, I would not be here at Go Daddy today.