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cenhyperion

I'd rather pay a decent company good money than give GoDaddy my name and email.

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

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Sexist advertising: I don't think there's been a racy commercial in a few years now... Not that I thought they were actually all that bad to begin with, especially compared to most advertising in general.

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.

>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.

I started working at GoDaddy right after the SOPA issue with some reservations. I'll try to address your points.

* 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.

I came here to post that exact list.

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