GoDaddy ends support for Ruby as of 23/01/2014 | Hacker News Reader

2014

support.godaddy.com

44 pointspothibo56 comments

Hi everyone, Product Manager from GoDaddy here. A lot of you have made the correct assumption. We simply host very few Ruby sites. We are radically improving our hosting, and with all the great offerings like Heroku (kicks ass) it doesn't make much sense to continue to invest in what will be a less than great user experience for Ruby developers. I'm happy to answer any more questions here!

You're keeping PHP support because you like elephants, right?

While I'm not a GoDaddy fan by any stretch, I think it's pretty cool that you're stepping up here to answer questions.

Thanks! I joined GoDaddy 6 months ago, and although 7 months ago I would have laughed if you told me I would be working at GoDaddy, the company is undergoing a remarkable transition with new leadership. We are becoming hyper customer focused and making our products world class.

I know the organization is changing, may I respectfully suggest that you suggest someone take a look at this language on the web site?

Like a Stanford dorm room on steroids, our Sunnyvale office is 40,000 square-feet of Bay Area badassery, brimming with some of the biggest brains on the planet, dreaming up digital masterpieces and keeping time in agile sprints

Because... yuck. I get what you're going for, but I'm sure you can do better.

http://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/about-godaddy.aspx?ci=9079

Thanks for the feedback. We can always do better :) I'll make sure it get to the right people.

Can you make the login popup on your website compatible with chrome password autofill? It used to be, but the new popup login thing broke it.

That's too bad, sorry that broke. I'll get it over to the right team. We're launching a dramatically improved front of site experience soon so it might be fixed in that release.

Ok. Either you fixed it, or I am stupid. But it seems to work now. Either way thanks!

I assume this doesn't affect MediaTemple accounts at all?

That is correct. This only impacts GoDaddy hosting accounts.

Any chance you can clean up the UI on the domain management and purchase order flow? It's a mess.

Yes.. I hate how clicking on "edit" in the zone file brings up a new window.

Hey... I'm a dev over at GoDaddy. While that area isn't my direct area of development, I work with those guys -- we're cleaning all that stuff up very dramatically. I think you'll be pleased...

Maybe this is just broad stereotype, but I don't see a huge overlap in "Ruby people" and "GoDaddy people"

Yeah, it seems actually a good sign to the ruby community.

My thoughts exactly. Most people cringe at using GoDaddy as a registrar.

Using them for hosting your site? Double-cringe.

Yep - any site I've seen hosted on GoDaddy is LAMP or just plain HTML/CSS/JS. I had to do some LAMP work on a site hosted on GoDaddy and it was pretty annoying to configure, with poor support. I can't imagine any Rails developer using them for hosting over Heroku, etc - so if Rails is maybe 1% of their hosted sites, they might save money by not having to support it.

I'm a PM at GoDaddy. The number of Ruby sites we host that I last heard was far less than 1% even.

Ok, naive question, what would make one registrar better or worse than another. They all do the same thing, no?

They don't all kill elephants for fun.

The user experience of buying domains through GoDaddy is very grating. They try to upsell and tack on services and features literally every step of the way. If all you want is a registrar, there are less annoying competitors at basically equal prices.

Quality of user experience: Can I register a domain without being bombarded for ads for other add-on crap?

Social responsibility: Am I supporting a company that relies on horrible and sexist and demeaning ads to get attention?

Social cachet: Would I be embarrassed to have people find out who I was using for my domains/hosting? It may be shallow, but working with GoDaddy looks as sophisticated as having an @aol.com email address.

Features like: Locking. Ease of transfers in and out. Properly authorizing requests for changes. Customer record privacy. Providing their own zone hosting. Not injecting evil wildcards/redirects. Supporting more than the basic record types when hosting the zones.

I'm sure there are other things that could be added.

The fact that this question is being asked illustrates that the Godaddy hate in the tech community is not as strong as some would think (hope?)

As the person who asked: I do in house database programming, so while I am aware of GoDaddy (they are the biggest registrar, no?), I wouldn't know what to expect differently from one registrar over another, as I don't use them. I registered a domain for my Mum's business over ten years ago, but haven't used a registrar since.

I transferred a domain from Godaddy to Namecheap last week. 33% cheaper and don't charge extra to keep my home address private.

My experience may have differed from yours.

In my experience a few years ago the process of transferring away from GoDaddy took as long and was as complicated as it possibly could be by law. Like absolute limit. If they were able to send me harassing emails before the transfer was completed, they did. Link bating with anti-agreements. I stuck it out for months jumping through every hoop they raised because I wanted to transfer away that badly. Maybe things have improved.

I hate GoDaddy.

GoDaddy actively pushed terrible SOPA legislation http://godaddyboycott.org/

Their past ad campaigns have been very trashy and sexist as well.

Their pricing is higher than other registrars, unless you play their discount/coupon games.

GoDaddy supported SOPA, their advertising campaigns are notoriously sexist, their CEO once posted a "white man's burden" video of him "saving some poor Africans" by killing an elephant, and they're constantly in the news for sleazy anti-consumer business tactics that add up to an awful, socially irresponsible corporation.

They've since recanted their SOPA support, but I think it'll take more than a calculated business move to regain any consumer trust. Personally, I'd advise being familiar with the organizations that have ever supported SOPA, and cutting ties with them for any future endeavors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_offi...

Here are some previous mentions of GoDaddy/SOPA on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393477

SOPA Was the biggest misstep for me, and was the breaking point for me to migrate all my domains elsewhere. I ended up at Namecheap because I liked the way they addressed the situation.

I'm a Rails dev and use GD for all my domains and most of my SSL certs. The service and UI has actually improved drastically in the past months.

But, yeah, I wouldn't use them for hosting anything.

Holy god don't recommend people to use GD until you've at least tried a competitor yourself.

Exactly, I mentioned further down that their ruby customers are probably made up of people with very little experience. So these customers are probably characterised by quite low spend and very high support costs since they're still quite new to it.

This is making the assumption that only someone who was quite new to Ruby (and development in general) would use GoDaddy for hosting.

Michael Hartl's immensely popular Railstutorial.org was registered thru GoDaddy. (Definitely doesn't use them for hosting though, as per http://builtwith.com/railstutorial.org)

I'm a PM at GoDaddy and can verify that the number of Ruby sites we host is extremely low. There are a lot of great Ruby offerings (Heroku kicks ass) so we are focusing resources to be really great at fewer things.

> Rails version 1.1.6 is supported in the default directory

So yes, I doubt anyone is still using GoDaddy for Rails hosting.

This is hilarious:

"If you have Java enabled for your hosting account, it will conflict with Rails."

"Currently, Rails version 1.1.6 is supported in the default directory, while Rails 2.2.2 is considered an alternate "development" environment"

etc...

Yeah, I mean, that's not really "supporting" Rails in any meaningful sense to start with, so its hardly significant that they are ending "support".

This is like someone breaking up with you on Facebook when you left them 2 years ago hahaha. I think we'll get through this tough time! sniff

I dunno. This is probably better for both communities. Better to offer no support than offer terrible support anyway.

We (GoDaddy) agree. We are radically improving our hosting and focusing on fewer areas helps.

Maybe this post exists only to convince us that there actually are Ruby devs using GoDaddy. Never underestimate the value of counter-intel!

I had the pleasure of trying to get a Rails site running on GoDaddy, primarily because my client had already purchased their hosting plan. This was circa 2009, and it was the first and last time I'd ever attempt such a thing.

I don't really blame GoDaddy, since their shared hosting infrastructure is just not built for long-running processes. For rails, CGI is laughably slow, and FastCGI, while faster, still wasn't performant enough and was causing intermittent 500 errors.

I ended up converting the entire project to static HTML (getting rid of the rails CMS component) and it was smooth sailing from there. Thankfully the client required very few updates to the site after that (otherwise I might have tried to move it onto Drupal or something).

It seems like a lot of the ruby community would use PAaS solutions. Even if they wanted to run their own server It's highly unlikely that they would be using a shared godaddy server. Not really that big of a deal.

Even if they wanted a shared server, I suspect that the number of people who'd want a shared server with primary support for Rails 1 and alternate, "development" support for Rails 2 is vanishingly small.

Feels like GoDaddy tried desperately to gain mind-share of ruby/rails developers, realised it was costing more than it was making and hence shutting it down.

"GoDaddy ends support for Clojure as of null"

Yet another sign that Ruby's popularity is waning.

Ruby's popularity is pretty irrelevant to using it as a tool. It's incredibly well-supported, and there's talent for it abound.

My guess would be it's more that no experienced Ruby developer would use GoDaddy for hosting. So most people they've got using it are probably inexperienced people (on that basis if you had experience, you'd use something like Heroku) who would probably be characterised by low spend and high support costs.

You are absolutely correct (I'm a PM at GoDaddy). There are some terrific Ruby hosting offerings (personally, I love Heroku) so we are focusing on being great at a few things. We've come a long way in the past 6 months with our hosting performance, but still have a ways to go.

Was not expecting a comments from someone at GoDaddy here, appreciate the response.

I suspect the downvoters need to have more of a sense of humor.

Yeah, I don't know what's most predictable about some Hacker News readers, the fact that they are in love with Ruby or that they are not good at detecting sarcasm.

I concur. Now that I use Ansible, it's been a long time since I touched anything Ruby.

My life is better for it too, I felt really agitated every time I had to touch Ruby code.

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