How GoDaddy Acquired and Dismantled a Successful Startup | Hacker News Reader

How GoDaddy Acquired and Dismantled a Successful Startup

sitebuilderreport.com

Not that this isn't abhorrent behavior, and not that GoDaddy isn't a terrible company anyway, but this isn't exactly uncommon. It happens every day, with the prototypical example of this sort of thing is General Motors:

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

Sure, GoDaddy is evil, but how is this different than any startup that Google/Facebook/Twitter etc. acquires and kills?

Not directly related but one of the happiest days of my life was the day I transferred my last domain away from GoDaddy.

Who did you transfer out to? When SOPA was the rage, I looked into transferring my domains out from Godaddy, but was unable to find a better domain registrar.

Really? Nearly everyone I've dealt with has been better. Name.com is my go to right now.

Name.com's nameservers had a huge outage that lasted about an hour a few months back now.

That's not the bad part.

The nameservers didn't just go down, they were misconfigured and were serving the incorrect records for all of our ~140 domains. They were resolving to some totally unrelated address we'd never seen before. And not with a 0 TTL.

Before emailing to ask about an issue they already knew about, I looked for their service status dashboard... They don't have one. I checked their Twitter and other social media... No mention of the issue.

To date they haven't released any information on what happened that I'm aware of. When I contacted them directly and asked them what had happened and asked if there was to be a post-mortem released, their response was simply that it was a "configuration error" and they couldn't give me any details about what had happened or what they're doing to mitigate it, but I had their word that it would never happen again.

As a registrar they've been decent (lots of issues trying to get some registrant info updated on our .CA domains...).

I would absolutely recommend someone more transparent for nameserver hosting however.

Namecheap. No frills, simple interface. No upsells. Customer service has been excellent so far.

Far and away Namecheap. They've been fantastic to work with.

Dynadot was also pretty good, though it doesn't have the community goodwill that Namecheap has been actively cultivating.

GoDaddy is one of the worst. My current go to is Namecheap but I've also recently used MyDomain and Hover, all are much better.

I've been happy with EasyDNS for domain registration and I use a couple of other places for my hosting.

I believe the general view is that better to have your domain registrar separate from your hosting provider. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than myself can speak to that.

Another vote from a happy customer of Namecheap.

I wish they supported DNSSEC, but it's not that big of a deal. I've been super happy with all of the rest of their services.

Did you|anyone expect anything else from GoDaddy?

I do occasional WEB consulting and I warn clients that I have to charge extra if they are hosting any of their resources at Godaddy.

Every time i need to interact with their resources to do anything productive - it is a minefield of upsells at every step and wasted time trying to find simple things.

I had the opportunity to interact with some of the new execs at GoDaddy and the culture was definitely shifting. But Virb's numbers just couldn't compare to GoDaddy's own site builder. Virb was a drop in the bucket compared to the user base they already had.

Surely this should be why GoDaddy acquired and killed....

The mechanics are simple, and obvious. GoDaddy buys an upstart with money, kills it be starving it of resources.

Whats more interesting is why it would do such a thing. To acquire a company and kill it takes a lot of time and effort. It must have been either a great threat, or have assets worth spending money on.

This isn't an uncommon practice. However its less common in the world of startups, mainly because no one runs at a profit, they can't afford to spend valuable run time capital killing a competitor.

Autodesk and Avid are the masters of the buy and kill.

Did you read the article?

GoDaddy never set out to acquire Virb. It just happened to. This is more of a story about the messiness of acquisitions than any kind of dark, malicious intentions by GoDaddy.

Yes,

but sorry, no one spunks out millions of dollars to get a happy accident. There are months of wranglings, negotiations, covenants drawn up, targets created.

Granted Virb might have been collateral, but thats the point of my question. Why, was it lack of interest, did it cost to much to develop?

I work for Autodesk via a buyout of Creative Market, and Autodesk has been amazing. Creative Market has existed within Autodesk and is thriving.

Softimage & naiad would beg to differ.

Plus Max isn't fairing to well either...

After my favourite invoicing solution roninapp.com got bought out by GoDaddy, I was forced to use their inferior Bookkeeping product!!! Never again!!!

What is infuriating is that Virb still lives under the MediaTemple umbrella. I'm sure MediaTemple loves having a good as dead product in their product lineup.

I had no idea Media Temple was now owned by GoDaddy. Makes me glad I never used them.

Random sidenote: wasn't Virb originally a side project from PureVolume?

Yup! I used to work for PureVolume, then Virb, and then Media Temple via acquisitions. Crazy world.

So, any idea of how much Virb was sold for to Media Temple?

I don't think that's publicly known. This was an article written around the time of the acquisition but it doesn't state any prices: http://www.businessinsider.com/virbcom-the-myspace-killer-th...

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