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Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

I see SourceForge as being to code hosting platforms as GoDaddy is to domain registrars. They both started in the late 90s, exploded, and suffered from their success. They became infested with bad management, became bloated and difficult to use, and employed skeezy money-making tactics. GoDaddy doesn't seem to be in trouble the way SourceForge is, though.

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Honestly, I don't see how they aren't in trouble yet. With how long GoDaddy has been around, and how dominant they are in terms of "casual" domain owners, it blew me away when I saw that they have yet to be profitable a single year.

However Amazon isn't profitable either -- never has been.

True, however Amazon has been constantly investing in new warehouses, infrastructure, adding new products, expanding their current offerings, etc.

I can't think of a single unique or new thing GoDaddy has done in the past 10 years.

They do have lots of fancy ads.

A lot of sexist ads as well.

Who the hell cares? Instead of "posting profits", Amazon reinvests its massive EBITDA into itself, and has shown continuous growth because of it.

Not focusing on shareholders sounds great to me.

False. Amazon had positive net income in 2011 and 2013 of $631 and $274 million respectively.

Asset increase yoy is pretty ridiculous.

As a customer of both GoDaddy and Namecheap, I have to say that GoDaddy offers a much better, more full-featured DNS control panel. Frankly, I can't see staying with Namecheap.

I really don't get the hate for GoDaddy. SourceForge, OTOH, are reprehensible.

A free CloudFlare account allows unlimited domain DNS services and their 'control panel' is clean and straight forward.

Unlike GoDaddy their only upsell is for their paid CDN services.

You can use the GoDaddy dns manager (dns.godaddy.com) without having your domain registered there. I use it because it's a much more robust DNS manager. You can manage your external domains with it.

> I really don't get the hate for GoDaddy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoDaddy#Controversies

What are the specific concerns with GoDaddy? I've been using them only as a domain registrar, and, well, they do register my domains.. I didn't know there were issues of the same magnitude as with SourceForge. What registrar do you use?

I used to work there. People complain that they use deceptive practices, like a low intro rate and then very high cost automatic renewals. About 3-4 years ago they were bought by some private equity firms and they have been in the process of basically rewriting all their products. I was involved in a one year full rewrite which was later scrapped in favor of reselling Office 365 instead.

>>> People complain that they use deceptive practices,

The last company I worked for had all of their public domains registered through them. The funny thing they figured out was if they registered for a domain or a service, they would get all the way through the order, then wait a day before processing.

Like clockwork, the next day the sys admins would get a 30% off coupon for the stuff they had just started to sign up for the previous day.

It was an easy way to game the system, and made you wonder how over priced their stuff really was.

GoDaddy doesn't make money on domains. They make money on the auxiliary services like email, hosting, etc.

Actually, it sounds like GoDaddy simply doesn't make money.

"The company lost $143 million last year. Granted that's less than the $200 million it lost in 2013, and the $279 million lost in 2012 -- but GoDaddy admits it hasn't turned a profit since 2009..."[1]

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-ipo-to-value-company-at...

The 1.5 billion in debt is sort of brutal too. Either way, not my favorite provider. (I admit bias though, as I run a competing hosting co.)

Interesting. As someone from the industry, which other companies would you recommend?

I regularly see Name.com, Namecheap, and Gandi as answers here.

https://dnsimple.com/

I'm a happy customer, and I also used to work with the founder, Anthony Eden. He's a great guy, and so is the product.

DNSimple is amazing, and we do our reselling on SimplyBuilt.com through them.

internet.bs

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