I got my domains on GoDaddy because it's cheap, easy, and didn't seem important enough to invest time into. I'll be moving them off GoDaddy now. Even if small boycotts didn't accomplish anything (which I don't believe), I would move my domains on principle.
God, that attitude is just so woefully irresponsible, or something.
"I was lazy." My only question is, was it "I'm lazy and I've ignored every single 'GoDaddy punched me and stole my lunch' post on HN", or was it "I'm lazy and just hoped it wouldn't happen to me, like every person who posted their horror story on HN thought"?
Come on, if you're going to downvote me this quickly, tell me why I'm wrong. We're really going to accept "it was easy" and "I didn't feel like exuding effort" as excuses when GoDaddy has a well documented history of screwing business owners over? Or am I just supposed to believe that them supporting SOPA is so much worse than the callus attitude they have about a fairly important resource it terms of... you know, keeping your website available to the whole world.
ITT: We don't care that we're regularly told that GoDaddy is bad and bad for startups, but we're outraged enough to fight a political proxy war that we'll move our domains. Please, help me understand this. The "rage" here is that SOPA will effectively yield DNS censorship in the United States. GoDaddy has, on more than one occasion, taken it upon themselves to censor the DNS of domains for the entire world, yet I am crucified for pointing out that THAT alone is worthy of ditching them as a registrar? Again, please help me understand this, because it doesn't make a lick of sense to me.
I have yet to meet anyone in person who has had a bad experience with acquiring a domain through GoDaddy. I've used them for a few years now and have no negative experiences to report.
However, I moved my hosting from GoDaddy to EC2 some time ago because I couldn't get the customization I needed from them. After their voiced support for SOPA, however, I'll no longer be registering/renewing my domains through them.
Most of those posts are related strictly to hosting issues. Websites going down and whatnot. That's a complete non-issue for me as I simply use GoDaddy to purchase domains on the cheap.
Not everyone's experience with GoDaddy has been negative. Personally, I wouldn't trust it with a critical website, but if I had a personal website, I'd definitely consider using it. It's cheap, and sometimes that's an individual's number one priority. It may not be yours, but humor the rest of us for a moment.
They're not even that cheap (namecheap and gandi are competitive, especially with their feature sets), and again that's missing my point.
GoDaddy is cheap, SOPA or not. If you take a moral stand because of SOPA... why wouldn't you have taken a moral stand previously based on their voluntary, unilateral, world-wide censorship of domains. Look, I dislike SOPA and I dislike GoDaddy but this sense of "moral outrage" is just misplaced in my opinion.
I'm not sure what sentiment I'm supposed to be humoring. "Cheap" (or lazy) is okay in the face of GoDaddy censoring domains themselves, but not in the face of a political fight about a bill that they happen to support that would let the US government censor domains? I guess my point is, I'm not surprised and I don't know why others are either.
How is that beside the point? They're a company that fit the bill for a service I needed. Knowing Wal Mart screwed people over on car repairs probably wouldn't stop me from buying produce there.
SOPA is something that could directly affect me, that's why I take a special interest in this. You might be surprised to learn that not a single one of those Hacker News stories directly affected my quality of life. That's why it is different to a lot of people.
More downvotes and no replies. Now nearing two dozens downvotes and not one person so confident as to downvote can waste 30 seconds to explain why I'm so horrendously wrong.
I'm just curious what would happen if it came out that Haliburton or Blackwater/Xi were in favor of SOPA. Then we can get some even more ironic "moral outrage" going.
1) I registered most of my domain names 5 or 6 ago and haven't bothered switching. I never had a problem with them personally and so I continued to use them. (I use them as a registrar, not as a host.)
2) I am not the most avid follower of HN and either never saw these stories or saw them and my eyes just glazed past them. I'm not interested in most stories here, not even about services that I use. Analogously, I use Gmail and don't read the horror stories about them anymore, but if Google were supporting SOPA I would probably switch from Gmail. I use AirBNB, didn't care about the silly meth head vandalism scandal that made every single top news story here, or various other criticisms, but would probably never use them again if they supported SOPA. etc.
3) Even if you don't buy the above, it still seems perfectly reasonable to be more offended by the support of SOPA than by the run-of-the-mill corporate incomptence that underlies most horror stories.
4) Complaining about downvotes is pretty lame, and I really can't tell if you're trolling or not, especially with a temporary account.
5) I can understand the sentiment that a self-fueling moralizing crowd is a distasteful thing to behold. But that's not an excuse to never agree with a boycott or take place in a collective action. Anyway, I don't think my original comment was particularly moralizing.
Thank you for taking the time. I would hope a second glance at my comments and account would indicate that I'm far from a "temporary" account.
That having been said, I understand your first two points, but I still find them to be irresponsible. I'm not saying that I've never done it, but to most people, their domain and availability are important parts of their brand and GoDaddy doesn't strike me as "competent" enough to be a risk I'd be willing to take with anything other than a site I really don't care about.
I know complaining about downvotes is in poor taste, I'm just shocked at the mob mentality that I expect at reddit taking over control of the discourse here. I think that your term "self-fueling moralizing crowd" is very apt, but I don't mean to imply that I'm against this boycott. I was really just speaking in defense of the OP of this trunk of the comments who was remarking that it's just a matter of perspective in reasons to avoid GoDaddy. Like I've said numerous times, I detest GoDaddy and SOPA and am in favor of any boycott that affects either.
The self aggrandizing morality stance in this thread is probably just getting to me more than I should be letting it.
I'd like to take the time and expand on what others have said. In particular, I was prompted by this bit: "to most people, their domain and availability are important parts of their brand..."
First, I think that's only true of competent web only companies. I really believe that most users are not really that concerned or interested in those technical details or the risks associated with using a less than competent registrar/hosting provider.
For many companies, availability is closely tied to cost, especially at smaller firms. And they are more than willing to sacrifice availability or not pay extra to be insured a certain level of availability. Additionally, for many companies their web presence is purely optional and not their primary means of generating profit. Availability is definitely not the most important thing.
In fact, I've seen more and more small companies shift to simply using Facebook instead of setting up their own page. They don't care about a custom domain the same way many technical users might care.
I guess my point is that the vast majority of people aren't really all that competent or interested on the workings of the internet. Nor are they interested in paying for high availability. This is GoDaddy's market.
If you search for any company name, you'll usually come across horror stories. That doesn't mean that people using that company are irresponsible.
Have you tried GoDaddy as a registrar? There's a lot of annoying upsell attempts involved, but as a registrar, they're pretty competent. Morally bankrupt, perhaps, but competent.
How can you call them "competent" when there have been half a dozen posts about GoDaddy screwing over HN customers that have used them as a domain registrar. What does it even mean to be "competent" as a registrar? They take your money and host your DNS? GoDaddy is really good at one of those things, and it's not the one that I'd consider important for competency.
And again, this has nothing to do with my point that everyone is conveniently trying to side step around. GoDaddy is still "cheap" and "competent" regardless of their feelings about SOPA, so why are we even talking about this.
My only point is that this "moral outrage" is hypocritical and backward. My comment about laziness was from someone who acknowledged that they ran with the publicized registrar instead of undertaking the extreme challenge of 5 minutes of Googling various registrars.
I have 2 pieces of information on which to make a decision regarding godaddy: my experience (including those people that I personally know), and the experiences reported in the "GoDaddy screwing over HN customers" posts. I've never had any problems. It's also impossible to know the overall customer satisfaction picture; customers with disaster problems are much more likely to be vocal than people with my experiences. I also have a full picture of my experiences; with the disaster posts, I don't know the full story.
Godaddy are such a small part of my concerns that I appreciate they're cheap and have always worked for me. Operating DNS/registration isn't exactly tough andI don't have too many requirements. GD meets those requirements.
Although I did not downvote you myself, I suspect the downvotes are because your comments appear unnecessarily confrontational.
