

GoDaddy issues free SSL certificates to OSS projects - iancarroll
https://www.godaddy.com/ssl/ssl-open-source.aspx

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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

~~~
tracker1
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.

~~~
cenhyperion
>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.

------
lolwutf
GoDaddy's plan was to use SOPA to give themselves a monopoly as a domain
registrar.

Don't forget it.

~~~
BummerCloud
Hyperbole.

[http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/24/godaddys-chief-sopa-
su...](http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/24/godaddys-chief-sopa-supporter-
christine-jones-running-for-arizona-governor/)

~~~
Osiris
The rumor internally is that she helped write the law and was trying to use it
as a way to gain political points for a potential future political career.

------
gdempl
I've worked happily at GoDaddy for years in Hosting and can say I don't get
caught up in the politics. What's good is millions of customers and thousands
of servers, which translates to plenty of development challenges. The
performance of hosting these days is actually really good. In the past it
might have been good or it might have been bad, just depended on whether you
landed on an overloaded server or not. It was never our intention to overload
servers, we simply grew faster than we knew how to maintain. Until we launched
a performance team to tackle this issue, and now the performance is really
good. Takes time for customers to recognize this. Performance is one of those
things most people don't notice unless it's bad.

The company's history has a few blunders, but there is also a lot of good -
millions donated to charities, thousands employed - creating jobs in a down
economy, great benefits, and from the inside, I can say, customers come first.
There has always been a do right by the customer mentality. For every poor
customer support story, there are a hundred positive ones, untold. I've liked
working at GoDaddy because the value of the product I help create is high.
This is no rip off, everyone wins and I can be proud of who I work for.

The new CEO and new executive leadership team are leading a great new vision
focused on helping small businesses kick-ass. It's really very moving and
makes me proud to work as developer at GoDaddy.

------
zxcvgm
Why would anyone use this when startssl.com issues free certs that are not
only limited to OSS projects?

See [https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for-
free?hn](https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for-free?hn) for a
walkthrough.

------
tyleregeto
GoDaddy should give free domain registrations to all the small businesses and
individuals they've taken advantage of over the years. Their website is still
deliberately confusing to trick less than tech-savy customers into spending
more than they need to.

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georgehaake
I'd rather pay.

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pera
CAcert.org issues free certs as well, though not every OS/browser have this CA
installed by default... it's a shame because they provide a nice service imo

[http://www.cacert.org/](http://www.cacert.org/)

------
rco8786
We all hate GoDaddy still, I get it. That said, this is actually a pretty
brilliant plan for them to begin to get back into the community's good graces.

~~~
kbar13
It's a pretty good plan if people STILL don't heed the advice of others to
stay the fuck away.

Even if you ignore the whole SOPA mess, and the scumbag CEO, and the shady
marketing techniques, all in all you still end up with shit service, which is
the thing you're trying to buy.

~~~
tracker1
Parsons hasn't been CEO or even an executive in the company for over a year
now iirc. Also, there's been a fair amount of effort to support FLOSS
(including contributing back to the community) as well as internal movement
away from proprietary solutions towards open-source software.

It's worth mentioning that I just joined GoDaddy a few months ago as an
employee, feeling a lot of the same concerns. Hosting really needs to get
their changes under way, I don't work in that area. I also have mixed feelings
about "sales and support" being the same people.

I will say the checkout isn't nearly as bad as it once was, and there's
movement to improve things.

As to the advertising, most of that's pretty much changed the past couple
years as well.

Don't get me wrong, for my own projects, I'm far more likely to use linode or
digital ocean if I'm hosting somewhere... I also feel that movement towards
things like docker.io are far better in terms of direction than a lot of
enterprise VM infrastructures being implemented. It takes time to change
course for an aircraft carrier.

If it weren't for a lot of the internal changes coming from the top down, I
would not be here at Go Daddy today.

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dibbsonline
Godaddy signs with a low exponent (3), so you might find you have to lower the
security on your app server (like we had to on weblogic)

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Osiris
Wow, did this really get flagged off the front page?

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uladzislau
Free first year - that's the catch.

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logjam
No thanks, GoDaddy is a slimy, incompetent organization.

