

Show HN: Badger.com is a brand new domain registrar (GoDaddy competitor) - badger_com
https://www.badger.com/#register/hackernews

======
caw
Original discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3397810>

Does HN find it acceptable to repost things like this? It's a slightly
different format (link vs no link), but it seems rather quick to be reposting.

~~~
pace
Yeah, you are right, it was rather too quick to repost—but hey that can happen
when founder are enthusiastic about their product. And their were tons of
redundant Godaddy SOPA posts—that can happen on a social news site, I am not
angry about the repost, maybe next time they should think about a new hook but
badger is a promising product with an awesome domain search—I tried it and I
like it. So before snitching them try the product once.

We are all founders and if there is one who might be a bit too spammy, too
pushy, too persisent, we flag, downvote him—we should hold together. Starting
something, especially a domain registrar isn't easy (and there is a need!) and
we should support every one of us.

Disclaimer: I've nothing to do with badger, I don't know them

~~~
caw
The question was more of an open one, of what's seen as allowable and what's
not. My post wasn't intended to be a snitch, it was more of a reference other
posts/responses about the same service.

I for one didn't see a problem in the repost. The format is different (the
other really only showed up under "ask", and this is on the main page), and
badger said they removed the invite only, which is definitely a milestone on
releasing a product. I'm glad they reposted without 'SOPA' in the title; I for
one was starting to ignore that word on HN.

Congratulations to Badger for creating a new registrar. I'm sure there were a
lot of hurdles to jump through.

------
ceejayoz
"How we're different" gives me a 404 JS alert.

 _edit:_ The GoDaddy SSL cert you're using is a little ironic.

~~~
stevelosh
First link I clicked on, got a JS "404" popup, immediately closed the page.

------
ernestipark
A domain registrar's primary focus on the homepage should be a big form with
the ability to type in domains and check their availability. It's not clear
that search bar is to find domains. There should be TLDs at the end of the
form to make it clear.

------
seldo
While I admire your enthusiasm, the last thing an experienced web developer
wants is a "brand new" domain registrar. The primary aspect you want in your
registrar is longevity, because transferring domains is a huge pain in the
neck. GoDaddy gets business just by virtue of having been around for so long,
thus indicating it's not going to be another disaster like RegisterFly.

Obviously everybody has to start somewhere, but if you're brand new, focus on
increasing consumer confidence through things like service guarantees and
offering long-term contracts.

~~~
badger_com
We have been using the term "brand new" as a way to show that we're trying to
approach the domain industry a bit differently than our 5-10 year old
competitors. I think the biggest example is that we've open sourced our
javascript frontend (<http://github.com/badger/frontend>) which exclusively
uses our API (<http://badger.github.com/>). We think the domain industry is
ripe for disruption and we think we have the right team and ideas to execute.

As you pointed out though we don't have a proven track record. Unfortunately,
there's not a lot we can do about that. Service guarantees and long-term
contracts might seem nice on the surface but wouldn't really change much if we
went out of business. I believe the quote goes something like: "The only two
things guaranteed in life are death and taxes. (Benjamin Franklin)"

That said, we're a startup in San Francisco with an office and employees and
have been around for over a year. We previously were a domain reseller
(rhinonames.com) but have spent the last six months becoming ICANN accredited
and building badger.com. We think we can build the best registrar around and
we're here to stay.

~~~
pork
That's very enthusiastic and I applaud it, but could you perhaps provide some
more substance beyond an open source frontend. How can we use the API? What
benefits do you think exposing an API would provide? What are the capabilities
of your API, etc.?

------
mgkimsal
good to see more competition. I agree with the other criticisms here, and
would add there's nothing about pricing on the site anywhere I can find.

It seems badger is .com and .net only? promote that up front so I don't waste
time.

I hope this wasn't put together solely as a "screw godaddy" anti-SOPA thing. I
suspect it wasn't, as I'd imagine icann accreditation would take more than a
few days, but the "godaddy competitor" in the title makes me think otherwise.
Or maybe this is just good pr-timing?

------
desireco42
I appreciate your sentiment with this, and want to be supportive, but it takes
more then landing page to be domain registrar. I think you should work on this
some more before showing anything. See other comments on what to improve.

~~~
badger_com
We've been working on this non-stop for six months... it's not just a landing
page. We are are a fully functional ICANN accredited registrar. We offer
domain registration/transfers, DNS hosting, WHOIS privacy, email forwarding,
url forwarding, etc.

------
BiosElement
I look forward to seeing where this goes. ^_^

------
nvictor
All the domain registration thing aside, that's a blazing fast web design.
Kudos to the developers!

