
While we have GoDaddy's attention - davewiner
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/27/whileWeveGotGodaddysAttent.html
======
thaumaturgy
(Sorry -- a little bit of crankiness ahead. I'll try to moderate my tone
accordingly.)

OK, I've flagged this. Not only are the GoDaddy articles on the front page
here getting out of hand, but this article adds literally _nothing_ to any
discussion anywhere. I'm sure the author is a wonderful and intelligent
person, but this particular article is completely useless.

In particular, I am completely underwhelmed by anybody that says they're
writing a blog post about a company "as a warning to others", or that "there
ought to be a consumer reports for ______". Here's the thing: there are
already a bajillion boo-hoo stories out there about GoDaddy. They have a
_terrible_ track record. (If someone is actively doing any business at all
with GoDaddy, I immediately have a clue about how long they've been in the
industry, and how deeply, and their level of expertise.)

But nobody bothers to do background research on companies like this! When this
guy went and decided to do business with GoDaddy, he obviously didn't bother
to read any of the other stuff online about them first. What good would a
Consumer Reports have done him? He'd've ignored it too! The people registering
35,000 domains on GoDaddy tomorrow also won't read his post, nor will they
likely read any of the other stuff out there about GoDaddy.

Instead, they'll think they've got an idea for something, say to themselves,
"I need to register a domain!", wonder how to go about that, Google it, and --
"Oh yeah, GoDaddy! They say they have great support! They say they're cheap!
And oh look, boobs! I've heard of them..."

I'm sorry you got ripped off by a company that ripped off thousands of other
people before you. Let this be a $5 lesson to do your homework next time. :-)

~~~
davewiner
Actually the piece wasn't so much a warning to others (I was actually
referring to another piece that did that, maybe you just skimmed my post and
missed that) as it was to say that backing off SOPA support wasn't enough.
That it was time for GoDaddy to change, the way other companies had changed,
from crisis.

I cited the example of how Johnson & Johnson reacted to the hacking of Tylenol
in the 80s. It's often cited as a textbook example of how to do it. They
instituted reforms, visible ones, that made it virtually impossible for their
product to be tampered with. No one demanded it of them, but they saw it as
the only way out of the mess. They had lost huge market share due to the
scare. But a year later they were right back on top, because they had re-
invested in their brand.

GoDaddy, like it or not, is the biggest registrar. And if they can reform
their service to get rid of the fraud (again, read the piece, I don't want to
rewrite it here) they can lead the rest of the registrar industry. Which is a
very important part of the open web. Which is part of a larger context wehere
more and more of the activity on the net is going into corporate-owned silos.

I think if you read the piece carefully and didn't shoot from the hip so much,
you'd see that you had mis-read. Probably due to skimming more than anything,
imho.

Also, to answer your implicit question -- I went with GoDaddy originally
because a lot of people I respected were using it, and I was paying $35 per
year at the registrar I was using, and could save a significant amount of
money using them. And further, at the time, there really wasn't much of an
alternative. Only now are "no nonsense" registrars coming on-line. The best of
which is hover.com, though I've used gandi.net and like them, also namecheap,
but I don't like how they're "marketing" using SOPA as a selling point. I like
that almost as little as GoDaddy thinking they can support SOPA without
pissing off their customers.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I did skim your article previously, so I just sat down with a big cup of tea
and re-read it more carefully, and as freshly as I could.

And I still stand by my earlier statements.

As you say, GoDaddy is the biggest registrar. They are already leading the
registrar industry; they just aren't leading it in the ways that we'd like
them to. They are wildly successful, by nearly every practical measure of a
business. They have absolutely no incentive to change.

This current PR flap isn't going to make them change, either. In 18 months,
nobody will even remember that this happened. I can feel pretty confident
about statements like that because GoDaddy has had really ugly PR issues in
the past -- though, admittedly, none of them as large as this one -- and most
of those aren't even included in the wikipedia page on GoDaddy, let alone the
hilariously short-term memories of people in the technology sector.

GoDaddy has been making transfers difficult ever since they opened their
doors; they were part of the whole domain tasting / frontrunning issue years
ago when there were multiple accusations that GoDaddy was leaking their domain
search information even as they were getting in a public fight with Network
Solutions over the practice; they've been up-selling customers as a business
strategy forever; they've been judge, jury, and executioner in domain
censorship since the very beginning; they have had a terrible track record in
the security of the servers and of their control panel system since the
beginning, a record that still continues even now; their website interface has
never ever looked decent; and Bob Parsons has been outspoken in his political
and moral repugnance for years.

Yet, you still did business with them.

I instead did business with Register4Less shortly after Network Solutions lost
exclusivity specifically because they promised not to do things that way, and
they've kept their promise. (It also helped that they supported Illiad back
when UserFriendly was a daily read.) You complain about the amount you were
paying to another registrar, but R4L has been about $14/year since shortly
after they opened. I can no longer recommend them because they've made some
serious technical errors recently and haven't updated their software or their
business in a long time. But, it is really really wrong to say that "no
nonsense" registrars are "only now" coming on-line.

You just didn't know about them.

So, that's why I'm really skeptical that your blog post is going to have any
impact whatsoever on GoDaddy's business. I think that the current PR mess for
GoDaddy speaks more to Reddit's considerable influence than anything else.
While I hope that this ends up being the papercut that kills GoDaddy -- and
I'll celebrate with a steak dinner the day that they die -- I just don't think
they're going to change, because they don't have to, because people don't
bother to look closely enough at the history of companies that they choose to
do business with.

Tylenol in the 80's is a poor example to bring to your position. That
(overblown) problem involved child safety at a time when "think of the
children" was just becoming a cultural disease in the U.S., and the FDA or
other regulatory bodies might have become involved.

I wonder if Fyodor now regrets selling NoDaddy to GoDaddy...

~~~
davewiner
Well, I can't respond to all this, but I did think you should read about the
seven people who were _killed_ by Tylenol.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders>

So far I don't think anyone has been killed by SOPA.

Something to think about.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Absolutely no disrespect intended, but Tylenol is still a non-sequitur. Would
you rather discuss them or GoDaddy?

------
dlsspy
...we've lost our focus on the real problem.

This isn't internic. It's just a company in a commodity market whose service
and policies people seem to dislike, but are about as far from a monopoly as
you can get. They are relevant because we keep talking about them.

~~~
guelo
GoDaddy, like a bunch of other giant non-monopoly companies such as banks,
cable co's, phone companies, etc. steal from their customers with fraudulent
nickle and dime charges. Happens all the time and it collectively costs
consumers billions of dollars a year. I'm confused by what your objection is
with a prominent blogger pointing this out. Should people just keep quiet and
let other customers be defrauded?

~~~
rglullis
What the GP means is that the domain registrar business is what Scott Adams
calls a "confusopoly". Just like banks and telco companies, registrars know
that they can't compete on price alone, so instead they convolute their
products and offerings as much as possible just to make it _look_ as
differentiation, but the main purpose is to make sure that the customer has no
way to objectively compare two companies.

As much as people are talking about GoDaddy and namecheap lately, no one
managed to find a _cheap registrar_. Consumer opinion will always mention
quality of support or the political stance of one company or another, but not
one single soul managed to show me one registrar that has low prices for
domain registration _and_ renewal _and_ SSL certificates. It's always one or
the other.

~~~
eropple
Namecheap's $10 for a domain, $10 for a renewal, and has single-domain Comodo
certs for $8.95 (wildcard certs for $89, which isn't the cheapest but is below
average).

I'm pretty sure that's a "cheap registrar".

~~~
rglullis
And yet, if you go to GoDaddy, you can find domain names for $1.99 _, and
transfers for $7.99.

With namecheap, they list as $10, but you can get the price even lower and use
the code "SOPASucks"_*

* Conditions apply. __Conditions also apply.

All of these "conditions apply" kind of makes the point of my argument. For
every $8.95 cert offer, there is another offer where you get a free cert by
purchasing the domain name, or by transferring from some competitor, or by
renewing some existing domain.

It is a true confusopoly. These schemes to extract more money from consumers
may be slightly more or less scammy, but ALL domain registrars engage in these
practices.

The sad part of it is that in the end, I don't know if I'd be better off being
scammed into paying an extra $4/month for some service I'm not using, or being
"socially conscious" and paying more to a company that does not pull these
tricks, but that can only keep itself in business by charging higher prices.

~~~
eropple
I don't think you're using "cheap registrar" in the same way as I would think
most people would. $10 is cheap. It's a lunch. If you are hunting for "the
best deal," it is virtually guaranteed that you're eventually going to get
burned at some point or another. Find a registrar who's not breaking the bank
and who doesn't act like a dick to you, and stick with 'em. Your confusion
seems self-inflicted.

(Namecheap actually does give you a free $8.95-level SSL cert with a domain
registration.)

~~~
rglullis

      1) Go to namecheap home-page.
      2) Try to find out how much it costs to *renew* a domain  after the first year.
      3) Realize that they are also not the masters of clarity and transparency.
    

No domain registrar is willing to compete on price (or premium services)
alone. Not one of them is willing to put a simple price table on their front-
page, and stick to it. There is always some coupon or bundled offer (can I get
a discount if I don't want a SSL cert?) or volume discount, or reduction on
the new ".yagni" TLD...

After all that, people just do what you say and "stick with someone who
doesn't act like a dick to them". But that doesn't mean that the general
confusion isn't there. Quite the contrary: it is working so well that you
don't even notice it.

What I want is a domain registrar version of <http://prgmr.com/xen/>

------
pbreit
Would it kill Dave to tell us the name of the add-on service in question?

~~~
davewiner
I linked to it from that piece. Here it is again, to save you the trouble of
going back to the post.

[http://scripting.com/images/2011/10/26/goDaddyConfirmation.g...](http://scripting.com/images/2011/10/26/goDaddyConfirmation.gif)

~~~
pbreit
My bad.

------
larrys
As a competitor of godaddy's that charges what some, no actually most, believe
is an exorbitant rate for domains (compared to godaddy) we hear every day from
people who want to know why we charge what we do. Why? Because we don't sell
you things you don't need and lure you in with low pricing, loss leaders or
bait and switch.

Here's some background. Each and every registrar, whether they are selling
1000 domains a year or a million pays exactly the same for .com/net/ domains.
The variable cost is identical and essentially set by Verisign/PIR/Afilias and
ICANN. As much as large registrars want you to believe they make it up on
volume that isn't what's going on. They are selling you extra services and
things that you don't need. There is simply no way to make money in domains at
the prices out there unless you do that. It's that simple. Now I'm not even
talking about the pre checked boxes that Dave is referring to. I'm just
talking about taking advantage of people who don't understand what they need
and what they should buy. (Like getting privacy protection on a domain used in
a business as only one example under the guise of protecting you against spam
and protecting privacy!). Or worthless cctld's

Now of course there is nothing new about this. It's similar to many things in
technology. Such as selling a computer and making people think they need a
large fast processor even if the are only surfing the web or using the
computer for email (as only one example).

(Note: On .org and .info PIR/Afilias sometimes run rebates if a registrar
exceeds a certain level of domains from the previous year or time period. But
as everyone knows the bulk of domains are .com)

~~~
NerdUno
Sorry to disagree, but we've used omnis.com for years with comparable pricing
to GoDaddy and no upselling attempts ever!

~~~
larrys
Just tried to start a registration at Omnis and they immediately try to sell
domain privacy protection at .99 per month. That's almost $12 per year!

"Add Domain Name Privacy Protection for $0.99 a month? Domain Name Privacy
Protection will STOP spammers, telemarketers, and identity theft criminals
from gaining access to your contact information. Without Domain Name Privacy
Protection, your contact information is available to the public."

Spammers? Use a gmail account for the email.

Telemarketers? I have thousands of domain names all using the same phone
number and rarely receive a telemarketing call (not saying this can't happen
of course). If you're worried about that get a google voice phone number.

"identity theft criminals"? Totally playing on fear (especially considering
many people have their contact info on their website.) And you can always use
another address in your whois as well w/o paying for privacy protection.

So in other words they are willing to make .95 total per year for the base
domain but want to charge close to $12 per year for something that essentially
has no base cost? That's my point exactly.

But of course if you are well informed and fully know what you are getting by
reading beyond the marketing speak of course you can save money (as you can by
knowing the ropes with anything.)

Also you can verify this but I don't believe that Omnis gives free web and
email forwarding which would require you to buy a hosting plan unless you were
knowledgeable enough to know how to get around this.

------
georgieporgie
Assuming the author submitted this, the sentence starting with "On what planet
is a customer" appears to be a fragment.

~~~
davewiner
Might not be the best contructed sentence, but it's a complete one. "On what
planet is a customer, expressing a very clear wish, asking you to do something
for them."

~~~
georgieporgie
But it doesn't make any sense. It's like a final clause was left off.

~~~
davewiner
As with most other things, it probably makes a bit more sense if you read the
other sentences around it. In any case my apologies for writing awkward (and
to some confusing) prose.

~~~
georgieporgie
"On what planet is a customer, expressing a very clear wish, asking you to do
something for them."

That doesn't make any sense on its own. Expressing a clear wish for customer
service to do something _is_ asking them to do something for you.

The preceding two sentences appear to establish that you did ask them to
remove it for you:

 _It wasn't so much that I had the charge, but that it was almost impossible
to get them to remove it. I got in contact with their support people and they
said I had to do it myself, they couldn't do it "for" me._

The following four sentences further establish that you were asking them to do
something for you:

 _That's what you get paid for. To do things on my behalf. Hopefully you make
enough money. If not, you should just charge more, not do these horrible
ripoffs._

So, the sentence in question makes no sense.

~~~
davewiner
Let's say you win and a consensus emerges that "the sentence in question makes
no sense." What then?

~~~
georgieporgie
Are you kidding? I assume you're the author. Why wouldn't you fix it?

Really, how can that sentence possibly make sense as it stands? I tried to
provide constructive criticism and received only downvotes and a snide
dismissal with no explanation of how it could possibly be correct.

