-Some ~40% (stupid pie chart) don't have an SSL cert, but almost all have login/registration page (4 out of 4 that I randomly picked had a login/registration page)
-So many people use GoDaddy as a registrar (they were horrible before SOPA)
-That startups use AWS despite its poor cost/performance
I can address two of those points (one for my company and another for YC companies in general):
- SSL: We're on that list as HireHive.com, which had a login and used to have an SSL cert, however, we shut it down (i.e., it just redirects now) and now run Hackruiter.com and HackerSchool.com, where our cert is now. We never had logins online without a proper cert. The data from OP is wrong.
- So many YC companies use Amazon because Amazon gives large cash credits to YC companies meaning it's effectively free to use for the first couple years. Also, many of us are built on services built on AWS (e.g., we use Dotcloud).
It's worth noting that the people hosting on Heroku have been lumped into the AWS stats. Which is even more expensive performance wise, but has added benefits over self maintained servers.
Not sure about now, but for the summer 2010 batch, Amazon handed out a good chunk of AWS credits (enough to cover the hosting costs of most early stage startups for a while).
You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost.
I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.
You can rent 20 AWS on-demand large instances for less money than a junior engineer. If you don't need a lot of machines and AWS saves you any time at all over dedicated hosting, then it's worth it.
I'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it.
Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.
what's horrible about GoDaddy? I used them for domain registration and DNS hosting, and everything went smoothly. The only annoying part, is how they try to sell additional goodies along the domain registration.
the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)
Someone posted MySpace passwords to Full-Disclosure, which therefore made it into several list archives. MySpace complained, and GoDaddy suspended the domain name of an extremely well-known archive, apparently without any investigation or contact: http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0. This was eventually cleared up, but WTF?
the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)
If that's what makes you choose a registrar then you need to seriously grow up. Attitudes like this are why we have so many problems with sexism in the tech world.
That's because you're probably looking at things purely from a technical/operational perspective (i.e. can they register my domain easily), whereas the parent commenter is taking into account more general reports about the way GoDaddy does business.
Just because a company is technically competent doesn't mean people want to do business with them.
any advice for an alternative registrar with free DNS hosting? Preferably one with native IPv6 reachable DNS servers (which is not the case at godaddy)
Gandi http://www.gandi.net/ has a pretty good reputation, with free DNS hosting. No IPv6 reachable nameservers, however. If you want IPv6 reachable DNS servers, Hurricane Electric offers free DNS hosting https://dns.he.net/; they are a big supporter of IPv6 and so offer a variety of free services to help get it off the ground.
thanks, I'll give Gandi a try with my next domain. I am using some free services from Hurricane Electric, particularly an IPv6 tunnel and also a dynamic DNS after dyndns.com pissed me off.
for production domains, I would still prefer a DNS hosting that is somehow paid for (with godaddy it was included in the registration price).
They were. I've dealt with them on one occasion (had one client insist on using them as a host/registrar), and they are technically incompetent. We've had numerous outages with this client's site, and had one problem that their technical support staff were simply unable to solve after numerous phone calls (they ended up blaming it on the site, which was running on WordPress - hardly an oddity). It ended up being a very simple problem/solution, which I discovered after spending an hour or so researching it.
Is the data collection methodology described somewhere? I'm questioning the accuracy given an error on our data (GoDaddy is not our registrar, namecheap is).
It's also a bit suspect that namecheap is not listed as anyone's registrar after so many fled GoDaddy for namecheap a few weeks back.
OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output?
I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar.
I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.
To everyone amazed by the various suboptimal decisions that startups make, think of it this way: the easiest, most straightforward solution is always the best one until it's more costly than some alternative.
I'd rather have my team working on product than researching domain registrars or hosts, since the odds of your registrar having a meaningful impact on your company's success are very low. Thus "just grab a big box on Rackspace" or "Namecheap is fine, just get it done".
I'm glad you mention this because that was the basically the motivation for me to build this tool in the first place. I was selecting a DNS host for the startup I was at and was wondering: "what DNS host do all my friends use?". I found myself doing a lot of dig commands, so I wrote what became domain-profiler.
I don't think you should spend a lot of time selecting hosting, but I do think you should put in a little bit of research into what you pick. It really sucks when your website is unavailable for an hour due to issues with your DNS provider - especially when your TTL's are set to an hour.
The profiler doesn't seem to take HTTP redirects into consideration, incorrectly reporting the web host and SSL details for Vidyard, though I'm sure for a few others too.
You're correct, currently the "Web Host" is determined solely by what shows up in the A records for the domain.
I've been working on updating the profile to determine the host based on where the HTML is ultimately served from, along with some pretty substantial changes in host detection heuristics. These are non-trivial changes. I was hoping to have them done in time for this report, but tradition dictated that I produce this report now.
FWIW, draftmix.com was a product of Blue Frog Gaming, Inc. We are a YC funded company. We don't run draftmix anymore, but we are still very much alive. Our main products do still use Softlayer, but we've got some stuff on Amazon too.
(We're not YC funded, but we did get into Startup Chile. Just wanted to share some options for people.)
Here's the choices our startup has made:
EMAIL:
After much investigation, we decided to host our email in Iceland. This is due to the strong privacy laws in Iceland, and wanting a hosted solution outside the USA (and which had technical support, unlike google)
We chose: http://1984hosting.com/
Pretty happy with them, though occasionally their site will give us a response in icelandic when trying to admin stuff, keeps things exciting! (they're helpful though and do support via email in english.)
Since our product will require a fair number of nodes and significant processing, the price and performance advantage of Hetzner vs. something like Amazon is very dramatic. (I haven't used Hetzner yet, but from my investigations they get positive remarks)
DOMAINS:
For years all of our domains have been handled thru Moniker. If you're going to go with a US registrar, don't use Go Daddy or any other consumer registrar. Moniker is set up for domain portfolios and they have very strong security policies and no BS.
I'd prefer to have this part of our business be offshore, however, given the propensity in recent years for US judges to rule domains be handed over without just cause. However, I've not found a good international Registrar.
Gandi.net is a great international registrar. They are based in Paris, France, and took a public stance against SOPA. They are also the EFF's registrar and have a great web interface. Their slogan is "no bullshit™"
I have no affiliation with them, aside from being a very satisfied customer.
They don't seem to have any two-factor authentication, which is a big deal-breaker to me - compared to Name.com. They don't reply to inquiries about it on Twitter, too.
-Some ~40% (stupid pie chart) don't have an SSL cert, but almost all have login/registration page (4 out of 4 that I randomly picked had a login/registration page)
-So many people use GoDaddy as a registrar (they were horrible before SOPA)
-That startups use AWS despite its poor cost/performance