7 ms·

GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group

58 points by Sujan 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago
How is GoDaddy nowadays? I know for a while, they racked up a terrible reputation ala Network Solutions for poor CS and policies, but have they recovered at all?
- wil421 10y ago
  As of last year, I don't really think so. Helped someone get setup who already had godaddy as their registrar. Everything I saw looked like they were trying to lock in uninformed customers to things they don't need. Or make it very hard for them to switch.
- mootothemax 10y ago
  I run a very minor hosting reviews site, and regularly monitor people talking about GoDaddy on Twitter. In short, customer-satisfcation-wise, they seem to have vastly improved, and are leagues ahead of the likes of EIG (A Small Orange, Arvixe, BlueHost, BigRock, Host Gator and fifty thousand other brands). Their hosting packages seem usable now - a vast improvement. The difficulty in judging hosts is that plenty of people have basic needs that are well served, and will go to the ends of the earth to defend a company. (A Small Orange comes to mind). The people who have bad experiences tend to shout very loudly, which can give a false impression. The other issue is that people also shout loudly about things which, while not exactly a given host's fault, are connected with hosting, and so they get upset. Typically this comes about from leaving public information on a domain's WHOIS record, leading to spam calls and emails - which leads to some people accusing hosts of selling their customer lists. Interestingly, EIG have been shutting down a number of their brands' affiliate programs (Site5, A Small Orange, Arvixe - may be others), which makes me wonder if they're going to consolidate some of their brands soon. They seem to be starting with the brands with the worst (recent) track records. If you're after shared hosting, either go with SiteGround, or go with InMotion hosting (who have the occasional network outage like every shared host, but meh, the rest of their company is sound). For anything else, grab a VPS from OVH, DigitalOcean, or dedicated from OVH or Hetzner. Good and bad stories abound, I've used them all and their core offering is sound. (I don't know why you're downvoted, you asked fair question)
  - 7952 10y ago
    Can you share your review site? Would be curious to see a legitimate one for once.
    - ohashi 10y ago
      Not the OP, but I've been doing similar to what he describes (using twitter data for web hosting reviews). It has ~5 years of data: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare My data doesn't agree with what he's saying. GoDaddy's reputation is on par with the majority of the EIG brands. A Small Orange was a good company post acquisition by EIG for a while. I wrote about that specifically here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-small-orange/ http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of... basically it went to hell once EIG management got involved and the original people team/staff left and it got merged into the conglomerate. I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Regarding price, a more detailed list of a few VPS and dedicated hosters you mentioned before can be found here: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...
      - mootothemax 10y ago
        >I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different. OP here - me, too :) Question: are you including every tweet in your analysis, or do you ignore some as being irrelevant? I mentioned the example of people complaining about spam from public whois records; if you mark such tweets as negative, I could see that explaining a large part of it. (I ignore them as I don't see it as being directly related to a host's performance, even though I know there's an argument to be made about public and "private" whois records). FWIW I also ignore positive tweets that consist of short generic "great, thanks!" or "Yay, awesome!" - I've found that they most often tend to be talking about some sponsorship/promotion or meetup/party the host has held.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > for poor CS and policies, but have they recovered at all Their stance on SOPA and PIPA didn't help them much, either.
- polysaturate 10y ago
  I would also like to add, I have seen people report that a domain they searched for, but not bought, was later registered and available for purchase as a 'premium domain'. However, personally, I have not seen any concrete proof of this. With that being said, it have seen this complaint multiple times.
  - tombrossman 10y ago
    What you describe is probably domain name 'front running', which was an abuse of the domain name 'tasting' scheme that some Registrars engaged in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running So called premium domains are set by the Registry managing the TLD, and Registrars offering those domains for sale pass along the premium price.
  - exhilaration 10y ago
    I tell people thinking about setting up websites for personal or business project that you need to make your list of potential domain names FIRST, then buy immediately if you find any available. ISPs have been selling NXD data since 2007 to domain frontrunners [1] and I wouldn't be surprised if frontrunners are behind the plethora of free whois services that show up on a Google search. [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-front-running/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-fro...
- praneshp 10y ago
  <Unsure how customers feel about them>. I worked at Godaddy in Sunnyvale for about 8-9 months, and left recently (for personal reasons unreleated to the job). It was a great place to be, the leadership was very down to earth and aware of the business, and the work-life balance was great. In addition, the pay was good, the benefits and perks were reasonable (but not awesome). Teams were encouraged and backed to try out new tech they felt was helpful (vs having to go through a process). I also worked with some super smart people. Also, if it matters to you, I thought it was refreshing the way they acknowledged diversity issues internally, and how they approach hiring. I recommend it as a great place to work, especially on the non-infrastructure teams.
  - hawaiianbrah808 10y ago
    A number of former coworkers have joined them here in Seattle, and it sounds like a pretty great place to work. I hear they're also great about letting people work on side projects.
    - runnr_az 10y ago
      I work for GoDaddy in the Office 365 Provisioning Team in Tempe, AZ. Our team's stack is Ember + some React / PHP + node / Linux... all running on OpenStack instances. I think it's a great place to work... lots of interesting projects, nice people, wonderful work / life balance. (I just got three months off for Paternity leave, for instance.) I can personally confirm the side project thing as well :)
  - rebase 10y ago
    Hey buddy! I didn't get to say goodbye when you left! Hope you are doing well! Hit me up on the nova channel or PM on IRC when you get a chance. -S
- shawnee_ 10y ago
  Still the lousiest of the lousiest. After its IPO, GDDY became one of those companies that tweaks its numbers in such a way that it siphons off all the wealth created by its employees up into management salaries and executive compensation. You can spot companies that use this as their "strategy" by really high Debt:Equity ratios, and a few other metrics... a few interesting ones here: GoDaddy Industry Sector ======= ========= ====== Revenue/Employee (TTM) 375,425 7,814,598 62,334,654 Net Income/Employee (TTM) -4,537 793,185 1,346,909 Receivable Turnover (TTM) 210.28 5.11 10.76 LT Debt to Equity (MRQ) 205.65 8.56 12.85 Total Debt to Equity (MRQ) 206.47 14.86 21.44 Interest Coverage (TTM) 0.09 37.70 15.70 * source: http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/financialHighlights?symbol=GDDY.K http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/financialHighlights?sy...
- brianmurphy 10y ago
  Godaddy is terrible. I do small business websites so I run across clients with GoDaddy all of the time. Their legacy "deluxe" hosting is as terrible as always. Simple things like extracting zip files with their file manager will hang/fail at random. Their cpanel offering is terrible because your IO is throttled to a snail's crawl. 1MB/s is not enough for much of anything. Their managed WordPress group did a dog and pony at our meetup group when it launched. It had a good "we're listening" marketing spin. That service has turned to garbage as well. I tried migrating a site from a cpanel dev server to their hosting and it turned into a week long project because their import tool craps out when encountering mysql 5.6 or newer. Their tech support scripts don't acknowledge the problem so they will waste an hour of your day asking to "disable plugins" and try the default 2016 theme for migration when clearly that's not the issue. In general while their telephone people are nice enough, the antiquated versions of software (max php 5.5), over burdened servers, and severe resource throttling are reasons to avoid them at all costs.
diakritikal 10y ago
Ugh :( I'll personally be transferring away from 123reg now. Will probably open a discussion with colleagues to the same effect.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
There's a prod to hurry up and move the last few domains I still have at 123.
qxmat 10y ago
Argh now I need an alternative to 123reg :(
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Gandi.net have been great. Control panel is techie-friendly, and support seems unbeatable. Their "no bullshit" tagline seems to work. You don't get a ton of upsells either. I used to be OK with Namecheap but the Web 2 redesign makes doing most things a pain.
  - sofaofthedamned 10y ago
    I use both Namecheap and Gandi, a couple of my observations: 1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates. 2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP. 3. Agreed, their redesign is awful. I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and: 1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing 2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API 3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing 4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.
scrollaway 10y ago
For those here asking about alternatives (rightfully so as GoDaddy is one of the sleaziest companies in the field), I recommend Gandi.net as domain registrar. Namecheap is also good but they have a lot less TLD coverage. Digital ocean for small scale hosting, too.
- 1337biz 10y ago
  I hate Gandi. A long time ago I lost 2 really valuable domains because they sent the renew reminder only to my account email, not the whois emails. Godaddy is anoying as hell but at least they keep me updated no matter if I want it or not.
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Despite recommending them I have some gripes with Gandi but I have to say that's a really weird thing to hate them for. You have valuable domains behind an email address you're not checking?
    - tobltobs 10y ago
      and apparently auto renewal wasn't enabled.
    - 1337biz 10y ago
      Yes. I have most of my domains with a local registar and used Gandi only because it was for a rarer domain extension.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Seconded. Gandi also includes email hosting with domains, so you can easily handle email without having to run a mail server. And their server hosting works well too.
- netule 10y ago
  For domain name registration, I can't recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] enough. I moved all my domains there (around 30 at the time) from GoDaddy about 3 years ago and never looked back. [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/
Firefishy 10y ago
This isn't good news for the .uk domain space. Nominet (who run the .uk ccTLD) allocate votes proportionally to registrars based on how many domains they have registered. [1] GoDaddy will now likely control the majority of the votes. 1: http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/58367_votingrightspolicy17052012.pdf http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015...
- tonylucas 10y ago
  The document you link specifically states protection mechanisms put in place to prevent this from happening. They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.
  - Firefishy 10y ago
    I hope I am mistaken... It is far from clear as an outsider. But the 10% or 3% limit respectively is per TAG (handle). HostEurope have multiple tags (HOSTEUROPE, 123-REG, WEBFUSION, WEBFUSION2, DOTUKDOMAINS, ... )
    - tonylucas 10y ago
      4.3.3 In the Document covers this scenario.
TekMol 10y ago
I have a couple of domains registered with Host Europe that are super important to me. Is it safe to stay with them?
- DanSpeers 10y ago
  I work in a senior position in Host Europe operations. There are no plans that I am aware of for anything to change on an operational level. As it stands, the sale has not yet been completed, so nothing will change within the next 6 months. Even after the sale completes, these sorts of large organizations move very slowly. I would not expect to see any customer-facing changes within the next 2 years. Host Europe has not even finished properly absorbing some of its previous acquisitions, and we're about 1/10th the size of GoDaddy! Any other questions about Host Europe, feel free to ask and I'll answer them if I can.
nom 10y ago
I was a happy customer of Host Europe for 13 years. I'm going to look for alternatives now...
- TillE 10y ago
  Depends on your specific needs of course, but I switched from HostEurope to Hetzner years ago and was quite happy.
- gkst 10y ago
  I've been a customer since 2006 and just cancelled my account. Not sure, where I'll move, but I need a provider that supports .de domains. I'm leaning towards uberspace.de, but will consider Hetzner as well.
alrs 10y ago
Did HEG make any acquistions after becoming part of Cinven? If it's the exact same assets, going from $667 million to $1.82 billion in three years is some pretty good work. 2013 acquistion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-buys-host-europe-from-montagu-for-438-million-pounds https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-bu...
- tonylucas 10y ago
  Quite a few: Sign-up.to, intergenia AG, Paragon Internet Group, MCS Computersyteme, OpenIT, 5quidhost, Webfaction, Dataflame, Elastichosts, Mr Site, Freezone, Daily Internet & Namescon Think Intergenia was probably the biggest from memory.
sofaofthedamned 10y ago
HEG includes Heart Internet and 123Reg, two of the worst companies in their field. They're welcome to them.
dwightgunning 10y ago
The GoDaddy service has a history of terrible user interfaces, advertising imagery that objectifies women, and the former CEO / founder Bob Parsons who's shot wild African animals, still sits on the board. How do new customers over look that to save a couple bucks per year? How do existing customers ignore it because it'll take some time/effort/cost to make the change?
atl4s 10y ago
Just in case there's anyone else like me, HEG also owns (owned) Paragon Internet Group which is a problem as all my personal projects and domains are with TSOHost... What a PITA. RIP TSO, you will be missed.

58 points by Sujan 10y ago

How is GoDaddy nowadays? I know for a while, they racked up a terrible reputation ala Network Solutions for poor CS and policies, but have they recovered at all?

wil421 10y ago
As of last year, I don't really think so. Helped someone get setup who already had godaddy as their registrar. Everything I saw looked like they were trying to lock in uninformed customers to things they don't need. Or make it very hard for them to switch.
mootothemax 10y ago
I run a very minor hosting reviews site, and regularly monitor people talking about GoDaddy on Twitter. In short, customer-satisfcation-wise, they seem to have vastly improved, and are leagues ahead of the likes of EIG (A Small Orange, Arvixe, BlueHost, BigRock, Host Gator and fifty thousand other brands). Their hosting packages seem usable now - a vast improvement. The difficulty in judging hosts is that plenty of people have basic needs that are well served, and will go to the ends of the earth to defend a company. (A Small Orange comes to mind). The people who have bad experiences tend to shout very loudly, which can give a false impression. The other issue is that people also shout loudly about things which, while not exactly a given host's fault, are connected with hosting, and so they get upset. Typically this comes about from leaving public information on a domain's WHOIS record, leading to spam calls and emails - which leads to some people accusing hosts of selling their customer lists. Interestingly, EIG have been shutting down a number of their brands' affiliate programs (Site5, A Small Orange, Arvixe - may be others), which makes me wonder if they're going to consolidate some of their brands soon. They seem to be starting with the brands with the worst (recent) track records. If you're after shared hosting, either go with SiteGround, or go with InMotion hosting (who have the occasional network outage like every shared host, but meh, the rest of their company is sound). For anything else, grab a VPS from OVH, DigitalOcean, or dedicated from OVH or Hetzner. Good and bad stories abound, I've used them all and their core offering is sound. (I don't know why you're downvoted, you asked fair question)
- 7952 10y ago
  Can you share your review site? Would be curious to see a legitimate one for once.
  - ohashi 10y ago
    Not the OP, but I've been doing similar to what he describes (using twitter data for web hosting reviews). It has ~5 years of data: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare My data doesn't agree with what he's saying. GoDaddy's reputation is on par with the majority of the EIG brands. A Small Orange was a good company post acquisition by EIG for a while. I wrote about that specifically here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-small-orange/ http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of... basically it went to hell once EIG management got involved and the original people team/staff left and it got merged into the conglomerate. I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Regarding price, a more detailed list of a few VPS and dedicated hosters you mentioned before can be found here: https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39...
    - mootothemax 10y ago
      >I'd be curious to see his data as well and why it his conclusions seem so different. OP here - me, too :) Question: are you including every tweet in your analysis, or do you ignore some as being irrelevant? I mentioned the example of people complaining about spam from public whois records; if you mark such tweets as negative, I could see that explaining a large part of it. (I ignore them as I don't see it as being directly related to a host's performance, even though I know there's an argument to be made about public and "private" whois records). FWIW I also ignore positive tweets that consist of short generic "great, thanks!" or "Yay, awesome!" - I've found that they most often tend to be talking about some sponsorship/promotion or meetup/party the host has held.
Alupis 10y ago
> for poor CS and policies, but have they recovered at all Their stance on SOPA and PIPA didn't help them much, either.
polysaturate 10y ago
I would also like to add, I have seen people report that a domain they searched for, but not bought, was later registered and available for purchase as a 'premium domain'. However, personally, I have not seen any concrete proof of this. With that being said, it have seen this complaint multiple times.
- tombrossman 10y ago
  What you describe is probably domain name 'front running', which was an abuse of the domain name 'tasting' scheme that some Registrars engaged in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running So called premium domains are set by the Registry managing the TLD, and Registrars offering those domains for sale pass along the premium price.
- exhilaration 10y ago
  I tell people thinking about setting up websites for personal or business project that you need to make your list of potential domain names FIRST, then buy immediately if you find any available. ISPs have been selling NXD data since 2007 to domain frontrunners [1] and I wouldn't be surprised if frontrunners are behind the plethora of free whois services that show up on a Google search. [1] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-front-running/ http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/domain-name-fro...
praneshp 10y ago
<Unsure how customers feel about them>. I worked at Godaddy in Sunnyvale for about 8-9 months, and left recently (for personal reasons unreleated to the job). It was a great place to be, the leadership was very down to earth and aware of the business, and the work-life balance was great. In addition, the pay was good, the benefits and perks were reasonable (but not awesome). Teams were encouraged and backed to try out new tech they felt was helpful (vs having to go through a process). I also worked with some super smart people. Also, if it matters to you, I thought it was refreshing the way they acknowledged diversity issues internally, and how they approach hiring. I recommend it as a great place to work, especially on the non-infrastructure teams.
- hawaiianbrah808 10y ago
  A number of former coworkers have joined them here in Seattle, and it sounds like a pretty great place to work. I hear they're also great about letting people work on side projects.
  - runnr_az 10y ago
    I work for GoDaddy in the Office 365 Provisioning Team in Tempe, AZ. Our team's stack is Ember + some React / PHP + node / Linux... all running on OpenStack instances. I think it's a great place to work... lots of interesting projects, nice people, wonderful work / life balance. (I just got three months off for Paternity leave, for instance.) I can personally confirm the side project thing as well :)
- rebase 10y ago
  Hey buddy! I didn't get to say goodbye when you left! Hope you are doing well! Hit me up on the nova channel or PM on IRC when you get a chance. -S
shawnee_ 10y ago
Still the lousiest of the lousiest. After its IPO, GDDY became one of those companies that tweaks its numbers in such a way that it siphons off all the wealth created by its employees up into management salaries and executive compensation. You can spot companies that use this as their "strategy" by really high Debt:Equity ratios, and a few other metrics... a few interesting ones here: GoDaddy Industry Sector ======= ========= ====== Revenue/Employee (TTM) 375,425 7,814,598 62,334,654 Net Income/Employee (TTM) -4,537 793,185 1,346,909 Receivable Turnover (TTM) 210.28 5.11 10.76 LT Debt to Equity (MRQ) 205.65 8.56 12.85 Total Debt to Equity (MRQ) 206.47 14.86 21.44 Interest Coverage (TTM) 0.09 37.70 15.70 * source: http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/financialHighlights?symbol=GDDY.K http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/financialHighlights?sy...
brianmurphy 10y ago
Godaddy is terrible. I do small business websites so I run across clients with GoDaddy all of the time. Their legacy "deluxe" hosting is as terrible as always. Simple things like extracting zip files with their file manager will hang/fail at random. Their cpanel offering is terrible because your IO is throttled to a snail's crawl. 1MB/s is not enough for much of anything. Their managed WordPress group did a dog and pony at our meetup group when it launched. It had a good "we're listening" marketing spin. That service has turned to garbage as well. I tried migrating a site from a cpanel dev server to their hosting and it turned into a week long project because their import tool craps out when encountering mysql 5.6 or newer. Their tech support scripts don't acknowledge the problem so they will waste an hour of your day asking to "disable plugins" and try the default 2016 theme for migration when clearly that's not the issue. In general while their telephone people are nice enough, the antiquated versions of software (max php 5.5), over burdened servers, and severe resource throttling are reasons to avoid them at all costs.

diakritikal 10y ago

Ugh :( I'll personally be transferring away from 123reg now. Will probably open a discussion with colleagues to the same effect.

anexprogrammer 10y ago

There's a prod to hurry up and move the last few domains I still have at 123.

qxmat 10y ago

Argh now I need an alternative to 123reg :(

anexprogrammer 10y ago
Gandi.net have been great. Control panel is techie-friendly, and support seems unbeatable. Their "no bullshit" tagline seems to work. You don't get a ton of upsells either. I used to be OK with Namecheap but the Web 2 redesign makes doing most things a pain.
- sofaofthedamned 10y ago
  I use both Namecheap and Gandi, a couple of my observations: 1. Namecheap has a really low API limit which caused me problems when using the DNS challenge to renew Let's Encrypt certificates. 2. Their API has to have clients whitelisted by IP, which is a pain when renewing a LE cert from a dynamic home IP. 3. Agreed, their redesign is awful. I used Gandi recently to get around these restrictions and: 1. Their web UI is truly awful and confusing 2. They don't have the same IP or rate limiting restrictions on the API 3. Their versioning of zones is a bit confusing 4. Their propagation seems to take an age longer than Namecheap. When the latter worked each LE challenge took a couple of minutes, with Gandi it's more like 20 minutes each.

scrollaway 10y ago

For those here asking about alternatives (rightfully so as GoDaddy is one of the sleaziest companies in the field), I recommend Gandi.net as domain registrar. Namecheap is also good but they have a lot less TLD coverage. Digital ocean for small scale hosting, too.

1337biz 10y ago
I hate Gandi. A long time ago I lost 2 really valuable domains because they sent the renew reminder only to my account email, not the whois emails. Godaddy is anoying as hell but at least they keep me updated no matter if I want it or not.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Despite recommending them I have some gripes with Gandi but I have to say that's a really weird thing to hate them for. You have valuable domains behind an email address you're not checking?
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    and apparently auto renewal wasn't enabled.
  - 1337biz 10y ago
    Yes. I have most of my domains with a local registar and used Gandi only because it was for a rarer domain extension.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Seconded. Gandi also includes email hosting with domains, so you can easily handle email without having to run a mail server. And their server hosting works well too.
netule 10y ago
For domain name registration, I can't recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.net[1] enough. I moved all my domains there (around 30 at the time) from GoDaddy about 3 years ago and never looked back. [1] https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/

Firefishy 10y ago

This isn't good news for the .uk domain space. Nominet (who run the .uk ccTLD) allocate votes proportionally to registrars based on how many domains they have registered. [1] GoDaddy will now likely control the majority of the votes. 1: http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/58367_votingrightspolicy17052012.pdf http://nominet-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2015...

tonylucas 10y ago
The document you link specifically states protection mechanisms put in place to prevent this from happening. They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.
- Firefishy 10y ago
  I hope I am mistaken... It is far from clear as an outsider. But the 10% or 3% limit respectively is per TAG (handle). HostEurope have multiple tags (HOSTEUROPE, 123-REG, WEBFUSION, WEBFUSION2, DOTUKDOMAINS, ... )
  - tonylucas 10y ago
    4.3.3 In the Document covers this scenario.

TekMol 10y ago

I have a couple of domains registered with Host Europe that are super important to me. Is it safe to stay with them?

DanSpeers 10y ago
I work in a senior position in Host Europe operations. There are no plans that I am aware of for anything to change on an operational level. As it stands, the sale has not yet been completed, so nothing will change within the next 6 months. Even after the sale completes, these sorts of large organizations move very slowly. I would not expect to see any customer-facing changes within the next 2 years. Host Europe has not even finished properly absorbing some of its previous acquisitions, and we're about 1/10th the size of GoDaddy! Any other questions about Host Europe, feel free to ask and I'll answer them if I can.

nom 10y ago

I was a happy customer of Host Europe for 13 years. I'm going to look for alternatives now...

TillE 10y ago
Depends on your specific needs of course, but I switched from HostEurope to Hetzner years ago and was quite happy.
gkst 10y ago
I've been a customer since 2006 and just cancelled my account. Not sure, where I'll move, but I need a provider that supports .de domains. I'm leaning towards uberspace.de, but will consider Hetzner as well.

alrs 10y ago

Did HEG make any acquistions after becoming part of Cinven? If it's the exact same assets, going from $667 million to $1.82 billion in three years is some pretty good work. 2013 acquistion: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-buys-host-europe-from-montagu-for-438-million-pounds https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-19/cinven-bu...

tonylucas 10y ago
Quite a few: Sign-up.to, intergenia AG, Paragon Internet Group, MCS Computersyteme, OpenIT, 5quidhost, Webfaction, Dataflame, Elastichosts, Mr Site, Freezone, Daily Internet & Namescon Think Intergenia was probably the biggest from memory.

sofaofthedamned 10y ago

HEG includes Heart Internet and 123Reg, two of the worst companies in their field. They're welcome to them.

dwightgunning 10y ago

The GoDaddy service has a history of terrible user interfaces, advertising imagery that objectifies women, and the former CEO / founder Bob Parsons who's shot wild African animals, still sits on the board. How do new customers over look that to save a couple bucks per year? How do existing customers ignore it because it'll take some time/effort/cost to make the change?

atl4s 10y ago

Just in case there's anyone else like me, HEG also owns (owned) Paragon Internet Group which is a problem as all my personal projects and domains are with TSOHost... What a PITA. RIP TSO, you will be missed.