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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

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.

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.