4 ms·

Serious question, why do people use GoDaddy? What does it have to offer in terms of price/features/anything that’s better than any other provider?

joecool1029 8y ago
It's cheap and it's a big company. They are basically the Walmart of domain registration. Out of having to deal with something like 40 or 50 registrars and resellers over the years I give them a slightly above average rating. Really, for all the bashing this thread people are giving there are far worse. They aren't great, but things will probably work with them. I'll talk about alternatives now. Yeah, I know Gandi is cool, but they want too much money so majority of people pass them by. If you want a really horrid example: 1and1 is a company that sets the bar. They buy up superbowl and print ads to lure in old people with cheap domain registrations (like $1 or so). Once sucked in they use a careful reading of the ICANN regulations to maximize difficulty in doing anything. Oh, you want a transfer? That's going to be a week. Most things either go over the phone or through a panel that's down or nonfunctional half of the time. Want to change nameserver delegation to your own DNS servers? Fuck you then. They wipe the current DNS records and process the change in a couple days. Your site can take a vacation. Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there. They finally got off being an ENOM reseller, which is great. ENOM are assholes. I had a client that hired an ENOM reseller some time ago to register their domain and host their site. The reseller's company's owner got arrested and/or deported and while we were able to save the client's files the domain expired with no way for us to renew it. The good news is you can gripe up the chain to ENOM which will require a 5 year domain registration for $200. That's it in a nutshell. They are a large company which has a service that mostly works for a cheaper price than arguably better options like Gandi. Shout out to other terrible registrars like Yahoo Small Business (ugh)
- rawoke083600 8y ago
  "Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there." Yup !! Thats my experience also !
  - user5994461 8y ago
    DNS can be cached for days. I wouldn't expect any DNS update to be propagated before a few hours.
    - joecool1029 8y ago
      You misunderstand. It very much should be pushed and updated at authoritative DNS servers within minutes. I'm aware of ISP and local DNS caches and this is not what I'm talking about. You can query the authoritative DNS servers for any domain using dig.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Other issues with Google aside, their registrar service has been great. I have 2FA on my google login and the domain services are pretty nice all around. No upsell, some integrated service options (close to one-click). Included Google DNS service and free mail forwarding. NOTE: I use the free mail forwarding so I can continue using some very old email addresses.
  - joecool1029 8y ago
    I've been a Google Suite reseller long enough to know not to trust Google with anything critical that can go wrong. I would imagine that when things go wrong there, the only recourse would be to blog, complain here, and no doubt file some sort of appeal to ICANN involving paying $1000 or so and having a month of downtime. As bad as the ENOM example is, at least I don't have to spend a week hammering the same dude on a certain subcontinent that has no escalation path.
miguelmota 8y ago
GoDaddy has crazy marketing and dominate search results in that regard. They bait and switch their customers into buying a really cheap domain for the first year and then rake up the price for subsequent years. It's annoying for businesses to switch everything over to a new provider, especially not so technical people that don't want downtime, so they eat the cost. GoDaddy alternatives which aren't shady are: Namecheap iwantmyname AWS Route53 Domains Google Domains (wouldn't be surprised if they kill this service though)
- rawoke083600 8y ago
  "Namecheap" used to be my fav but their backed is totally unreliable and broken.. At times when you add a new item to your domain (say mail) its not uncommon for the DNS settings to reset ! Happend to me twice. Also lost my DNS settings for another domain after i "browsed" their backend !
- aaronds 8y ago
  +1 for iwantmyname - such a simple service - does exactly what I want without any fuss
  - stephenhuey 8y ago
    Yes, I moved some stuff from Hover to iwantmyname because they don’t abstract anything important and there’s no clutter. Hover isn’t bad, but I was looking for something even more geek-appealing!
- tracker1 8y ago
  I don't think Google Domains is going anywhere, it's complementary to Google Docs and their cloud services.
technion 8y ago
People keep talking about domain registrations and competitors in this area, but the majority of GoDaddy customers don't know what means. The majority of competitors in the shared hosting space are part of the EIG conglomerate, which is largely more of the same. All the options we might call "better", including deploying a static site to Netlify or GH Pages, using a cheap VPS or a complex AWS deployment, aren't actually options for the people buying these services, who expect a one click Wordpress deployment.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Google domains has close to 1-click integration with Google Docs for the mail side, and Wordpress via bluehost integration. I've been VERY happy with them. Hadn't been on their main app in a while and it looks like they've improved the UX a bit. I do have gdocs on one of my domains, but probably will drop it. Otherwise I'm externally hosting a few things. I am also making use of the mail forwarding options for addresses on a couple of said domains.

joecool1029 8y ago

It's cheap and it's a big company. They are basically the Walmart of domain registration. Out of having to deal with something like 40 or 50 registrars and resellers over the years I give them a slightly above average rating. Really, for all the bashing this thread people are giving there are far worse. They aren't great, but things will probably work with them. I'll talk about alternatives now. Yeah, I know Gandi is cool, but they want too much money so majority of people pass them by. If you want a really horrid example: 1and1 is a company that sets the bar. They buy up superbowl and print ads to lure in old people with cheap domain registrations (like $1 or so). Once sucked in they use a careful reading of the ICANN regulations to maximize difficulty in doing anything. Oh, you want a transfer? That's going to be a week. Most things either go over the phone or through a panel that's down or nonfunctional half of the time. Want to change nameserver delegation to your own DNS servers? Fuck you then. They wipe the current DNS records and process the change in a couple days. Your site can take a vacation. Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there. They finally got off being an ENOM reseller, which is great. ENOM are assholes. I had a client that hired an ENOM reseller some time ago to register their domain and host their site. The reseller's company's owner got arrested and/or deported and while we were able to save the client's files the domain expired with no way for us to renew it. The good news is you can gripe up the chain to ENOM which will require a 5 year domain registration for $200. That's it in a nutshell. They are a large company which has a service that mostly works for a cheaper price than arguably better options like Gandi. Shout out to other terrible registrars like Yahoo Small Business (ugh)

rawoke083600 8y ago
"Now, I hear a lot of people saying Namecheap is a good choice. They are ok, we recommend them but their panel likes to shit the bed and it can take hours to push DNS updates when things aren't running great there." Yup !! Thats my experience also !
- user5994461 8y ago
  DNS can be cached for days. I wouldn't expect any DNS update to be propagated before a few hours.
  - joecool1029 8y ago
    You misunderstand. It very much should be pushed and updated at authoritative DNS servers within minutes. I'm aware of ISP and local DNS caches and this is not what I'm talking about. You can query the authoritative DNS servers for any domain using dig.
tracker1 8y ago
Other issues with Google aside, their registrar service has been great. I have 2FA on my google login and the domain services are pretty nice all around. No upsell, some integrated service options (close to one-click). Included Google DNS service and free mail forwarding. NOTE: I use the free mail forwarding so I can continue using some very old email addresses.
- joecool1029 8y ago
  I've been a Google Suite reseller long enough to know not to trust Google with anything critical that can go wrong. I would imagine that when things go wrong there, the only recourse would be to blog, complain here, and no doubt file some sort of appeal to ICANN involving paying $1000 or so and having a month of downtime. As bad as the ENOM example is, at least I don't have to spend a week hammering the same dude on a certain subcontinent that has no escalation path.

miguelmota 8y ago

GoDaddy has crazy marketing and dominate search results in that regard. They bait and switch their customers into buying a really cheap domain for the first year and then rake up the price for subsequent years. It's annoying for businesses to switch everything over to a new provider, especially not so technical people that don't want downtime, so they eat the cost. GoDaddy alternatives which aren't shady are: Namecheap iwantmyname AWS Route53 Domains Google Domains (wouldn't be surprised if they kill this service though)

rawoke083600 8y ago
"Namecheap" used to be my fav but their backed is totally unreliable and broken.. At times when you add a new item to your domain (say mail) its not uncommon for the DNS settings to reset ! Happend to me twice. Also lost my DNS settings for another domain after i "browsed" their backend !
aaronds 8y ago
+1 for iwantmyname - such a simple service - does exactly what I want without any fuss
- stephenhuey 8y ago
  Yes, I moved some stuff from Hover to iwantmyname because they don’t abstract anything important and there’s no clutter. Hover isn’t bad, but I was looking for something even more geek-appealing!
tracker1 8y ago
I don't think Google Domains is going anywhere, it's complementary to Google Docs and their cloud services.

technion 8y ago

People keep talking about domain registrations and competitors in this area, but the majority of GoDaddy customers don't know what means. The majority of competitors in the shared hosting space are part of the EIG conglomerate, which is largely more of the same. All the options we might call "better", including deploying a static site to Netlify or GH Pages, using a cheap VPS or a complex AWS deployment, aren't actually options for the people buying these services, who expect a one click Wordpress deployment.

tracker1 8y ago
Google domains has close to 1-click integration with Google Docs for the mail side, and Wordpress via bluehost integration. I've been VERY happy with them. Hadn't been on their main app in a while and it looks like they've improved the UX a bit. I do have gdocs on one of my domains, but probably will drop it. Otherwise I'm externally hosting a few things. I am also making use of the mail forwarding options for addresses on a couple of said domains.