7 ms·

Whenever I talk to startups, I check their domain. If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.

ars 6y ago
Not necessarily. I used to think that, but it's rather common for the person with the idea to just go and buy the domain on GoDaddy. Then they'll search for technical people to implement their idea. So being hosted there is not necessarily connected with the people actually doing the work. I think you may be used to cases where the startup idea generator and implementer is the same person. But it's not always that way.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Yeah, I joined a startup as the first engineer and inherited a GoDaddy registration, which the non-technical founder had purchased. I may have been technically incompetent but the startup's GoDaddy registration had nothing to do with it. :-)
jansan 6y ago
>If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent. Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.
- tyingq 6y ago
  One exception is domains picked up from a GoDaddy auction. I believe you have to pay for a year, which you might not want to waste. Or even a transfer takes a while to complete.
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a new registrar. Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.
    - tyingq 6y ago
      You're right. I think my memory was domains where you wanted to prepay for "privacy", so the ownership didnt show during the xfer after the auction.
      - cirno 6y ago
        GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.
  - haswell 6y ago
    Another exception is that at least for awhile (not sure if they still do), Google Domains would farm our registrations to GoDaddy, eNom, etc. So you might not have even realized GoDaddy was in the picture (at least initially).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kovacs 6y ago
Absolutely. You sound like someone that could really be of benefit to my latest startup. We're doing bigly things. If you're interested in finding out more drop me a line... gator3827@aol.com
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Wow, samesies! brian1999@yahoo.com
  - ThePadawan 6y ago
    > brian1999@yahoo.com I'd be interested to know what percentage of 21 year olds know what yahoo is (they would have sold Tumblr right around them being 18 years old).
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Back in the day it was trendy to affix the year you signed up for an account to your account name - rather than the birth year. It was interesting to see things like sandra96@yahoo.com still the primary email address when sending someone an email to catch up post uni.
      - Loughla 6y ago
        God help me, I cannot stop myself from laughing every time I see a @yahoo or @aol e-mail address on job applications/resumes. Bonus laughter if it's something massively inappropriate. Some e-mail stems from the last position search (this is at a college, granted it is an entry level position, but it's still a college): cuntcrasher, c00rslight, bigswag420, trideltaFcups, and my personal favorite, milfhunter9inch. These are supposed to be professional people. This is real life. This is real. I can't wake up.
        Igelau 6y ago
        Hey, maybe that's short for Bret Igswag (born April 20). I used to work with a guy whose first + middle initials and last name resulted in an official corporate email of "xlwang", no lie. Only you can save Corbin Untcrasher and Tyrone Ridel-Tafcups from crushing student loan debt.
edoceo 6y ago
There is another option here. I'm technically competent but have one domain on GoDaddy for a startup I'm handling. See, the domain we wanted was after market, and the purchase deal was done through a service that requires GD as the registrar. So, after $12000 for the domain, we have to wait before we can transfer into our AWS.
- bredren 6y ago
  If you can afford $12k for a domain hopefully you’re not worried about the registrar signaling to an investor.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    I'm one of the investors too.
hangonhn 6y ago
I really dislike GoDaddy but this is not the best signal to use. A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. A lot of things about startups are just crap early on. People do things that they shouldn't or will have to pay for in the long run. Startups accumulate debt in many ways. Being on GoDaddy might be one of those. And if the DNS resolves just fine, many won't do anything about it except pay the yearly fees. More importantly, startups should ideally improve as they survive from year to year and not using GoDaddy is going to be pretty low on the list of things they need to fix.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying to avoid.
  - Cyphus 6y ago
    It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures. I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders. Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating domain ownership to AWS gives us almost no benefits. I guess having more consolidated billing would be nice, but until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar. Then again, I don't know if I'd care to interview someone who makes such large decisions based on small details with no context.
    - hangonhn 6y ago
      Wow. That's funny because that's the exact evolution that happened at my current company (GoDaddy points to AWS and AWS does the rest) and we're now a unicorn. Being a unicorn is not a reflection of engineering quality though. That said, the earlier engineers were pretty bad (So bad that someone at one point terminated every line in Python with a semicolon. Those engineers are nearly all gone now) and I like to think that the current groups are decent engineers. But I don't see us ever going back and transferring the domain somewhere else.
vmception 6y ago
/r/gatekeeping is that way yes, a startup registered through Route 53 is a better sign of competency on staff or in their network but propping up domains wherever you want and changing the cname whenever you want doesn't tell you anything
- jjeaff 6y ago
  And a lot of the time, the non-technical founder will have already registered the name and transferring can be a pain so it is sometimes delayed.
mattl 6y ago
What if a non-technical co-founder bought the domain?
- Biganon 6y ago
  This is likely to happen, too. Parent comment is not being very wise here.
  - mattl 6y ago
    I also used GoDaddy to buy libre.fm back in 2009 because buying an fm domain was harder than it ought to be. I moved it to Gandi when I could, but that's because I have most other domains there.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  Then it probably means the technical people didn't have much say in this.
  - haswell 6y ago
    What are you trying to say here? Domain purchases often happen before there are any technical people at all. It's not about who had a say.
ci5er 6y ago
Google domains sometimes dumps you onto GoDaddy. Which is/was unexpected and unwelcome. Sometimes you have to buy a domain and that's the way through. I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap). But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)
rfrey 6y ago
Please have mercy on those of us whose CEOs set up the email and Office365 accounts.
driverdan 6y ago
I downvoted you because I've known many technically competent people, including startup founders, who have used GoDaddy. Many people don't realize how terrible they are.
prh8 6y ago
Frequently it's the non-technical idea person who grabbed a domain before finding technical people to work with.
wmeredith 6y ago
> it means that they are technically incompetent That's a mixed signal. I can really help my technically incompetent clients.
rezonant 6y ago
The registrar's job is to facilitate the transaction for the domain, charge you for renewals, and give you a way to assign the authoritative name servers. For that purpose GoDaddy works about as good as any other registrar. You can debate the merits of GoDaddy as a company on [oh so] many levels, remark on their absolutely terrible user interfaces, and certainly discuss their sleazy practices, but none of this is an indicator of ineptitude on the part of the purchaser. Having a slick user interface around what amounts to a Purchase Domain button and a text box for setting name servers isn't terribly exciting or something I care about, and GoDaddy covers a very large swathe of the available TLDs (though certainly not all of them), so managing many related domains across TLDs with a single account is appealing. All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude. And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better. You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc. GoDaddy's hosting is unfit for any purpose.
shivekkhurana 6y ago
I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but Cloudflare has as domain registry service too. They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay. They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/ When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now. All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.
- krn 6y ago
  > They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay. That's because all domains transferred to CloudFlare are required to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. It's just a different business model.

ars 6y ago

Not necessarily. I used to think that, but it's rather common for the person with the idea to just go and buy the domain on GoDaddy. Then they'll search for technical people to implement their idea. So being hosted there is not necessarily connected with the people actually doing the work. I think you may be used to cases where the startup idea generator and implementer is the same person. But it's not always that way.

tomjakubowski 6y ago
Yeah, I joined a startup as the first engineer and inherited a GoDaddy registration, which the non-technical founder had purchased. I may have been technically incompetent but the startup's GoDaddy registration had nothing to do with it. :-)

jansan 6y ago

>If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent. Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.

tyingq 6y ago
One exception is domains picked up from a GoDaddy auction. I believe you have to pay for a year, which you might not want to waste. Or even a transfer takes a while to complete.
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a new registrar. Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    You're right. I think my memory was domains where you wanted to prepay for "privacy", so the ownership didnt show during the xfer after the auction.
    - cirno 6y ago
      GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.
- haswell 6y ago
  Another exception is that at least for awhile (not sure if they still do), Google Domains would farm our registrations to GoDaddy, eNom, etc. So you might not have even realized GoDaddy was in the picture (at least initially).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kovacs 6y ago

Absolutely. You sound like someone that could really be of benefit to my latest startup. We're doing bigly things. If you're interested in finding out more drop me a line... gator3827@aol.com

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Wow, samesies! brian1999@yahoo.com
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  > brian1999@yahoo.com I'd be interested to know what percentage of 21 year olds know what yahoo is (they would have sold Tumblr right around them being 18 years old).
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Back in the day it was trendy to affix the year you signed up for an account to your account name - rather than the birth year. It was interesting to see things like sandra96@yahoo.com still the primary email address when sending someone an email to catch up post uni.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      God help me, I cannot stop myself from laughing every time I see a @yahoo or @aol e-mail address on job applications/resumes. Bonus laughter if it's something massively inappropriate. Some e-mail stems from the last position search (this is at a college, granted it is an entry level position, but it's still a college): cuntcrasher, c00rslight, bigswag420, trideltaFcups, and my personal favorite, milfhunter9inch. These are supposed to be professional people. This is real life. This is real. I can't wake up.
      - Igelau 6y ago
        Hey, maybe that's short for Bret Igswag (born April 20). I used to work with a guy whose first + middle initials and last name resulted in an official corporate email of "xlwang", no lie. Only you can save Corbin Untcrasher and Tyrone Ridel-Tafcups from crushing student loan debt.

edoceo 6y ago

There is another option here. I'm technically competent but have one domain on GoDaddy for a startup I'm handling. See, the domain we wanted was after market, and the purchase deal was done through a service that requires GD as the registrar. So, after $12000 for the domain, we have to wait before we can transfer into our AWS.

bredren 6y ago
If you can afford $12k for a domain hopefully you’re not worried about the registrar signaling to an investor.
- edoceo 6y ago
  I'm one of the investors too.

hangonhn 6y ago

I really dislike GoDaddy but this is not the best signal to use. A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. A lot of things about startups are just crap early on. People do things that they shouldn't or will have to pay for in the long run. Startups accumulate debt in many ways. Being on GoDaddy might be one of those. And if the DNS resolves just fine, many won't do anything about it except pay the yearly fees. More importantly, startups should ideally improve as they survive from year to year and not using GoDaddy is going to be pretty low on the list of things they need to fix.

marcosdumay 6y ago
> A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying to avoid.
- Cyphus 6y ago
  It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures. I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders. Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating domain ownership to AWS gives us almost no benefits. I guess having more consolidated billing would be nice, but until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar. Then again, I don't know if I'd care to interview someone who makes such large decisions based on small details with no context.
  - hangonhn 6y ago
    Wow. That's funny because that's the exact evolution that happened at my current company (GoDaddy points to AWS and AWS does the rest) and we're now a unicorn. Being a unicorn is not a reflection of engineering quality though. That said, the earlier engineers were pretty bad (So bad that someone at one point terminated every line in Python with a semicolon. Those engineers are nearly all gone now) and I like to think that the current groups are decent engineers. But I don't see us ever going back and transferring the domain somewhere else.

vmception 6y ago

/r/gatekeeping is that way yes, a startup registered through Route 53 is a better sign of competency on staff or in their network but propping up domains wherever you want and changing the cname whenever you want doesn't tell you anything

jjeaff 6y ago
And a lot of the time, the non-technical founder will have already registered the name and transferring can be a pain so it is sometimes delayed.

mattl 6y ago

What if a non-technical co-founder bought the domain?

Biganon 6y ago
This is likely to happen, too. Parent comment is not being very wise here.
- mattl 6y ago
  I also used GoDaddy to buy libre.fm back in 2009 because buying an fm domain was harder than it ought to be. I moved it to Gandi when I could, but that's because I have most other domains there.
behnamoh 6y ago
Then it probably means the technical people didn't have much say in this.
- haswell 6y ago
  What are you trying to say here? Domain purchases often happen before there are any technical people at all. It's not about who had a say.

ci5er 6y ago

Google domains sometimes dumps you onto GoDaddy. Which is/was unexpected and unwelcome. Sometimes you have to buy a domain and that's the way through. I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap). But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)

rfrey 6y ago

Please have mercy on those of us whose CEOs set up the email and Office365 accounts.

driverdan 6y ago

I downvoted you because I've known many technically competent people, including startup founders, who have used GoDaddy. Many people don't realize how terrible they are.

prh8 6y ago

Frequently it's the non-technical idea person who grabbed a domain before finding technical people to work with.

wmeredith 6y ago

> it means that they are technically incompetent That's a mixed signal. I can really help my technically incompetent clients.

rezonant 6y ago

The registrar's job is to facilitate the transaction for the domain, charge you for renewals, and give you a way to assign the authoritative name servers. For that purpose GoDaddy works about as good as any other registrar. You can debate the merits of GoDaddy as a company on [oh so] many levels, remark on their absolutely terrible user interfaces, and certainly discuss their sleazy practices, but none of this is an indicator of ineptitude on the part of the purchaser. Having a slick user interface around what amounts to a Purchase Domain button and a text box for setting name servers isn't terribly exciting or something I care about, and GoDaddy covers a very large swathe of the available TLDs (though certainly not all of them), so managing many related domains across TLDs with a single account is appealing. All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude. And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better. You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc. GoDaddy's hosting is unfit for any purpose.

shivekkhurana 6y ago

I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but Cloudflare has as domain registry service too. They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay. They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/ When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now. All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.

krn 6y ago
> They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay. That's because all domains transferred to CloudFlare are required to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. It's just a different business model.