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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts.

* If it ain't broke don't fix it.

* Google could take some tips from a lean tech company that creates a legacy product that requires minimum upkeep while staying respectable profitable.

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But...really it is broken, because, as a long-time Namecheap customer, their shitty legacy systems have got me looking for a better option. I recently complained that they sent me an email warning about a pending expiration, followed immediately by an email about auto-renewal on the same account. Their response was basically to shrug and explain that their email notifications suck. That's garbage customer service no matter how you cut it, and the domain registration/hosting business is 100% customer service.

And GoDaddy is all of the above, but a thousand times worse.

For reference, ICANN requires that upcoming renewal notifications are sent in specific intervals, so it results in very noisy registrars.

Namecheap could note within that renewal notice (and subsequently avoiding the auto-renewal notice) but, I can see where they're coming from.

That's definitely interesting. At the end of the day, the messages are misleading at best, arguably negligent, and definitely sloppy. They could fix it, but their whole site just seems like five or so legacy systems glued together without any overriding consideration for the user.

Accidentally down voted instead of up voting, so I'll just pipe in to say that this is exactly my impression. It's as though they felt like putting an Ajaxy new UI on top of their collapsing backend would make things better, when it really made them worse because it's harder to tell if your request has been sent or the system is lagging out, or what. I was with Namecheap for something like ten years, but now I'm migrating everything away as they start to get close to renewal.

What tips could Google glean from the Blockbuster Video of registrars?

Maybe Google is becoming interested in the lower end of the hosting market? GoDaddy is at roughly $1+B/year of revenue with a 5% market share. The revenue is split pretty evenly between domains and hosting, and there's obviously synergy between the two. A 5% market share netting $1+B implies an overall market of $20+B.

Google has all the pieces, but doesn't seem to have made any notable inroads in that space. They haven't made any real attempts, thus far, to compete with GoDaddy, 1&1, EIG, etc.

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