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Comment by dmerfield | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: Has anyone in the HN community actually bought anything from GoDaddy?

I find it difficult to imagine that any HN reader would. Was there ever an era when GoDaddy's reputation and service were respectable?

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I have a domain that's (shamefully) hosted on GoDaddy. Worse, I had the domain on a better registrar and I transferred it to godaddy.

I needed a registrar that was able to handle IPv6 glue records, which was rare at the time. (The TUCOWS-backed services only got this capability last month! Before that you had to email TUCOWS and have them manually add the AAAA records to your glue, which I didn't consider a solution.) For all their many flaws, GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.

I suppose by now some of the other registrars probably have gotten their act together. Anybody with experience running IPv6-hosted nameservers have recommendations?

I believe name.com does ipv6 glue

For years, yes - years ago they were cheaper than anyone else and no worse than anyone else. It wasn't until last summer, I think, that I finally moved the last domain off of GoDaddy.

If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.

You're forgetting the people and companies that bought domains back in the early 2000s who now have dozens or hundreds of domains on GoDaddy. People stay because it's easier than transferring. A lot of people still use them even for new domains because they're still the cheapest game in town.

You are giving the HN users too much credit.

While I would never use them for domains, I did buy a $12 SSL cert back when everyone else was charging hundreds of dollars for the same thing. Before someone points me to a free SSL service, this was for an enterprise class application that was more about security theater than actual security. I was able to get away with GoDaddy instead of Verisign, etc. because my client used GoDaddy for their domains – go figure.

People makes mistakes. I bought some domains from GoDaddy. As they expire i'm transfering them to namecheap.

You don't have to wait until they expire! Transferring adds another year to your current registration, and you don't lose anything at all, unless you bought hosting at GoDaddy.

For basic website hosting, I've been very happy with HostGator. For about $7 a month you get unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains. It takes care of DNS for your sites (just point your registrar nameserver information at HostGator's nameservers), has SSH access, provides unlimited MySQL databases, and has a pretty nice interface.

I signed up with GoDaddy 6 years ago and have been using them since, stuck with them because it was easy but I want to move my stuff to Canada cause I know its safer here.

Yep. I registered my first domain with them about a decade ago. I've finally moved on to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net (don't really like their weird account funding thing, though) for a couple of new domains last year.

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