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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

Seriously misleading title.

GoDaddy, with 50,000,000 domains, has lost almost nothing, about 1000 domains, when you factor in new registrations and new transfer-ins.

We would need the historical records to see more into this.

Hell, it might even look like their registrations and transfer-ins are up due to being in the news.

I seriously doubt that GoDaddy gives a shit about this.

Their domain business is a complete "loss leader" operation that costs them about a dollar of loss on each domain they sell.

Hosting accounts is where it counts the most for them and I can tell you few, if any, people will be transferring hosting accounts out as it's a complete pain in the ass.

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I seriously doubt that GoDaddy gives a shit about this.

If by this you mean literal outflow of domains, then I agree. But if you mean public relations impact their support of and then half ass retraction of support for SOPA then I disagree. I think the long term effects of all this calamity are something they very much care about.

In general you don't want to piss off your best customers. The type of person who owns 20+ domains is the type of person you want as a customer (lower support costs, lower cost per customer acquisition).

The person who owns 20+ domains is the type of person who probably is someone who cares about SOPA.

I don't think these numbers, really mean anything, to be honest. But I do think that pissing off the people who are the cheapest customers to acquire and support and the people who people are going to ask where to register their domains at is probably not the best business strategy long term.

If a company turns a profit of $20,000 a day, and then suddenly it turns a profit of $1 a day, do you think that is not going to catch their attention, despite not being a loss in absolute terms?

It is a huge loss in terms of day over day profits. This is attention grabbing for a business.

GoDaddy looks at day over day sales and sees a drop. It is probably the most important event that's happened to that department in months. We already know it has gotten their attention because now they are doing damage control, however disingenuous or mitigated by overriding concerns it may be.

you forget to factor in future sales.

It may be true that GoDaddy still has loads of domains but I can bet ya that a lot of it are shady websites. If GoDaddy is seen to support something that may lead to their websites shutting down, you can be sure they (and future customers) are looking elsewhere.

In other words, GoDaddy does give a shit. Is not about what they have now, is about whether they can get anymore future sales.

Not to mention renewals. I hear of a few people with hundreds of domains that don't want to renew all at once. So they are going to let them near expiration and just transfer them away as they get closer to expiry, so as to spread the cost out.

This is only what was transferred so far though. Many major sites are taking a while to transfer because they want to avoid downtime.

There is zero downtime when you transfer a domain.

That's absolutely not true if you also use the registrar for DNS. We transferred a domain away from Network Solutions a few weeks ago, and got bit by the combination of:

1. When you re-point your domain at non-NetSol servers, they momentarily point toward a server that in turn says your A record is their "business profile" default landing page. It takes a few minutes before pointing correctly at your new name server

2. Many large caching nameservers don't obey TTL; our SOA's TTL was 7200, or 3 hours, but we saw servers at RCN, BellSouth and Cox serving our old SOA nearly 24 hours later.

Together, that means that for 24 hours, some people got this lovely page: http://www.vttcorp.com/ instead of our server.

If either you, or your old provider do things right, there is no downtime at all. In your case it looks like Network Solutions kinda screwed you over.

Here's the correct recipe: a) Tell new registrar about incoming domain transfer, make him already set up nameservers. b) Set the new nameservers for your domain. c) Actually transfer the domain.

If either your old provider is nice enough to not shut down your name server as soon as he receives the transfer request (which won't benefit him in any way, because he is just helping an already leaving customer) or you follow the recipe from above, you will have zero downtime.

This wasn't even a registrar transfer, just a DNS repoint from NetSol to Route 53. Amazon was all set up before the transfer; it was NetSol's screwup (which is probably some ancient set of CGI scripts) that caused the problem, and there was no way we could have avoided it even if we had known exactly what would occur - NetSol controlled both (a) the registry data telling the root servers where to find our SOA, and (b) the name server that the old SOA pointed to.

People using GoDaddy for both registration and DNS could find themselves in exactly the same predicament, so it makes sense that they'd want to do it carefully.

I was actually unaware that people used their registrar as their DNS provider. I've personally only used GoDaddy to purchase domains and couldn't for a second thing anyone would want to use them for something as important as DNS.

Other people have mentioned having to move Email as well, but I don't understand why people don't use Google Apps which is free and stops you from having to migrate your email all over the place when you switch hosts.

The person I replied to specified "major sites". How many major sites do you know that use GoDaddy to host their DNS?

But if you're transferring web and email hosting, as I am, it takes a lot more logistical work.

The domains leaving are just the leading indicator. If they're going away, there's plenty of reason to believe that other customers, that will hurt them more, are working on the issue.

I'm switching SSL which is more complicated.

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