While we have GoDaddy's attention | Hacker News Reader

While we have GoDaddy's attention

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55 pointsdavewiner36 comments

(Sorry -- a little bit of crankiness ahead. I'll try to moderate my tone accordingly.)

OK, I've flagged this. Not only are the GoDaddy articles on the front page here getting out of hand, but this article adds literally nothing to any discussion anywhere. I'm sure the author is a wonderful and intelligent person, but this particular article is completely useless.

In particular, I am completely underwhelmed by anybody that says they're writing a blog post about a company "as a warning to others", or that "there ought to be a consumer reports for ______". Here's the thing: there are already a bajillion boo-hoo stories out there about GoDaddy. They have a terrible track record. (If someone is actively doing any business at all with GoDaddy, I immediately have a clue about how long they've been in the industry, and how deeply, and their level of expertise.)

But nobody bothers to do background research on companies like this! When this guy went and decided to do business with GoDaddy, he obviously didn't bother to read any of the other stuff online about them first. What good would a Consumer Reports have done him? He'd've ignored it too! The people registering 35,000 domains on GoDaddy tomorrow also won't read his post, nor will they likely read any of the other stuff out there about GoDaddy.

Instead, they'll think they've got an idea for something, say to themselves, "I need to register a domain!", wonder how to go about that, Google it, and -- "Oh yeah, GoDaddy! They say they have great support! They say they're cheap! And oh look, boobs! I've heard of them..."

I'm sorry you got ripped off by a company that ripped off thousands of other people before you. Let this be a $5 lesson to do your homework next time. :-)

I don't understand this defeatist attitude, just because other people have complained and nothing has changed doesn't mean that people shouldn't continue complaining, especially a prominent blogger like Dave Wiener. If people keep shouting into the interwebs maybe something will happen, maybe the next registrar searcher will find this article in google or maybe enough people pull out the pitchforks that it forces GoDaddy to at least pretends it's changing. We don't have to live in the crappy world that we do, we can change it.

This is almost as much an indictment on the competition as it is GoDaddy. The fact is, marketing and branding can still sell a lot of product (even if the marketing is goofy and the product is sub-par). It's still not even clear to me which other vendors we should be considering. Namecheap, I guess.

On day 4 or 5 at Namecheap and very unimpressed with just about everything except the pricing is decent. My site has been down for about 12 hours because I had a number of issues trying to get nameservers/DNS configured. Now I've spent a few hours trying to log in to web hosting.

My guess is that all these registrars and discount hosting providers cobble together a variety of third party services, offshore support and end up with a frankenstein customer experience.

It's not as black and white as you claim.

GoDaddy is the largest and best-known registrar. For people who don't know much about something, picking a large and familiar option is a common heuristic. That feels safe.

What will make it feel unsafe is frequently hearing bad things about them. Novice domain purchasers won't often read Hacker News or know who Dave Winer is, but they could well have a friend who does. Articles like this (and repeated Hacker News discussions about GoDaddy sucking) make it more likely that average consumers will hear enough negative buzz that they'll pick somebody else. I'm all for it.

Actually the piece wasn't so much a warning to others (I was actually referring to another piece that did that, maybe you just skimmed my post and missed that) as it was to say that backing off SOPA support wasn't enough. That it was time for GoDaddy to change, the way other companies had changed, from crisis.

I cited the example of how Johnson & Johnson reacted to the hacking of Tylenol in the 80s. It's often cited as a textbook example of how to do it. They instituted reforms, visible ones, that made it virtually impossible for their product to be tampered with. No one demanded it of them, but they saw it as the only way out of the mess. They had lost huge market share due to the scare. But a year later they were right back on top, because they had re-invested in their brand.

GoDaddy, like it or not, is the biggest registrar. And if they can reform their service to get rid of the fraud (again, read the piece, I don't want to rewrite it here) they can lead the rest of the registrar industry. Which is a very important part of the open web. Which is part of a larger context wehere more and more of the activity on the net is going into corporate-owned silos.

I think if you read the piece carefully and didn't shoot from the hip so much, you'd see that you had mis-read. Probably due to skimming more than anything, imho.

Also, to answer your implicit question -- I went with GoDaddy originally because a lot of people I respected were using it, and I was paying $35 per year at the registrar I was using, and could save a significant amount of money using them. And further, at the time, there really wasn't much of an alternative. Only now are "no nonsense" registrars coming on-line. The best of which is hover.com, though I've used gandi.net and like them, also namecheap, but I don't like how they're "marketing" using SOPA as a selling point. I like that almost as little as GoDaddy thinking they can support SOPA without pissing off their customers.

I did skim your article previously, so I just sat down with a big cup of tea and re-read it more carefully, and as freshly as I could.

And I still stand by my earlier statements.

As you say, GoDaddy is the biggest registrar. They are already leading the registrar industry; they just aren't leading it in the ways that we'd like them to. They are wildly successful, by nearly every practical measure of a business. They have absolutely no incentive to change.

This current PR flap isn't going to make them change, either. In 18 months, nobody will even remember that this happened. I can feel pretty confident about statements like that because GoDaddy has had really ugly PR issues in the past -- though, admittedly, none of them as large as this one -- and most of those aren't even included in the wikipedia page on GoDaddy, let alone the hilariously short-term memories of people in the technology sector.

GoDaddy has been making transfers difficult ever since they opened their doors; they were part of the whole domain tasting / frontrunning issue years ago when there were multiple accusations that GoDaddy was leaking their domain search information even as they were getting in a public fight with Network Solutions over the practice; they've been up-selling customers as a business strategy forever; they've been judge, jury, and executioner in domain censorship since the very beginning; they have had a terrible track record in the security of the servers and of their control panel system since the beginning, a record that still continues even now; their website interface has never ever looked decent; and Bob Parsons has been outspoken in his political and moral repugnance for years.

Yet, you still did business with them.

I instead did business with Register4Less shortly after Network Solutions lost exclusivity specifically because they promised not to do things that way, and they've kept their promise. (It also helped that they supported Illiad back when UserFriendly was a daily read.) You complain about the amount you were paying to another registrar, but R4L has been about $14/year since shortly after they opened. I can no longer recommend them because they've made some serious technical errors recently and haven't updated their software or their business in a long time. But, it is really really wrong to say that "no nonsense" registrars are "only now" coming on-line.

You just didn't know about them.

So, that's why I'm really skeptical that your blog post is going to have any impact whatsoever on GoDaddy's business. I think that the current PR mess for GoDaddy speaks more to Reddit's considerable influence than anything else. While I hope that this ends up being the papercut that kills GoDaddy -- and I'll celebrate with a steak dinner the day that they die -- I just don't think they're going to change, because they don't have to, because people don't bother to look closely enough at the history of companies that they choose to do business with.

Tylenol in the 80's is a poor example to bring to your position. That (overblown) problem involved child safety at a time when "think of the children" was just becoming a cultural disease in the U.S., and the FDA or other regulatory bodies might have become involved.

I wonder if Fyodor now regrets selling NoDaddy to GoDaddy...

Well, I can't respond to all this, but I did think you should read about the seven people who were killed by Tylenol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders

So far I don't think anyone has been killed by SOPA.

Something to think about.

Absolutely no disrespect intended, but Tylenol is still a non-sequitur. Would you rather discuss them or GoDaddy?

...we've lost our focus on the real problem.

This isn't internic. It's just a company in a commodity market whose service and policies people seem to dislike, but are about as far from a monopoly as you can get. They are relevant because we keep talking about them.

GoDaddy, like a bunch of other giant non-monopoly companies such as banks, cable co's, phone companies, etc. steal from their customers with fraudulent nickle and dime charges. Happens all the time and it collectively costs consumers billions of dollars a year. I'm confused by what your objection is with a prominent blogger pointing this out. Should people just keep quiet and let other customers be defrauded?

What the GP means is that the domain registrar business is what Scott Adams calls a "confusopoly". Just like banks and telco companies, registrars know that they can't compete on price alone, so instead they convolute their products and offerings as much as possible just to make it look as differentiation, but the main purpose is to make sure that the customer has no way to objectively compare two companies.

As much as people are talking about GoDaddy and namecheap lately, no one managed to find a cheap registrar. Consumer opinion will always mention quality of support or the political stance of one company or another, but not one single soul managed to show me one registrar that has low prices for domain registration and renewal and SSL certificates. It's always one or the other.

Namecheap's $10 for a domain, $10 for a renewal, and has single-domain Comodo certs for $8.95 (wildcard certs for $89, which isn't the cheapest but is below average).

I'm pretty sure that's a "cheap registrar".

And yet, if you go to GoDaddy, you can find domain names for $1.99, and transfers for $7.99.

With namecheap, they list as $10, but you can get the price even lower and use the code "SOPASucks"*

* Conditions apply. Conditions also apply.

All of these "conditions apply" kind of makes the point of my argument. For every $8.95 cert offer, there is another offer where you get a free cert by purchasing the domain name, or by transferring from some competitor, or by renewing some existing domain.

It is a true confusopoly. These schemes to extract more money from consumers may be slightly more or less scammy, but ALL domain registrars engage in these practices.

The sad part of it is that in the end, I don't know if I'd be better off being scammed into paying an extra $4/month for some service I'm not using, or being "socially conscious" and paying more to a company that does not pull these tricks, but that can only keep itself in business by charging higher prices.

I don't think you're using "cheap registrar" in the same way as I would think most people would. $10 is cheap. It's a lunch. If you are hunting for "the best deal," it is virtually guaranteed that you're eventually going to get burned at some point or another. Find a registrar who's not breaking the bank and who doesn't act like a dick to you, and stick with 'em. Your confusion seems self-inflicted.

(Namecheap actually does give you a free $8.95-level SSL cert with a domain registration.)

  1) Go to namecheap home-page.
  2) Try to find out how much it costs to *renew* a domain  after the first year.
  3) Realize that they are also not the masters of clarity and transparency.

No domain registrar is willing to compete on price (or premium services) alone. Not one of them is willing to put a simple price table on their front-page, and stick to it. There is always some coupon or bundled offer (can I get a discount if I don't want a SSL cert?) or volume discount, or reduction on the new ".yagni" TLD...

After all that, people just do what you say and "stick with someone who doesn't act like a dick to them". But that doesn't mean that the general confusion isn't there. Quite the contrary: it is working so well that you don't even notice it.

What I want is a domain registrar version of http://prgmr.com/xen/

I accept your point but reject the generalization. Not all registrars have embraced the prevailing approach you've identified - we've embraced exactly the opposite and work extremely hard to be as transparent and uncomplicated as possible.

I don't have a source handy, but there was an article circulating a few years ago describing the "evilness" of complication. The contention was that businesses that work hard to complicate situations for consumers are fundamentally "bad" and that the long-term win lies with simplifying complexity (the author made a distinction between complexity and complication - i.e. math is complex and best expressed in the least complicated manner.)

Anyways, I just wanted to point out that not everyone is working a variation of "the bait and switch" :)

> steal from their customers with fraudulent nickle and dime charges

whoa now, that's quite the claim. I'm no GoDaddy fan, but come on.

This claim was made in the article, in case you didn't read it.

If anything, that's generous.

People have already talked about the confusion the generate with pricing, upselling, and renewing. But the other day I got an email that said:

"You are the administrator on record for the following domains listed for sale at Go Daddy Auctions:"

And it listed a domain I've had for 15 years, one that isn't even listed with GoDaddy. I thought somebody had hijacked my domain.

Turns out it was all a scam. They were just trying to get me to use their assorted services. They said that "someone" had listed my domain there, but couldn't say who or when. When I asked to be taken off their mailing lists, they told me there was no list to be taken off of, but that yes, they might send me more bogus notices at any time. When I asked to speak to a supervisor, the guy flat-out refused. Eventually he called me names and hung up on me.

As far as I'm concerned, they're assholes and scammers. They compete on marketing and the ability to confuse the rubes. I can only hope that Jon Postel's vengeful spirit haunts them unto suicide.

> Should people just keep quiet and let other customers be defrauded?

No, they should talk the damage SOPA will do and companies that consumers should work with that currently provide positive experience.

Godaddy has had tremendous press over the last few days. All most people know about them now is that they sell domains. Can I buy domains somewhere else? Is there a company better than godaddy? Why is everyone talking about godaddy instead of this other company?

Would it kill Dave to tell us the name of the add-on service in question?

I linked to it from that piece. Here it is again, to save you the trouble of going back to the post.

http://scripting.com/images/2011/10/26/goDaddyConfirmation.g...

My bad.

As a competitor of godaddy's that charges what some, no actually most, believe is an exorbitant rate for domains (compared to godaddy) we hear every day from people who want to know why we charge what we do. Why? Because we don't sell you things you don't need and lure you in with low pricing, loss leaders or bait and switch.

Here's some background. Each and every registrar, whether they are selling 1000 domains a year or a million pays exactly the same for .com/net/ domains. The variable cost is identical and essentially set by Verisign/PIR/Afilias and ICANN. As much as large registrars want you to believe they make it up on volume that isn't what's going on. They are selling you extra services and things that you don't need. There is simply no way to make money in domains at the prices out there unless you do that. It's that simple. Now I'm not even talking about the pre checked boxes that Dave is referring to. I'm just talking about taking advantage of people who don't understand what they need and what they should buy. (Like getting privacy protection on a domain used in a business as only one example under the guise of protecting you against spam and protecting privacy!). Or worthless cctld's

Now of course there is nothing new about this. It's similar to many things in technology. Such as selling a computer and making people think they need a large fast processor even if the are only surfing the web or using the computer for email (as only one example).

(Note: On .org and .info PIR/Afilias sometimes run rebates if a registrar exceeds a certain level of domains from the previous year or time period. But as everyone knows the bulk of domains are .com)

So what is that variable cost?

Domain ICANN registrar cost, variable

.com - $7.34 + .18 icann = $7.52

.net - $4.65 + .18 icann = $4.83

.org - $7.21 + .18 icann = $7.39

.info - $5.75 new + .18 icann = $5.93

.info - $6.75 renewal + .18 icann = $6.93

1/15/2012 Price change

.com - $7.85 + .18 icann = $8.03

.net - $5.11 + .18 icann = $5.29

.org (sorry don't have this right at hand as I am traveling)

.info (sorry don't have this right at hand as I am traveling)

----FIXED BELOW---

Ongoing fixed costs, in addition to other obvious fixed costs (hosting, customer service etc.) and not including startup ICANN fees (as an aside the startup fees are pretty low now. Back when we started we had to post a $100,000 bond which essentially meant putting $100k in a bank which we couldn't touch).

Icann Quarterly Fee, with drop pool: 1114.254 = $4457.00/year

Icann Quarterly Fee, w/o drop pool: 371.414 = $1485.64/yr

(If you are grabbing names in the batch pool or essentially attempting multiple name registrations but with only a small percentage of resulting registrations relative to the overall registration rate.)

Annual Registrar Acc Fee: $4000.00 ($1000*4)

---Additional Variable Costs---

Additionally, keep in mind that domain orders are typically paid for by credit card. So in addition to the above the registrar is paying a few % points on their cost of the domain.

So for example if the base cost of a .com is (on 1/15/12) $8.03 with a 2.5% cc fee we are talking about another .20 or a total of 8.23 in cost.

Lastly, registrars have to keep money on deposit with the various registries to equal the amount of registrations that they will do in a month.

So if they are doing $10,000 of domain registrations in a month they would have to keep maybe an amount on deposit with (for just .com .net) Verisign of, say, $6000 to $15000 depending on the time of the month.

So there is the opportunity cost of that money.

That money that is tied up that you can't do anything with and that you are either forgoing opportunity cost of borrowing. If borrowing (assuming you can) I guess you could assign a cost of 3.5% to 5% for this on top of the domain cost as an additional variable cost.

That's off the top. I'm probably missing a thing or two and will update the above.

Sorry to disagree, but we've used omnis.com for years with comparable pricing to GoDaddy and no upselling attempts ever!

Just tried to start a registration at Omnis and they immediately try to sell domain privacy protection at .99 per month. That's almost $12 per year!

"Add Domain Name Privacy Protection for $0.99 a month? Domain Name Privacy Protection will STOP spammers, telemarketers, and identity theft criminals from gaining access to your contact information. Without Domain Name Privacy Protection, your contact information is available to the public."

Spammers? Use a gmail account for the email.

Telemarketers? I have thousands of domain names all using the same phone number and rarely receive a telemarketing call (not saying this can't happen of course). If you're worried about that get a google voice phone number.

"identity theft criminals"? Totally playing on fear (especially considering many people have their contact info on their website.) And you can always use another address in your whois as well w/o paying for privacy protection.

So in other words they are willing to make .95 total per year for the base domain but want to charge close to $12 per year for something that essentially has no base cost? That's my point exactly.

But of course if you are well informed and fully know what you are getting by reading beyond the marketing speak of course you can save money (as you can by knowing the ropes with anything.)

Also you can verify this but I don't believe that Omnis gives free web and email forwarding which would require you to buy a hosting plan unless you were knowledgeable enough to know how to get around this.

Assuming the author submitted this, the sentence starting with "On what planet is a customer" appears to be a fragment.

Might not be the best contructed sentence, but it's a complete one. "On what planet is a customer, expressing a very clear wish, asking you to do something for them."

But it doesn't make any sense. It's like a final clause was left off.

As with most other things, it probably makes a bit more sense if you read the other sentences around it. In any case my apologies for writing awkward (and to some confusing) prose.

"On what planet is a customer, expressing a very clear wish, asking you to do something for them."

That doesn't make any sense on its own. Expressing a clear wish for customer service to do something is asking them to do something for you.

The preceding two sentences appear to establish that you did ask them to remove it for you:

It wasn't so much that I had the charge, but that it was almost impossible to get them to remove it. I got in contact with their support people and they said I had to do it myself, they couldn't do it "for" me.

The following four sentences further establish that you were asking them to do something for you:

That's what you get paid for. To do things on my behalf. Hopefully you make enough money. If not, you should just charge more, not do these horrible ripoffs.

So, the sentence in question makes no sense.

Let's say you win and a consensus emerges that "the sentence in question makes no sense." What then?

Are you kidding? I assume you're the author. Why wouldn't you fix it?

Really, how can that sentence possibly make sense as it stands? I tried to provide constructive criticism and received only downvotes and a snide dismissal with no explanation of how it could possibly be correct.

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