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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

Mind blown that:

-Some ~40% (stupid pie chart) don't have an SSL cert, but almost all have login/registration page (4 out of 4 that I randomly picked had a login/registration page)

-So many people use GoDaddy as a registrar (they were horrible before SOPA)

-That startups use AWS despite its poor cost/performance

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I can address two of those points (one for my company and another for YC companies in general):

- SSL: We're on that list as HireHive.com, which had a login and used to have an SSL cert, however, we shut it down (i.e., it just redirects now) and now run Hackruiter.com and HackerSchool.com, where our cert is now. We never had logins online without a proper cert. The data from OP is wrong.

- So many YC companies use Amazon because Amazon gives large cash credits to YC companies meaning it's effectively free to use for the first couple years. Also, many of us are built on services built on AWS (e.g., we use Dotcloud).

EDIT: Typo.

I'd say thats money well spent by Amazon to get all the up and coming companies onto their cloud.

Aside from being admitted to YC, is there a formal process to request AWS credits for budding startups...?

I have no idea, sorry. If you know anyone who works there, I'd try that route. Otherwise, you could try asking for a deal here: http://aws.amazon.com/contact-us/aws-sales/

It's worth noting that the people hosting on Heroku have been lumped into the AWS stats. Which is even more expensive performance wise, but has added benefits over self maintained servers.

Not sure about now, but for the summer 2010 batch, Amazon handed out a good chunk of AWS credits (enough to cover the hosting costs of most early stage startups for a while).

Interested to hear about AWS cost/performance too!

There's been a lot of comparison of AWS's cost per performance compared to more bare-metal cloud solutions or dedicated servers.

It's been covered a lot of times...here's one that just appeared on HN a few days ago: http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-...

You can easily get 10x the performance for the same cost.

I'm not saying AWS isn't awesome...I'm saying it's much, much more expensive, and I'm surprised that startups full of tech people don't manage their own servers.

You can rent 20 AWS on-demand large instances for less money than a junior engineer. If you don't need a lot of machines and AWS saves you any time at all over dedicated hosting, then it's worth it.

Ok, how do you manage your servers?

I'm just very surprised that more startups don't have people who both enjoy the experience and are good at it.

Also, people make it sound like EC2 is management-free. It isn't. It might take less time, which is important, and the problems might be different, but it isn't a fire-and-forget solution.

I enjoy it, I just don't see how you could do that and get even close to the price of a VPS. In other words: colocation is expensive for a startup.

I agree on the SSL & GoDaddy, but AWS? What poor performance?

I think he didn't mean "cost and performance" but rather "cost per performance".

The IO performance of EBS is terrible.

what's horrible about GoDaddy? I used them for domain registration and DNS hosting, and everything went smoothly. The only annoying part, is how they try to sell additional goodies along the domain registration.

the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)

Seriously? Aside from all of the normal things that are wrong with GoDaddy, where have you been for the past few weeks?

the parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA. I was wondering what exactly was horrible. It was all plain and easy for me.

I think he's referring to their recent support for SOPA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3383564

the parent comment refers to them being horrible before SOPA

Ok, maybe it's more to do with stuff like their CEO gunning down elephant's - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-godaddy...

that's quite bad for the company reputation, but I still don't see any argumentation for they were horrible before SOPA

That's because you're probably looking at things purely from a technical/operational perspective (i.e. can they register my domain easily), whereas the parent commenter is taking into account more general reports about the way GoDaddy does business.

Just because a company is technically competent doesn't mean people want to do business with them.

Exactly..and the use of sex to sell.

ok, point taken, thanks :)

any advice for an alternative registrar with free DNS hosting? Preferably one with native IPv6 reachable DNS servers (which is not the case at godaddy)

Gandi http://www.gandi.net/ has a pretty good reputation, with free DNS hosting. No IPv6 reachable nameservers, however. If you want IPv6 reachable DNS servers, Hurricane Electric offers free DNS hosting https://dns.he.net/; they are a big supporter of IPv6 and so offer a variety of free services to help get it off the ground.

thanks, I'll give Gandi a try with my next domain. I am using some free services from Hurricane Electric, particularly an IPv6 tunnel and also a dynamic DNS after dyndns.com pissed me off.

for production domains, I would still prefer a DNS hosting that is somehow paid for (with godaddy it was included in the registration price).

Stories like the following were more common than they should have been:

http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-...

They were. I've dealt with them on one occasion (had one client insist on using them as a host/registrar), and they are technically incompetent. We've had numerous outages with this client's site, and had one problem that their technical support staff were simply unable to solve after numerous phone calls (they ended up blaming it on the site, which was running on WordPress - hardly an oddity). It ended up being a very simple problem/solution, which I discovered after spending an hour or so researching it.

This topic comes up every time I run this report.

The reasons why people don't like GoDaddy are covered in both of the previous discussions on this report. Well worth reading!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080469 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=746386

The older reports are broken, for me at least. They show the same stats as this year's report.

Older reports are in the git commit history on the GitHub project for domain-profiler.

Thanks.

Someone posted MySpace passwords to Full-Disclosure, which therefore made it into several list archives. MySpace complained, and GoDaddy suspended the domain name of an extremely well-known archive, apparently without any investigation or contact: http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0. This was eventually cleared up, but WTF?

  the front page ladies weren't too much of disturbance either :)

If that's what makes you choose a registrar then you need to seriously grow up. Attitudes like this are why we have so many problems with sexism in the tech world.

no, actually I've seen one of the ladies too many times during the crankygeeks.com shows, and that annoying advertising... probably it worked? :)

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