Rubenerd

I wanted to avoid commenting on an aggravating subject like this on Christmas Eve, but the story is developing so rapidly I feel I have little say in the matter. In short, goodbye GoDaddy.

Thoughts

GoDaddy, perhaps best known as "that site with Danica Patrick and Ella Koon on it" has been a mainstay of the domain registration business for years. I got on board in the early days of podcasting in 2004, back when The Gillmor Gang had those offer code things you could use. GANG1, GANG2 and GANG3 gave you 10% off each order, freebies and other stuff. Many other shows ran similar promotions at the time.

Anyway, for someone at the time with limited funds and tens of domains, it was a pretty sweet deal. So much so, that I put up with their overly complex site designed to up-sell me as much as they could. My only regret was they didn't support the .sg TLD (hey, I made a rhyme! :D), which meant I had to have an account with someone else as well.

I have to admit, that horrid tranquilised elephant shooting news made me sick to my stomach, but it was the way they treated a friend of mine over SSL certificates that first led me to question their technical and customer service merits. Despite certificates being listed at a certain price, renewing them is substantially more, and as far as he could tell they made no reasonable effort to make this clear to him. Steve Gibson of Security Now had a similar issue with them a few months back.

Of course, there was the recent DNS blocking controversy, and their terms of service that allow them to suspend or revoke domains at their will — which they've done. Their initial support for SOPA, and subsequent PR backflip has done nothing to help their cause.

Press

From Talking Points Memo:

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith’s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

“If companies like GoDaddy.com are exempt, why aren’t non-commercial domain servers exempt?” Polis asked.

And from that now infamous Pastebin upload from Anomymous:

[..] Bob Parsons and GoDaddy have made news, this time for announcing their support for the Internet Censorship bill SOPA, which experts have said would destroy the Internet as we know it, adopting a system of government censorship similar to that of Iran and China. GoDaddy had stated previously that it believed SOPA was “a welcome step in the right direction”, and have since continued to voice support for the controversial bill. Link

Bob Parsons, you disgust us. From your documented cruelty to animals, to your outright support of the oppressive Internet censorship bill SOPA, you have attracted the attention of Anonymous.

It's even attracted the attention of Jimmy Wales:

I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us.

And even this weird guy called Ruben Schade:

So GoDaddy flipped on their #SOPA support? I’m still not renewing my domains with them.

Moving On

I'd already disabled automatic renewal on most of my GoDaddy domains back in January this year, so next week I'll be finally moving off them entirely. I'm so angry I'm almost willing to do it now just to join the exodus.

Not sure whether I'll put the rest of my domains onto Hover or my private .sg registrar, I've had positive experience with both. I'll have to run the numbers after New Years.

As for those that have endorsed them in the past, me thinks a revision is called for.