GoDaddy is the largest and most wellknown registrar out there.
From all accounts, they've lost less since this began than they gain -in a single day-.
This isn't affecting their bottom line much at all, it's just affecting their image with the techie/hacker crowd.
A vital crowd to have a good image with, but their business is literally built on taking advantage of NON-hackers -- let's be honest, how many people here have ACTUALLY bought anything but a domain from GoDaddy, and MAYBE some cheap/crappy hosting?
If you look at this specific moment in time on Tuesday, no it hasn't effected their bottom line yet, but company perception is everything and GoDaddy's company perception has gone from "gray area that some hate and some don't care about" directly into the RED.
Are any HN'er going to forget this for their next startup? Or their next contract? Or when their buddy asks them to register a domain for them?
No, we are all going to remember that as long as we don't use GoDaddy we will be fine.
That is going to cost GoDaddy a lot in the years to come. I don't think bankruptcy is around the corner, but I think we'll hear about some down sizing in a couple of years.
FWIW, I am thrilled to see the karma fairy show up and pay GoDaddy in full for years of garbage.
"Always" and "never" are particularly strong marketing words when uttered by word of mouth. Non-technical people can easily remember never to use GoDaddy, much more than "use any of these X registrars depending on what you need."
Nonsense, non-technical people will be swayed by some initial special offer, as always. This will all be forgotten about by February.
GoDaddy will just price themselves to be attractive to the vast majority, i.e. cheapskates. The 'elite' will probably also pile in by rationalising that this must be costing GoDaddy money, so by registering a domain with them they are actually costing them money.
Never underestimate the twin forces of "getting a good deal" and geeky self-deception.
Excellent point; I can even imagine some point in the distant future where a conversation along the lines of the following takes place:
"Oh you never want to use GoDaddy."
"Why?"
"They suck, use Ghandi or NameCheap"
"Right... but WHY... ?"
"There was this thing a few years back... they just suck."
"Oh ok."
How many times do you think a conversation like that took place during the early years of the iPod before it was so mainstream?
Or Ford vs Toyota... or McDonalds vs. In-and-Out... or DirecTV vs Cable back in the day.
You forget the details of the conflict, but you file away the conclusion: "XYZ sucks!" and that is how people will remember GoDaddy until they make an active effort to redefine themselves as a customer-focused company.
Which I doubt they will; they don't know how to run that company and it would be a very expensive transition.
Instead they will just fade into the future until someone else steps in and redefines them and takes them to the next level (e.g. cloud hosting / SaaS offerings) or they dry up and die.
I have purchased domain names from GoDaddy for years. And only from them, unless there was a TLD I required that they didn't offer.
Recently I started moving all of my domains to namecheap (before the SOPA shit hit the fan) for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I was being penalized by GoDaddy for aggressively SEOing my domains.
I wouldn't trust the statistics. DNS plain text data can be changed. They have a history of holding onto expired domains among other attempts to look like they have more.
Also, there's a lot of guesswork to try to gauge how much products vs customers they have.
Reference: Two sources on domains show; some gain vs 300,000 weekly loss.
Maybe, but my judgement is that while domains are relatively easy to move, various other services aren't.
It seems to me that the focus on HN and other sites is to move domains.
I'm not particularly up on GoDaddy TOS, but I imagine their not going to give refunds to prepurchased hosting. This would increase the friction involved in a total dump of GoDaddy. The customer would also have to allocate time to setup the new environments. Same with email, Dedicated and Virtual servers.
There are also SSL certificates. Again, I assume no refund, and the time it takes to gain and install a new SSL certificate from another provider would also increase the friction.
GoDaddy also provides alot of instant website tools. I'm not saying that SOPA opposers do not use these tools, but they tend to be marketed towards a non web savvy user that may not care/know about SOPA. This would reduce the effect of SOPA protests.
In summary I'd say that the tech savvy GoDaddy customer with a decent budget and the time to set up alternatives could dump all services, it's could be unreasonable to expect a total boycott of services from other GoDaddy customers.
>It seems to me that the focus on HN and other sites is to move domains.
I don't think that many readers of HN would have anything besides a domain with GoDaddy anyway.
I have ONE client with a GoDaddy hosting account. I picked up this client on oDesk last week. The GoDaddy account was pre-existing. We have been fighting GoDaddy support for the last week or so to fix an intermittent misconfiguration that other users occasionally also experience. They have heretofore not fixed it and it constitutes a serious disruption to the client's business.
GoDaddy is awful and any tech-savvy individual knows it.
They should be considered a Corporation Non-Grata.