# Anyone moving off GoDaddy?



## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

I didn't realize transferring hosting and domains was such a pain, but think it's about time with their views on SOPA, plus I always did hate their website.

Anyone else moving everything over to another provider?


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## Earl Bonovich (Nov 15, 2005)

No plans to... I just use them as a registrar anyway.


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## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

I moved off when they jacked up my rates on my domains last year. Went to Dreamhost, where I hosted anyway, and I can't beat the total overall price.


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

GoDaddy seems to be censoring (deleting) any posts on their Facebook page related to SOPA. How ironic... or not.


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

I wonder how many people realize that GoDaddy will be redirecting users away from their hosted website if there is any accusation of breaching this ludicrous act.

We are a registrar and website hoster and often have to deal with GoDaddy customers and GoDaddy set ups. 

What worries me is that any online provider who supports this bill is either (a) being paid or (b) doesnt understand the implications - in which case they should not be in the business.

My only other thought is that they think that if the bill goes through and peoples sites start being shut down that they can coerce those people to host with them somehow.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

I'm not sure I understand why some of the companies that are listed as supporters would really take a public stand for it? Especially ones like Dollar General and CVS. Just because of their own trademarks and such?


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> I'm not sure I understand why some of the companies that are listed as supporters would really take a public stand for it? Especially ones like Dollar General and CVS. Just because of their own trademarks and such?


Politics and lobbying.

Give me your support for this bill and I will support/lobby for the special interest bill you want..... aka you scratch my back and I will scratch yours


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

I have just seen a list of 40 internet companies who have publicly come out and opposed SOPA - looks like GoDaddy is on its own. Could be a huge PR disaster (wonder if they have Reed Hastings advising them :lol

AOL, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Linkedin, Twitter, Mozilla, eBay, Wikipedia to name a few.


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## Drew2k (Aug 16, 2006)

Per @willw on Twitter here's a big Reddit thread with resources for folks moving off of godaddy...

http://redd.it/nmnie


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

Drew2k said:


> Per @willw on Twitter here's a big Reddit thread with resources for folks moving off of godaddy...
> 
> http://redd.it/nmnie


Cheezeburger's CEO has said that they will pull all 1000 of their domains off GoDaddy if they dont reverse their support.

I am still at a loss as to how anyone in our industry can think this is a good idea?


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## carlsbad_bolt_fan (May 18, 2004)

I still have my domains there, and used to have my web & email hosted there. But when I started getting emails sent back because GoDaddy's servers were being blacklisted and messages wouldn't arrive until hours after they were sent to me, I moved over to hostgator.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

While I may not agree with the methods, does anyone disagree that piracy is a huge issue that needs to be addressed? It almost seems like some of you may oppose it just so you can keep pirating intellectual property.


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

CCarncross said:


> While I may not agree with the methods, does anyone disagree that piracy is a huge issue that needs to be addressed? It almost seems like some of you may oppose it just so you can keep pirating intellectual property.


I agree with the fact that piracy needs to be stopped. We write software and make sure we do what we can to protect it.

And I agree that the DMCA is useless. But this is worse. Stanford Law have come out and said it is anticonstitutional.

You do realize that under this proposed act I can shut down DBStalk? I dont have to prove anything, I just have to file a complaint. And the owners (Chris) and hosting company will also be liable. Just on my say so.


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

From GoDaddy's Facebook page:

Go Daddy no longer supports SOPA legislation. Click here to find out more - http://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/release-view.aspx?news_item_id=378&isc=smfb2


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## Drew2k (Aug 16, 2006)

Wow... the power of public "persuasion" (read: sites migrating like mad away from godaddy!)


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## Drew2k (Aug 16, 2006)

I do love the power of social media... the first I heard of the "Leave Go Daddy" day was on Twitter, and now Go Daddy is course-correcting. I do love it...


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

Drew2k said:


> Wow... the power of public "persuasion" (read: sites migrating like mad away from godaddy!)


Yep. And yet another example of the power of Social Media. Just like FedEx's box throwing incident, PayPal not allowing donations to a charity, etc etc.


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## maartena (Nov 1, 2010)

My wife still has 1 domain registered with GoDaddy, and it will be moved soon. Reason being has more to do with their CEO, that went to Africa to hunt and shot and killed an Elephant. That doesn't sit well with me, and it REALLY does not sit well with my wife.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4235670...o-kills-elephant-videotapes-act/#.TvTP-_nnttA

And with their views on SOPA, it has pretty much sealed the deal. I will never do business with them again.


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

From GoDaddy:



> Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.
> 
> ......
> 
> In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.


In other words... they do support it but wont say so because they are losing so many customers in 24hrs.

And they removed the blog posts as they can show up in search engines in months to come and they dont want people to find out....


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## maartena (Nov 1, 2010)

CCarncross said:


> While I may not agree with the methods, does anyone disagree that piracy is a huge issue that needs to be addressed? It almost seems like some of you may oppose it just so you can keep pirating intellectual property.


Piracy IS an issue that needs to be addressed. But I got to tell you..... since the release of iTunes a number of years ago, I spend an average of about $25 a month between me and my wife on new music, when I just went the Napster/Kazaa route before that.

The reason? The fact you can buy a few good songs and not have to buy the whole album, and at a good price. I love to support known-but-not-so-famous-artists by buying their work, and iTunes makes it easy. I can easily burn them to CD's for the car, and the music plays on a variety of devices I have.

But the way some companies are going about it, is all wrong. DRM is my biggest issue, and if something has DRM on it, not allowing me to make a copy of music for my car, or for the back-seat DVD player, I won't buy it. I want to buy 1 movie for my household, and be allowed to make as many copies as I like for the different devices I own. One for the car, because carrying the original DVD in the hot california sun will destroy it on a hot day. When I travel, I want to be able to put 25 movies or so on my laptop, so I can watch them in other countries whose language on TV I don't understand. And if I take public transport, I wouldn't mind watching some video on my phone while traveling from A to B.

And that's my problem. I don't want to buy a DVD that I am not allowed to copy for my car, not allowed to rip for my travel laptop (who wants to lug around 25 DVD's?), and not allowed to convert to mobile video format for my phone. And this is why I download movies sometimes.... not because I don't want to pay for them, but because what I can buy..... is often crippled with DRM that doesn't allow me to move it between devices WITHIN MY OWN HOUSEHOLD. A downloaded copy..... can be watched on any of my devices, including from a central media server that both of my TV's connect to.

Piracy is not going to go away by introducing more efforts to stop it, but by introducing better, more liberal, non-DRM infected methods of distributing movies and other material.


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

Ouch.



> That move proved to be too late for a number of prominent Go Daddy customers, however, including Wikipedia, which coincidentally announced today that it will be moving all of its domain names away from Go Daddy due to its stance on SOPA.


Link - http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/23/godaddy-pulls-support-for-sopa-amidst-backlash-too-late-to-sati/


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

"F1 Fan" said:


> You do realize that under this proposed act I can shut down DBStalk? I dont have to prove anything, I just have to file a complaint. And the owners (Chris) and hosting company will also be liable. Just on my say so.


I do think they would have 5 days to appeal.

Part of the problem, the way I understand the bill, it would be enforced on the DNS server level. Which means servers outside the US could still provide the IP, or you just go directly to the IP address. This will do nothing to stop piracy, if someone wants to pirate music, they'd just connect by IP address.

The other issue is this is one of the cases where they can say "you can't possibly be for piracy", just like in previous bills that they used certain pornography as an example. It's not the content that they say they want to prevent or protect, it's how they go about it, or how far it can be taken.

Even the Business Software Alliance has concerns.


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

Sigh .. I'm not leaving GoDaddy. It's worked great as a service and I sure as heck don't give them enough money to make a meaningful difference either way. So, I'm going with the bang for the buck and sticking with what I've got.


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## trh (Nov 3, 2007)

F1 Fan said:


> You do realize that under this proposed act I can shut down DBStalk? I dont have to prove anything, I just have to file a complaint. And the owners (Chris) and hosting company will also be liable. Just on my say so.


First - 'you' have to be the US Justice Department OR the copyright holder to do so. And from a PC World article:


> The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

Piracy will always exist. However if an industry has rampant piracy then they need to realize that their business model needs to change.


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## Marlin Guy (Apr 8, 2009)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...rces-godaddy-to-drop-its-support-for-sopa.ars

_Under intense pressure from an Internet-wide boycott, domain registrar GoDaddy has given the open Internet an early Christmas present: it's dropping its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act. The change was announced in a statement sent to Ars Technica:

Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation-but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

GoDaddy's embarrassing climbdown took barely 24 hours. The boycott started on Thursday on reddit (an Ars sister site), but it quickly spread to the broader Internet. GoDaddy's competitors began offering special deals with promo codes like "SopaSucks" to entice GoDaddy switchers.

Initially, GoDaddy was defiant. In a statement emailed to Ars Technica Thursday evening, the company said "Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business."

But this reaction only enraged GoDaddy's customers. And evidently, the impact on their business began to be more obvious on Friday._


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

trh said:


> First - 'you' have to be the US Justice Department OR the copyright holder to do so. And from a PC World article:


Yup, just like with the current law.... except that you can go an ask You Tube and other sites that were told by the courts to remove material even though the complainant was not the copyright holder.

Regardless of the specifics of who is who. Are you sure that you are happy that the government can censor a whole site/domain based on a small amount of possible content infringement that the owner had no responsibility for? If you are (and this has been shown to be anticonstitutional - which is worse than unconstitutional) then you wont complain when they take away other constitutional rights that you do care about?


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> I do think they would have 5 days to appeal.
> 
> Part of the problem, the way I understand the bill, it would be enforced on the DNS server level. Which means servers outside the US could still provide the IP, or you just go directly to the IP address. This will do nothing to stop piracy, if someone wants to pirate music, they'd just connect by IP address.
> 
> ...


It wont be at the DNS server level. It will be at the ICANN level (currently under Verisign control).

For example, I run our own servers and domain name servers for lots of domains. But those name servers (which hold the dns for other servers) and their ip addresses have to be registered with ICANN and are the first lookup on the chain. The nameservers will be overridden. So it will be blocked everywhere.

This is a major part of my companys business and we are looking closely at this.

I despise piracy. As I have said before, we write software and I want paying for what we sell (we give lots away for free and discount too but it is our choice when and to whom).

Someone came up with a scenario about how to stop pirates and this works. But they forgot all the "what ifs" which affect everyone. But more than that, this is about censorship and first amendment rights. Nothing has to be proven, just the same as now. I have seen You Tube and other content pulled because of complaints by non-copyright holders.

As you said, someone is touting this as "if you are against it you must be for piracy" which is about as stupid as the bill itself.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

> Hosting and domain registrar company Go Daddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in the past two days due to the company's wishy-washy stance on the Stop Online Piracy Act.


http://venturebeat.com/2011/12/24/godaddy-domain-loss/


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## Mark Holtz (Mar 23, 2002)

If I am unable to run a perl script as a cron job which automatically backs up my MySQL DBs, then the web hosting provider is useless to me. I will not use GoDaddy for hosting.

Now, about the domain registrar... won't transferring a domain name incur a one-year renewal fee per domain name? Right..... I don't have the money to transfer the thirty domain names that I personally "own".


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## fluffybear (Jun 19, 2004)

Earl Bonovich said:


> No plans to... I just use them as a registrar anyway.


Ditto! A few years back, GoDaddy offered me the chance to renew our domain names for 20 years at some ridiculously low rate and I snatched it up. Web-hosting and any other services are done somewhere else.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

But the Domain Name is what gets blocked, so no matter where your site pages are hosted, GoDuddy can block your sites on a whim.

How do you know they won't flip-flop again if they get pressured from the Pro-Censorship crowd?


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

It seems silly (to me) to move due to a lot of "what ifs." For all of my domain names, I'm not doing anything illegal, nor am I doing anything that would even warrant attention from most people in the world. I'm not even concerned IF the power is granted.

I'm more concerned with how it will affect me personally .. It won't either way .. so, since I think GoDaddy provides a good/easy to use service at a reasonable price I have no reason to move.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

It's interesting that GoDaddy is being called easy to use. I'm fairly technical, but their site and management tools have always seemed very confusing to me.


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## RasputinAXP (Jan 23, 2008)

They're convoluted on purpose. Their user interface is positively awful. AWFUL.


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

All about the upsell.


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## Grentz (Jan 10, 2007)

So where the heck are people moving to? From the looks of it most major domain registrars will be involved with this anyhow at some point in time. BTW, most of the companies out there are just reselling the major domain registration services as their own.

Godaddy, while like a friggin ad farm and something I would NEVER host my sites on, has been great as a registrar. Their updates are fast, their domain admin panel is easy to use, and their prices are good.

Combine that with the fact that nothing on my domains conflicts with these laws, I am not really worried. Right now the process is that you will get take down notices, so the people that should be worried probably already know.


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## Grentz (Jan 10, 2007)

dpeters11 said:


> It's interesting that GoDaddy is being called easy to use. I'm fairly technical, but their site and management tools have always seemed very confusing to me.





RasputinAXP said:


> They're convoluted on purpose. Their user interface is positively awful. AWFUL.


Their ordering/public facing stuff is CRAP and full of marketing BS and upsell sh*t.

BUT, their domain admin panel is really good. I have always found it easy to use and clearer than many of the others that are out there. It has a nice "single pane of glass" view of all your info.


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## SPACEMAKER (Dec 11, 2007)

Had Go Daddy not switched their stance I'd have pulled my business from them on January 1st. It's not much but I'd have been vocal about it.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

Apparently the numbers are up to 70000 domains now that are lost and other companies are offering promotions and incentives just to switch. According to the article one company is heavily discounting the fee and asks for a $1 donation to the EFF. I'm posting this article mainly for the other information as the claims that they are limiting whois requests is just from one registrar.



> An effort by GoDaddy customers to boycott the domain registrar over its support for Hollywood-backed copyright legislation has sparked allegations of foul play.
> NameCheap, whose chief executive last week likened the Stop Online Piracy Act to "detonating a nuclear bomb" on the Internet, said today that GoDaddy has intentionally thrown up technical barriers to prevent its customers from leaving. It lost over 70,000 domains last week.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57348511-281/godaddy-accused-of-interfering-with-anti-sopa-exodus/


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

> GoDaddy has intentionally thrown up technical barriers to prevent its customers from leaving


If true, that would be reason enough to leave.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

http://www.namecheap.com/moveyourdomainday.aspx



> Because of this, we're declaring December 29th "Move Your Domain Day", as a call-to-action for those who oppose SOPA and wish to leave service providers who support SOPA.
> 
> On December 29th, we're offering transfers below cost ($6.99 per transfer) using the coupon code SOPASucks. Additionally, for every domain transfer initiated on the 29th, Namecheap will donate $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to help them continue the legal fight against SOPA, PROTECT-IP, and other overbroad and ill-considered legislation.


http://www.namecheap.com/support/kn.../876/83/how-to-transfer-a-domain-from-godaddy


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## Grentz (Jan 10, 2007)

I wouldn't trust the companies fanning the flames just to get business from GoDaddy either....

That is more shady IMO than what GoDaddy is doing.


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## Shades228 (Mar 18, 2008)

It's no different than targeted adds that other companies do with high profile issues. All cable and satellite companies toss out adds with public channel negotiations going on. Cell phone companies target each other in areas where one has more network problems.


If DISH knew what it was doing in marketing they could have made a killing on the Netflix not Netflix issue.

Taking advantage of your competitors mistakes has always been a key business move.


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## SayWhat? (Jun 7, 2009)

Any numbers on today's exodus?


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## Greg Alsobrook (Apr 2, 2007)

Go Daddy Now Officially Opposes SOPA - http://mashable.com/2011/12/30/go-daddy-now-officially-opposes-sopa/


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## F1 Fan (Aug 28, 2007)

Greg Alsobrook said:


> Go Daddy Now Officially Opposes SOPA - http://mashable.com/2011/12/30/go-daddy-now-officially-opposes-sopa/





> Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities


In other words..... "we oppose it because everyone else does at the moment but as soon as they all like it we will like it again. We will flip-flop our stance to keep the majority of people happy".

PS I heard they were getting their PR from Reed Hastings :lol:

They have yet to come out and state the problems in the bill. They do not understand the bill and that (for a technical company) is scary given that it is their business.

For those of you who say they wont be affected by the bill - you could be. If you use any site to post information (say you have a wordpress blog hosted off your servers, or use facebook, or you tube or even this forum). As I mentioned before - with this bill and the current wording, I can quite easily shut down this forum. That is the problem. It is not the "intent" of the bill that is causing the issue, it is the very loose and vague terms deliberately put in there.

So even though the intent was to stop people copying music, video, software etc. the wording says that anyone can claim a copyright infringement (without having to prove ownership or copyright) and the whole domain name will be blocked. So again. I can claim copyright infringement in a post on here and instead of the post being removed they redirect the WHOLE internet requests for dbstalk.com (and as far as we are aware currently, all subsites and email etc.).

Still like it?

And just one more thing. The people who say that they dont care as it doesnt affect them..... (and I hate to get into politics) .... this is just another small step into government censoring the internet and free speech and the constitution.


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