GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft

RobertB-DC writes "Bargain-basement registrar GoDaddy.com has decided to move all its parked domains to Microsoft servers, saying that they'll provide 'a technology platform that is security-enhanced, highly scalable and easy to manage.' This is a shift away from Linux, a decision met with derision by other registrars such as Gandi.net, which greeted the news with the headline 'Go Daddy and never come back'. Late last year, GoDaddy.com had some 'issues', shall we say, with non-Microsoft browsers."

Comments

Incredible!

[OmgTEHMATRICKS]

Ghandi never struck me as the kind of guy who trashtalks others. Well you learn something new everyday, I suppose.

Re:Incredible!

[TgmBxA!X8(TNDWr_, xv]

Gandhi. G-A-N-D-H-I.

In college, I took a course called Gandhi's India, about--what else?--the life of Gandhi, and Gandhi's contributions to modern India. Come the day of the midterm, the class swelled to twice its usual size; most of the new faces spelled his name "Ghandi" in their essays. My professor didn't look too kindly on these idiots. Damn if she didn't look good otherwise.

Re:Incredible!

[natmakarvitch]

> Ghandi never struck me as the kind of guy who trashtalks others

Gandi.net was sold in September 2005, a new team is in charge.

--
http://www.makarevitch.org/rant/rant.html

Re:Incredible!

[raju1kabir]

Except if Indians start using roman letters, I believe translation is opened... therefore, Gandi, Ghandi and Gandhi, as long as they sounds the same, are conceptually equal, and should be considered as such.

They don't sound the same.

GH is a softer sound than G.

DH is a softer sound than D, pronounced with the tongue flatter against the roof of the mouth.

In Hindi, I believe that D and G without the softening 'H" simply don't exist (but could be wrong). In Arabic, 'D' and 'DH' are completely different letters, likewise 'G' (Egyptian, anyway) and 'GH'. Baghdad is not pronounced Bagdad; the GH should sound like a French R. They aren't any more the same than 'Mop" and 'Top' are.

Re:Incredible!

[fatphil]

Gandhi hated kaffirs. And was pro-Apartheid.

He lived in South Africa for quite a long time, and
wrote a lot while there. Almost everything he wrote
about the blacks there was negative, and to be frank,
downright racist. The "uncivilized races", he called
them. That's trash talk in anyone's book.

Sorry, but the infallable image of Gandhi is one that
needs to be punctured. See the Penn & Teller 'Bullshit'
episode about 'heroes', where they also crucify the
Dalai Lama, and Mother Theresa. (The latter being someone
I consider to be downright evil in the extreme.)

FP.

Re:Incredible!

[belmolis]

In the romanization of Hindi and other languages of India, bh, dh, and gh are used for so-called "voiced aspirates". The difference between these and their unaspirated counterparts b, d, and g has nothing to do with tongue position. Rather, it is a matter of what phoneticians call phonation type. The ordinary b, d and g have modal voicing, in which the vocal folds vibrate in the usual way. The "voiced aspirates" have what is called breathy or murmured voicing, which results from the vocal folds being held together rather loosely. The glottal source spectrum of murmured sounds is much noisier than that of sounds with modal voicing. You can listen to a contrasting set of examples here.

Re:Incredible!

[bertramwooster]

Mod parent a troll. While Gandhi was hardly infallible, there is little documentation to show that he hated kaffirs or was pro-apartheid. One or two isolated quotes does not a character define. An episode of Penn and Teller's show time is not "documentation".

Who cares?

[CRCulver]

Since most of these parked domain names are just misspellings of respectable sites or total nonsense, full of links to casinos and places to get prescription drugs, which no one would ever actually register and use for hosting, does it really matter what OS the server is running?

Re:Who cares?

[biocute]

It does, as bragging rights for Microsoft to show that its server solution is hosting xx% of the internet.

Re:Who cares?

[JordanL]

Well I just called in about the 1 domain I have there, and they flat out told me that none of their domain servers and/or name servers are IIS or will be moving to IIS. A closer look at the article reveals the openning statement:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that GoDaddy.com®

Perhaps MS misunderstood what their product was being purchased for? Or maybe I was being lied to...

Re:Who cares?

[Denney]

The actual press-release on Yahoo! Finance states "Go Daddy® will have moved all its parked domains from Linux to the Windows platform." That does not include domain servers or name servers. If my understanding is correct, parked domains are on one set of servers, while all the other services are being provided from other sets of servers. Thus, I think you were told the truth by the GoDaddy folks, and Microsoft is also telling the correct story, although the heading of the Press Release makes the news sound bigger than it really is.

Re:Who cares?

[Bacon Bits]

Well, hey, maybe IIS returns empty HTML documents faster than Apache.

Or maybe they hope to obfuscate their security by running Apache on Windows. Send all the malformed POST requests you want. Win32 isn't going to successfully execute your Linux code!

Re:Who cares?

[ImaLamer]

I own two domains that are "parked" there until I can use them (i.e. iheartje.ws) and who cares? Their parked domains have no reason to really stay online. They exist to advertise for GoDaddy and their minions until you setup shop. In a way I assume that is why there are so many sales at GoDaddy.

No matter you can get Linux & Windows (shared) hosting still:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp

and it's all Fedora on the dedicated side:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/dedicated.a sp

Not really a story.

Re:Who cares?

[ImaLamer]

Now that I read it, the legal agreement is the story:

http://documents.secureserver.net/show/document.as px?plvid=1&name=hosting_sa

in no event shall Your web site consist of the following: search results, registration, "thank you", error, email or chat pages, pages comprised primarily of other advertising or pages that contain any of the following types of content: pornographic, obscene or excessively profane content or content intended to advocate or advance computer hacking or cracking, gambling, illegal activity, drug paraphernalia, hate, violence or racial or ethnic intolerance.

I can't put ads on my own error pages? Even if I'm hosting 30 domains on a dedicated account? Since when is bad web design a reason to shut a website down; so what if I plaster the thing with ads? And saying that gambling and drug talk isn't allowed goes a little far as restrictions vary from state to state and even from city to city (in the USA).

Re:Who cares?

[SillySnake]

This is clearly Go Daddy trying to do us all a favor. No one likes the dumb mispelling domains with tons of sponsored search links for pr0n, pills, and the such.. This is simply Go Daddy declaring open season on all the parked domains they host.. It's that simple :)

Re:Who cares?

[jmorris42]

> It does, as bragging rights for Microsoft to show that its server solution is
> hosting xx% of the internet.

You are close to the truth. Watch Netcraft. Anytime Microsoft gets near the 20% mark a fresh deal is announced about some parked domains moving to IIS. They really can't afford to drop into the teens and retain any credibility as a player in the server space so they spend whatever it takes to prevent it.

The more important number is Netcraft's active domains number and IIS is only at about 25% there. That gives a better picture of where they stand. Take out their own massive net operations and those of their slaves (Dell, HP, heck, most everybody who sells PCs, software or who develops heavy on Windows) who use IIS because they fear the consequences of using anything else and it would really be pitiful.

Re:Who cares?

[mrsbrisby]

At least one good thing can be said for the Windows-based sites, they do actually do something.

Yup. They get defaced and broken down more than any other system. That despite not having a majority.

most of the windows-hosted sites are ecommerce

Err, no they're not. As the article points out, most windows-hosted sites are parking pages.

Strip out all the 1-page personal websites where you have a thousand hosted on 1 server by the huge hosting companies (eg 1&1) and you'd have a pitiful number left.

While we're at it, let's "strip out" anything else that disagrees with your pretension that Windows are superior.

Let's group all Windows platforms together, and separate all unixish platforms.

Let's ignore any site that didn't pay for vendor assistance! (after all, they're not doing business)

Let's ignore any site that didn't sign up for the survey with a Microsoft browser (after all, they're evil hackers!)

Or do you really believe that it's easier to manage 10,000 customer sites with different needs, than it is to manage one site, with a single need, and lots of lead time before changes?

It is a pity Netcraft don't release their SSL site survey as I think that would be a lot closer to a 50/50 split.

Lemmie guess, one of those gut feelings right?

Or maybe you're basing this on the free report they published in November 2004, you know, when RSA was still patented and you had to get a commercial license to use SSL?

It's just an OS

[BadAnalogyGuy]

An OS is no good without applications on top of it.

If GoDaddy doesn't have the wherewithal to develop applications for Linux, maybe they'll have better luck with Windows. It gives them the ability to use ASP.Net on the server side with all the benefits that entails.

Re:It's just an OS

[pavera]

Except as the article states and then quickly dusts under the carpet, this only applies to their parked domains which host no services, no actual sites, and are just place holders. They won't be developing any applications for these domains anyway.

If they were moving actual hosting to windows, then maybe this would be real news, but they can't do that, actual hosting requires offering windows and linux as the platform, they aren't going to force their customers to rewrite all of their php/apache/mysql web sites in asp/iis/sql server

Re:It's just an OS

[jbplou]

70% of websites around the world.

Bullshit. There is no way I believe that exact combo has 70% of the web sites. Lets see Linux might have the most but I highly doubt they have 70% are you saying that Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Misc O/S only total 30%.

What about sites that use PERL , ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, or just static HTML, once again I doubt that only totals 30% of sites.

Then the big one MYSQL is not used on 70% of sites, I worked at a web host for a while and know that most hosting customers don't even really know what a database is, let alone use one.

Re:It's just an OS

[Foofoobar]

Actually, MySQL overtook Oracle last year as the number one most popular database and is installed on over 55% of ALL servers (not just web servers). Apache still holds rein as the king of web servers with 70% and the most common web server is still Linux with over 60% of the market. PHP is the number one Apache mod and is in the top 4 of programming languages on the Tiobe Index.

Keep in mind that these stats are for web servers... not ALL servers.

So yes... those stats are fairly accurate... though 70% may be high, I would say in the mid to high 60 percentile range is not unreasonable.

Re:It's just an OS

[Sepper]

No need to - the "AMP" part of LAMP runs on Windows as well.

So in this case it's WAMP.

Or WIMP if you use IIS...

Re:It's just an OS

[WoodstockJeff]

the "AMP" part of LAMP runs on Windows as well.

But, it doesn't run as well on Godaddy's Windows servers as it does on their Linux boxes. This is because Godaddy has chosen to make liberal use of "Safe Mode" and "OpenDir" restrictions on the Windows boxes, presumably to protect them. Should NOT be necessary, but they feel it is.

If you have a program that opens files in multiple directories, or enumerates files in a directory, you have to ask to be hosted on a Linux box at Godaddy.

Netcraft confirms it - the haiku

[HishamMuhammad]

GoDaddy has jumped the shark,
News at eleven
All your base to Microsoft.

Sigh...

[OxygenPenguin]

I use GoDaddy for my hundreds of domain registrations....too bad to see them make this decision. Not to be a blatant Microsoft troll, but it is nearly generally recognized in the server community that Linux/Apache is a more secure solution than Windows. Why would GoDaddy site security as their reason to change vendors?

I wonder why...?

[Zarel]

I think we can all agree that, at the very least, Linux SERVERS are better than Windows servers.

And, GoDaddy should at least know that much.

So, the question is, why are they doing it? Do you think Microsoft is paying them to do this? Did management's preconception that "Windows is what we use on our desktops, so it MUST be good for our servers" override any rational thought? Did they think it would trick customers who didn't know better and think, "They use Windows, just like our own computers, it must be good"?

Any thoughts?

Re:I wonder why...?

[Foofoobar]

Well I have known Microsoft to bend over backwards to give away their product just so that they can have a poster child. I also know that Microsoft is trying to get into web hosting. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of business arrangement coming down the line.

I expect all their Apache customers will be bailing and going elsewhere... not a smart move when you consider the market share Apache has and how many people applications use the LAMP stack.

My Prediction??Watch their business drop by at least 25%.

GoDaddy.com looking for people with Linux Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that GoDaddy.com is looking for people with Linux skills:
http://jobsearch.monster.com/jobsearch.asp?q=linux &cn=GoDaddy&sort=rv&vw=b&cy=US&re=14&brd=1%2C128%2 C1862%2C1863

Examples:

Linux Systems Manager
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=3993 8005&AVSDM=2006-02-20+15%3A04%3A46&Logo=1&q=linux& cn=GoDaddy&lid=338&sort=rv&vw=b&cy=US&brd=1,128,18 62,1863

Senior Linux Software Engineer
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=4015 5008&AVSDM=2006-02-24+17%3A38%3A10&Logo=1&q=linux& cn=GoDaddy&lid=338&sort=rv&vw=b&cy=US&brd=1,128,18 62,1863

I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back

[notaprguy]

They talked about moving to Windows and said, basically, that the costs roughly in line with Linux when you take into account administration/management costs and that MSFT was bending over backwards to meet their needs. They liked MSFT's customer service. They like ASP.NET because of the capabilities it provides. They like MSFT's vision and...most important of all...their customers liked the results when they used Windows hosting sevices.

Re:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back

[ScrewMaster]

... and that MSFT was bending over backwards to meet their needs.

Well, there's no doubt that when all is said and done ... someone will be bending over and it won't be Microsoft.

Re:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back

[schon]

costs roughly in line with Linux when you take into account administration/management costs and that MSFT was bending over backwards to meet their needs.

Translation:

Costs are the same, but it costs money to switch, therefore MS is trying to buy their business.

The fact that only the "parked" (read: bare pages with no interactivity and exceptionally low risk) will be changed means that GoDaddy is trying to take them up on it without really taking any risk.

Re:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back

[Rogerborg]

I think they're about to find out the difference between pre-sales and after-sales service.

Microsoft just dropped them some cash

[codepunk]

MS is just pissed off that they keep loosing market share on netcraft so the likely dropped godaddy a big ole wad of cash to move all those worthless
parked domains to IIS servers....To think there is a technical reason or advantage is pure hog wash...

And don't give me a bunch of bull about how great .net is. Being a ex asp programmer I grabbed the latest copy of visual studio and had a little go with
it.....guess what, it is still the same buggy piece of crap it always was.

I need Windows reliability for my parked domain!

[poopie]

When I waste money registering misspelled domain names and register tons of word combinations while speculating on new product names, I need somewhere that can handle the strenuous demands of parking my domains.

I'm not stupid - I wouldn't trust the job of handling web redirects to any of that old legacy stuff like UNIX. That stuff was old back when I was using Windows 3.1... and Windows has gotten a lot better since then. When people try to access my domainnames, I expect the performance of Geniune Windows.

I know that sometimes domain names need to be rebooted too, like when critical updates get applied, but that's okay. I wouldn't want my domain names parked on an unpatched, so-called "highly available" server.

No sir, it's genuine-windows-advantage-plays-for-sure for me and my domain collection.

Re:Hmm...

[k_187]

umm, you do realize that's talking about the special interactive player, and the movie plays just fine?

Microsoft probably paid them for this...

[drasfr]

That is my assumption... I used to work for Register.com and we were having a HUGE number of parked domains and redirected domains served by Linux. Basically Microsoft approached us and offered us a pile of cash AND some of their engineers to help so we migrate the servers serving this (futurestep it was called if i remember right) to Windows and that they can use that as advertisement AND that netcraft would show a significant change in the number of sites hosted by Windows.... Let's say that it was very hard to refuse this...

So yeah... I would assume the same. How much money/services did they got from Microsoft?

Re:Microsoft probably paid them for this...

[The Famous Brett Wat]

It's a fair assumption. Microsoft have been playing this game for quite a long time now. Look, for example, at Netcraft's April 2002 survey. This is about as close as Microsoft ever got to Apache in market share. Consider the following quotation from that page.

Some of the big moves are because Microsoft has been able to identify people who control very large numbers of sites, are not bound tightly to a particular technology, and persuade them to switch to Microsoft servers. The leading domain registrars, Verisign and register.com, are prime examples of this.

"Per$uade", or "purse-swayed", I'm sure.

Attempts to purchase survey results like this seem a little desparate to me, given the long term trend. Still, you can get an idea of the effect Microsoft is purchasing by looking at the January 2006 survey, where Apache lost nearly a million sites worth of share to the "other" category thanks to a bit of tweaking by GoDaddy. See that page for more detail.

So what

[icepick72]

Oh c'mon, Go Daddy is not suddenly the bad guy because they chose a different technology platform. They didn't choose it to make Linux advocates resentful or to make Microsoft partners happy. It was a business decision. They think it will help them for their specific need. If Mac OSX would have been more helpful to their business they would have chosen it instead, or Atari OS or whatever. So what if they had problems with non-Microsoft browsers in the past or not; the author tries to draw a correlation but it's irrelevant. The author is just acting stupid I'm afraid to say. I mean, the issue is very interesting in and of itself, but I want to see mature discussion. Let's not put Go Daddy down because we prefer apples over oranges. I would rather see mature discussion about the switch. Indeed the good posts are already coming in ...

It had to be said...

[javacowboy]

... Who's your daddy now?

Marketing Ideas

[st1d]

"Microsoft, the preferred platform for content-free websites"

"Microsoft, recommended by 9 out of 10 get-rich quick customers"

Seems kind of appropriate that MS is out to capture the scammer segment of the market, doesn't it? (Apologies to folks who park sites to protect themselves from scam artists.)

That's fair.

[jd]

Most of the other servers hold xxx% of the Internet, and the remaining 5 hold the tech/geek content.

Re:Well, then.

[geniusj]

I was involved in this project, and I'm pretty sure I can relay the following information at the least:

    The only thing that has changed are our PARKED web servers. Linux and open source is still used in many other places that are not changing. I can't go into specifics on this stuff, but I just wanted to clarify that that is all that changed. Hosting is still offered under both Linux/PHP (and I believe RoR) and Windows/ASP, and Linux is hosting many other systems as well.

Security through feature removal!

[WoodstockJeff]

they'll provide 'a technology platform that is security-enhanced, highly scalable and easy to manage.'

If you want to run anything on Godaddy's servers that accesses files in PHP (which includes things like include and require in directories other than the current one), you have to ask to be put on a Linux server. This is because the only way Godaddy has found to keep Windows "secure" is to disable features... It's one of the reasons they recently stopped supporting "one button install" for PHPBB; it wouldn't work if it was on a Windows box, due to safe mode restrictions.

Fortunately, that isn't a problem with parked domains!

Re:Well, then.

[WindBourne]

Ok, so you were involved. Just out of curiosity, why the change? I can not see any advantage to you unless there is more income coming in from elsewhere.

Re:Mod parent DOWN

[Benley]

BTW, what has Google ever given back to the OSS community it depends on to supply Linux, MySQL, Python, etc.?

Does employing a huge number of prominent open-source developers count for anything? OSS coders gotta eat, you know. A partial list, off the top of my head: Guido Van Rossum (Mr. Python), the Gaim lead developer, the Camino lead developer, Spamassassin lead developer (I think; not sure), a bunch of Firefox developers ... the list goes on. These people are paid to work on OSS projects and contribute code back to the community!

IMHO, MS is Buying IIS Marketshare.

[WoTG]

Some of the Netcraft numbers are based on the number of domains hosted by a platform or web server. By paying off GoDaddy.com for parked domains they will get a large boost in Netcraft numbers for IIS and Windows Server. Sure the domains don't reflect 'productive' websites; but they still count. Not a bad plan.

From GoDaddy's point of view, it's a no brainer. Who doesn't want money? Besides, there isn't even any evil involved in this one.

Misinterpretation

[pingveno]

They are not removing their Linux hosting. Go to godaddy.com, Hosting & Servers, Virtual Dedicated Servers. All of the preconfigured plans use Red Hat Fedora Core 2. The "Hosting Plans" section of their web site allows the user a choice between Fedora and Windows. This move to Windows is in just in a certain part of their system. Removing support for Linux web servers would be suicide. Microsoft's web serving numbers aren't going anywhere from this decision.

Re:Misinterpretation

[Irish_Samurai]

This is what I don't get about Linux zealots. As I understand it, Linux distros are open source so you can change things under the hood if you want. If GoDaddy has a team of well skilled Linux programmers and admins on staff, shouldn't they be able to change the code to a form that will suit their needs?

And if that is true, what does it matter if the release is no longer supported and was originally intended as a testing system? I thought the whole point of Linux was to be able to change it to suit your needs and support it yourself if you had the skills.

Bad Advertising

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

With MS essentially bribing GoDaddy to make the rather trivial move for their parked domains, you have to wonder just what MS's PR people were thinking.

Will their new slogan be, "Microsoft - where do you want to park today?"

I don't get it.

[Southpaw018]

Okay...essentially, the core change is that GoDaddy is moving their parked sites from BIND to MS DNS. Curiously, most of the argument here focuses elsewhere (LAMP, IIS, LAMP's components vs alternatives).

I use MS DNS 2003. It's nice. It's easy to use. I enjoy having a GUI built in and supported by the developer in addition to having the power of command line editing. The only thing I wish I could change is that it uses a sequential zone serial number instead of a dated one (ie, instead of 2006032301, 2006032302, 2006032303, it uses a raw format - 1, 2, 3...)

I really don't see what the big deal is...

In the old days

[HangingChad]

Back in my day, the ancient days of IT...three or four years in the dark past, it was big news when a company switched to Linux. These days it's a headline when a company switches to MSFT.