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GoDaddy Up For Auction
An anonymous reader writes "GoDaddy.com, the closely held website that registers Internet domain names, has put itself up for sale in an auction that could fetch more than $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company, which currently has more than 43 million domains under management, is well known for its edgy advertising, including Super Bowl commercials and ads featuring different 'Go Daddy Girls,' including racing car driver Danica Patrick."
I remember when Verisign paid wwwwaaaaayyyy too much or Network Solutions - on the order of 21 - freakin' billion dollars. Has anyone pegged a true value for companies like these?
On the bad news side, I guess that means imminent layoffs for more geeks in Arizona.
I bid one meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelion dollars!!! Muhahaha. C'est gagne, et la premier poste aussi!
Whoever buys it is able to do a rate hike and truly screw over pre-existing consumers, and that's just if they're feeling generous. There's far worse they could potentially do.
~The roAm
the company is 13 years old. this isn't exactly flipping a house after a few months and minor work. Not sure 'pump and dump' is really accurate.
Will bidders for GoDaddy have to use the same sort of hideous web interface that they make their users use? Shame that they will have to forgo that lovely experi- FOR EXTRA $5,000,000 YOU CAN HAVE 50% AOL STOCK IN OUR SuperStock Special Plus++ Plan!!!!! CLICK >HERE!
of GoDaddy's deep dark secrets?
Like the way they (supposedly) steal customer domain ideas after you whois a domain?
Somebody on the inside? How about it?
Also, does anybody have the link for that story from Slashdot a couple years ago, I can't find it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I'm sure we could scrape together 1-2 measly billions. Who wants to setup the PayPal account for donations?
... going... Gone Daddy
No left turn unstoned.
Do not want.
I've got about a half dozen domains registered with them. What the hell do I do now?
Whoever buys it is able to do a rate hike and truly screw over pre-existing consumers, and that's just if they're feeling generous. There's far worse they could potentially do.
Everything should be owned by the Government! That way no-one would ever be screwed over.
I don't know that GoDaddy (or any internet registrar, for that matter) really needs to advertise at the superbowl - or any other mainstream television event. Every super bowl since they've started advertising, I've had to explain to at least one person what GoDaddy is and what they do; which generally leads to a rather long discussion of why it matters at all.
They should have been smart enough to realize that anyone who needs their services already knows who they are. I highly doubt there was a Joe Six-Pack watching the super bowl who arrived at the idea after seeing the ad to go look up what a GoDaddy is, and then buy a new domain name from them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
also it's privately held so there isn't anything to pump.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
It's full of windows machines running customer websites. Who want's that kind of headache?
No, it's more like buying a shiny new house, smashing down walls for 13 years, and trying to foist it off onto a naive buyer.
GoDaddy is infamous. When someone posted MySpace passwords to a mailing list archived by seclists, MySpace complained and GoDaddy immediately shut down seclists.org with less than 1 minute's notice. They weren't even hosting the material, just the DNS record. GoDaddy's counsel said "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous."
As covered on slashdot they also have a habit of coming up with reasons to suspend customers' accounts and not just terminating service but refusing to release the domain to a different registrar unless you pay exorbitant fees.
Also GoDaddy shut down some guy's personal website because they sent him an email to update his invalid email address in the whois information and he didn't reply to it. They didn't just shut down the domain, they sold it.
What kind of joke of a service provider complies with random complaints from non-customers against customers without court order?
godaddy also has probably half of all the spam domains that exist - due to their lovely "auto-register a domain you searched for" shit.
Strictly speaking, you're right -- the "pump" refers to inflating stock values. However metaphorically it could still work with privately held companies. Many startups are built (get their funding) on the basis that they'll make themselves an attractive buy for a larger company. Their goal isn't to prove a business model on their own, but to create a modular subsystem and then parade their tech in large company showrooms. It's kind of like the "Buy Now" button on E-Bay that ends the auction (potential IPO).
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
What practices? The most telling is the holding of domain names hostage. Any expired domain is held hostage for an amount of time until someone pays the release fee, above and beyond the registration fee. Some business will fall for this tric, but I suspect it is mostly the small user that gets hurt, losing a domain because in the pressures of family and work a domain was not renewed prior to expiration. What same person would work with such a company? Is it any wonder they are selling?
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Their ads are not edgy, they're moronic. Slutty girls have been done before, oh like a trillion quintillion times. GoDaddy is a terrible registrar; their service stinks and they are spammer-friendly. If they are acquired, the purchaser is going to inherit a lot of problems.
I like scantily clad women as much as the next guy, but the Go Daddy commercials are the worst commercials I have ever seen, regardless of how many bimbos they put in them. I was very disappointed in Danica Patrick for selling out to them. She completely lost all respect she had earned as the best or most prominent female Indy/Nascar driver (for the most part, I don't watch Car racing). But more to the point, the commercials are so blatantly, "we must be great, we show bimbos on TV". Hopefully they will go way with new ownership.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I briefly hosted a subdomain on GoDaddy.com. I dumped them because:
If someone had told me how much of a disaster GoDaddy was beforehand, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, "There's no way anybody could be THAT incompetent." Einstein put it best when he said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."
Maybe I should start the bidding at a dollar.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Invalid email address in whois is grounds for forfeiture of the domain. Those are the ICANN rules. That is one thing that should happen a lot more often.
and why would they bail now? selling in a recesion is never a good idea and its a trade sale and not an issue.
You are correct. In fact, this is probably the way most tech startups make their founders (and angel investors) rich. Not as rich as they would have been if they'd taken the company to a successful IPO, but still "millionaire rich" with 100 times less risk. The folks at Y Combinator (a Silicon Valley angel investing group) are fully aware of this reality and will not stop a company they've backed from selling privately.
The most successful (financially) startup I was a key participant in was sold directly to General Magic (mostly for a patent we held in the speech recognition field, but they also wanted -- and got -- "the software guy"). (I went along because I wanted to make sure the technology got incorporated into their products correctly. But, it was my last job as an employee! Almost 15 years ago now. Whew -- time flies.)
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
If we aren't to use GoDaddy.com, who do you suggest that we use? I was about to launch a new site and had hopes that GoDaddy.com would have sufficed. Where else can you find online hosting for really cheap ($20 or less/month)? Inquiring minds like mine want to know! =)
I have 20 or so domains registered there.. a lot for my personal biz stuff.. and any time you mess with the technical stack of bb's it makes ya nervous. Yes, their web interface is a gaudy heavy wtf nightmare, yes their hosting is hell in a handbasket, but I have never had a problem with their registrar services and once I set up or change a domain name it propogates usually in less than an hour and never has any problems afterwards and they have always always been one of the least expensive options for registering domains. It makes me terribly nervous to see this go up for sale.
Also GoDaddy shut down [domainnamewire.com] some guy's personal website because they sent him an email to update his invalid email address in the whois information and he didn't reply to it. They didn't just shut down the domain, they sold it.
This, at least, isn't GoDaddy's fault. ICANN rules mandate that correct contact information must be provided in whois, failing which you lose your domain. There is an ongoing debate about whether demanding such information is fair, since the whois database can be accessed publicly, worldwide, free of charge. But till such time as the debate is ongoing, you've got to provide accurate info.
EVERYONE, who is in a position to know, knows (No)GoDaddy sucks big time and would never use or recommend any of their services.
PPN
Pretty much anywhere, GoDaddy doesn't have particularly great pricing. I use NearlyFreeSpeech.NET but that's a pre-paid service recommended for when you want to leave a little bit of content up for years at a time without much load. No reason to pay $20/mo if you're only hosting 20MB with a GB or so of transfer monthly.
GoDaddy is very cheap($5 month hosting).. thats why people flock to them. However you get what you pay for.
I haven't used GoDaddy in almost 8 years. The stuff being talked about at nodaddy was enough to split my registrar and hosting up (I now use PairNIC, while more expensive has a better policy IMO, for my registrar). My web host is a free host (000webhost.com) so not much to brag on there (aside from a few neat features).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I despise Godaddy's upsell hell interface and their advertising is crude. Anyone here have recommendations or share experiences on alternatives?
Good! I'm glad they may be bought out, maybe then we won't have to bear the commercials thought up by a dirty old man anymore.
Domains with invalid whois are taken back by the registry after multiple attempts to have it fixed. After this they are offered back to the public for purchase. This is all explained to you in the agreements you agree to when you register a domain with ANY registrar. What I fail to see is how everyone here is so clueless on the subject when they attempt to pass themselves off as experts
Here are some stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)
Those are just the stories until July of 2008.
Did your SSL cert come from StartCom?
Bob Parsons sold his previous company, Parsons Technology, purveyors of home accounting, home Bible concordance, home taxes, home legalese software, to Intuit (who sold it to Brøderbund) after Microsoft passed on the deal, so it's not surprising GoDaddy is on the block. He blazed a few new trails through the personal computing woods, I'll give him that, but he was more of a Davey Crockett than a Daniel Boone. Has a penchant for Alamos.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
The GoDaddy folks may just be reading the tea leaves...when you have judges saying that merely being on the 'net strips you of privacy while simultaneously all kinds of money and power are being brought to bear to strip the 'net of its neutrality, the value of the 'net as a means of discourse and information exchange may be about to plummet.
How long is America going to want to pay the ever bigger bucks required for 'net access for the privilege of being legally spied upon and the ever increasing probability that they'll be preempted by "higher priority traffic" when all they'll get out of using the 'net is one never-ending stream of political propaganda and commercials?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
If PairNIC is as good as Pair's hosting, then you've made a wise choice. If I didn't already have most of my domains locked up in DirectNIC, or EDIS.at, I'd be a PairNIC guy. Pair's customer support and service is among the best in the business.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I'm no security expert, but as far as I can tell GoDaddy SSL is as good as anyone's SSL, except it's way cheaper.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
What a lot of people don't seem to know about GoDaddy is that they don't actually register your domain in your name. They register the domain in their name and then "license" you to use it. At least this is the way they worked several years ago. I discovered this when I was helping a customer set up his web site hosting. He had gone online and registered the domain with GoDaddy - because they advertise a lot - but could not figure anything else out on his own. When I checked into things to help him get the rest set up, I discovered that he wasn't even listed as the owner of the domain. I called GoDaddy's "customer support" only to have them explain that this was for their customer's "protection." They said it was to prevent anyone from stealing someone else's domain but he couldn't explain how it was any different with GoDaddy owning the domain instead of the customer. Over and over again, the "customer service" person tried to hard sell me while ignoring my questions about how I could get my customer's domain actually put in his own name. After intense grilling, the representative admitted that GoDaddy policies do (did) allow for them to assert control of your domains for almost any reason at all, yet he assured me that they would never actually do that. ... Ha!
If they still have the same policy in place (and I will leave it up to others to check on that, as I am certainly not going to try hassling with them ever again) then this could be a disaster for anyone with a valuable domain name that is registered with GoDaddy. This "Sale" could amount to a cashing in on all those domain names they have collected. Domain names that they claim to own while only "licensing" them to the person who registered them. The new owner could easily claim they had bought all those domains and begin auctioning them off to the highest bidder. I'm not saying that they would, but it seems entirely possible and not worth the risk for anyone with a valuable domain name.
Therefore, if anyone has any domain names registered with GoDaddy, then I highly suggest you get them moved to a different registrar ASAP.
Here are the stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot since July of 2008:
KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List (2009-02-06, 80 comments) GoDaddy is on the list.
R.I.P. FTP (2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the "Hosting" menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick "Manage Account." This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the "Settings" options. 4) In the "Settings" control panel, click the "SSH" icon. 5) You will see a page saying "SSH is not set up", and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]
Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote: "GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too."
GoDaddy Wants Your Root Password (2010-02-24, 236 comments)
Massive Number of GoDaddy WordPress Blogs Hacked (2010-04-26, 112 comments)
GoDaddy Up For Auction (2010-09-11, 122 comments)
I keep my hosting separate from my registrar, but it's nice to hear confirmation of what I've already discovered. (: That just reinforces my decision to stick with them.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
What domain registrar do you recommend?
Pump and dump. Figures.
I think you have confused GoDaddy.com and the "Go Daddy Girls" referred to in the summary....Some of them were certainly "pump and dump" candidates :D
Right, but I'm wondering if there's some exit strategy here beyond the obvious. Thoughts?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
After all the comments against GoDaddy, and I am sure a lot of them are based on fact, there is one thing I've got to say.
I moved my domains from Network Solutions to GoDaddy and have been extremely happy with GoDaddy, and very unhappy with netsol.
Network Solutions actually would lock you out from transferring "for your protection" and then force you to call on the phone, so that they could repeatedly try to sell you on staying with them. And they made it very hard. Twice I had to demand their superior just to get any action.
GoDaddy on the other hand is quite cheap and very easy to use. I switched a domain from from MelbourneIT to them and saved a lot of money.
Their UI is not perfect but you can do a lot of stuff with it, both newbies and pros.
The bit about them reselling your name is absolutely ridiculous. But otherwise they have given a lot of satisfaction and there are probably a lot of people who use them thinking it is a good deal, especially if you don't go in for anything else they offer. And Danica is hot. But that nothing to do with my decision, no sirree.
I get non-techie gossip from my Mom. Apparently the creator of GoDaddy is hailed as a hero and successful entrepreneur in the popular press. Whatever, if someone else provides a more trustworthy service with better price point they will probably gain a lot of customers since everyone is I think a bit squeamish about GoDaddy's ugly habits.
As for "licensing" versus "owning" domains, I didn't realize that. However I wonder if they would be able to operate a volume business with rapid changes, etc. otherwise. Does this allow them to auction your name off I wonder or is that a different story.
Despite all of the horror stories of Godaddy and all the other bad press regarding them, I still have my domains there for one reason: Total DNS.
Once you get used to the clunky UI, Total DNS is actually a pretty powerful DNS management tool.
Are there any other registrars that offer a similar tool?
I currently have several web pages with ICDSoft... so far they have been really good. But you can see it for yourself doing a quick google search. In general, people are happy with them.
I bought my first hosting account with them about 3 years ago, and so far, so good.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Has any one heard of any of the receiver manufacturers developing a Google TV capable receiver? Just seems like a match made in heaven, receivers already have as much processing power as many desktops.
It would be cool to incorporate google , gmail and this new domain service all together if google were to bid and buy up godaddy. I had a few problems but all in all ok for what i need, however, if google were to scoop them up i am sure they would turn it into a much more secure and efficient machine then it is now. Seriously, could any google employees or ceos reading this, might be able to bring the idea to the board?
I've been happy with both Blue Host for ISP and NearlyFreeSpeech.net for domain registration. NFS has a "buy credits" model then charges you tiny amounts daily. They also have an anonymizer DNS service for additional amounts. They handle auto-renewal of domains smoothly if you so select it. NFS also has inexpensive hosting, but that depends on your needs.
I recommend both.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.