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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."
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
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?
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.
godaddy also has probably half of all the spam domains that exist - due to their lovely "auto-register a domain you searched for" shit.
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
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
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.
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.
Interesting, so....
Maybe that 5 year deal with Microsoft for parking new websites on Windows IIS servers is ending so they don't know where to make profits this time. I would not leave out the option of Microsoft buying them just to keep Windows IIS marketshare numbers up and to possibly grow them.
If you don't know, Microsoft was paying GoDaddy to place parked web domains on Microsoft IIS based servers so that netcraft and other web server counting systems looked more favorable for Microsoft's web server( IIS ). Prior to that business deal, GoDaddy was parking domains on GNU/Linux apache based servers.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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.
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.