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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."
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.
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.
goatdaddy.com is also taken (no, I am NOT going to click on the link and see where it leads), foedaddy.com, gomommy.com, nogodaddy.com, goaddy.com, g0daddy.com, but h0daddy.com is availabile, and so is goatdaddie.com. Knock yourselves out.
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?
Domain tasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting) essentially doesn't exist now. Back in Aug 2009 15 million domains were being tasted per month. Currently it is down to less than 60,000.
Icann adopted a 20 cent charge for each domain that was tasted. Beyond that, a number of TLDs upped the charge to several dollars.
It went from a totally free way for companies to check the value of domains to being a very expensive way.
They should have been smart enough to realize that anyone who needs their services already knows who they are.
So, you're saying that pretty much any big brand might as well stop advertising?
Everyone knows Coca Cola by now... They might as well stop advertising, because anyone feels like cola, they just buy Coca Cola!
And most commercials don't work directly: It's just for those moments when the consumer actually wants to buy a domain, the name will ring a bell. At such time, GoDaddy is more likely to be chosen by someone with not enough knowledge of what is important in a webhost; but they'll be remembered by those 'funny' commercials at the Superbowl.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
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.