Wikipedia Hasn't Forgiven GoDaddy

netbuzz writes "The fact that a month and a half has gone by and Wikipedia still hasn't followed through on Jimmy Wales public threat to remove its domain name registrations from GoDaddy over the latter's early support of SOPA has some concerned that the online encyclopedia may have had a change of heart. After all, GoDaddy did withdraw its backing of the controversial antipiracy legislation, at least publicly. But fear not, SOPA foes, as Wikipedia says its days with GoDaddy are indeed numbered and that number is getting very small."

Comments

SOPA isn't the only reason GoDaddy sucks

[MrEricSir]

Let's also not forget all the other ways GoDaddy sucks:

• So much up-selling a car dealer would blush
• Obnoxious TV advertisements that are straight out of Idiocracy
• Customer service worse than the post office or a bank
• That whole elephant-killing thing.

So fuck GoDaddy. There's plenty of registrars with better service that cost less anyway.

Re:SOPA isn't the only reason GoDaddy sucks

[stephanruby]

and don't forget also:

The GoDaddy CEO publicly supports waterboarding
GoDaddy already has an history of shutting down domains without requiring to see a court order
GoDaddy has a long history of getting its customer servers/accounts hacked and not saying anything about it to its customers
And during the SOPA exodus, which is still going on, it's been dragging its feet on domain transfers (a violation of ICANN rules and regulations).
Hopefully, they'll have their domain name registry privileges taken away by ICANN because of that last one.

Re:SOPA isn't the only reason GoDaddy sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL.
After following your link to waterboarding, which then leads to another page 60 links deep proclaiming the GoDaddy CEO supports waterboarding, the only thing it eventually led to is a blog posting by the CEO calling Guantanamo Bay an "important asset" to protect Americans. So yes, I suppose you could say he therefore supports waterboarding, in the same way that if a staff member at Guantanamo Bay was into BDSM, you could say Bob Parson supports BDSM tooly. Or in the same way that you support Open Source, of which Linux is a leading example, which contains components written by Hans Reiser, who was a murderer; and therefore you publicly support murder.

Re:SOPA isn't the only reason GoDaddy sucks

[Arrepiadd]

Put two fish of the same species in a proper environment and safe from predators and after one year you have 10000 of them.
Put two elephants in an equivalent scenario and after one year you have two elephants. After two years you may have three. After 10 years, all things perfect, you'll have about 5 of them.

Now go back to the end of year one... kill one fish, kill one elephant. Do you see where this is going?

forgivness

[SuperTechnoNerd]

I have not forgiven my congress critters either. Looking forward to November.

Re:forgivness

[EuclideanSilence]

What the hell is wrong with being a statistical outlier? Elections aren't some horserace that you win by voting for the candidate that gets office, they are won when public opinion changes.

Re:forgivness

[artor3]

What the hell is wrong with being a statistical outlier? Elections aren't some horserace that you win by voting for the candidate that gets office, they are won when public opinion changes.

True, but public opinion isn't changed by the fact that 0.2% of the vote went to Generic Third Party #17. Not even a little bit.

If you want to effect change via voting:
1) Primary for the best candidate you can find (a lot of people ignore this step, and then go on to bemoan that they only have two choices in the general election)
2) Vote for the least bad of the two major party nominees at the federal level
3) Vote for third parties at the local and state level

Non-federal politics matter a whole lot -- more than federal politics for many aspects of life -- and are easier to influence. Plus the pool of people who get taken seriously at a federal level tends to be drawn from those who have been successful at the lower levels. If you can get a great candidate to be a popular and successful state senator, then he's got a good shot at becoming governor. If you've got a popular and successful independent governor, I know a whole lot of people who'd love to see him become president. It's admittedly a long shot, but it's better than throwing away your vote every cycle in a protest that 99.9% of the populace won't even notice.

To be fair...

[Daetrin]

I expect with a company the size of Wikipedia, particularly one with Wikipedia's web presence, switching your hosting around isn't really something you can do on the turn of a dime.

On the other side of the coin though (er, so to speak) i wonder if this is really the best tactic. I mean, i couldn't wish for the fallout to land on a more deserving company, but will this affect Wikipedia's bargaining position for similar situations in the future? Threatening to punish people for actions you don't like is just fine (well, assuming you stick to legal methods of course) but if they recant and you follow through on your threats regardless, would the next company you deal with have any reason to recant?

Re:To be fair...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I'm aware, Wikipedia does not depend on GoDaddy for anything other than domain registrar services. They don't use them for DNS. They don't use them for hosting of any kind. So actually, yes, they literally can switch to another registrar on the turn of a dime. I've seen it done with corporate sites fielding millions of page views a month, and downtime should be precisely zero. Nothing changes aside from the registrar name in the whois info.

Have you ever tried to switch from GoDaddy??

[ukemike]

Have you ever tried to switch from GoDaddy? I'm sure they're just having difficultly figuring out HOW to unregister from GoDaddy. It took me about 5 tries over the course of three months and I only had one domain to deal with.

Re:And this costs GoDaddy what, $2.95?

[FreakyGreenLeaky]

It costs them reputation.