Marketing expertise. They are good at:

- Initially low prices that go up at renewal time

- Cross sell and upsell

- Stickiness. Like the (since removed) 60 day lock on domains if you changed the whois info...even if it was removing privacy so you could transfer it.

- Affiliate (kickback) programs

- Advertising

They also use real people to call and remind people to renew and upsell. Probably annoying to HN demographic, but that is pretty savvy business foresight for the rest of the universe. Part of market building and maintance, the "ignore that customers are real people you can talk to" attitude of many shops like Google are a reality distortion.

The 60 day lock is mandated by ICANN, not Godaddy. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-03-07-en

The ICANN policy is 60 days after TRANSFER. GoDaddy extended that to include "any change to whois data". ICANN, in fact, issued several advisories to stop this sort of thing.

Interestingly enough, the CIRA (.ca domains) implemented a policy that says quite the opposite. Any domain changes result in a 60 day lock.

A long, long time ago, they were one of, if not the, cheapest domain reseller(s) out there.

AFAICT this is exactly it, they were very very cheap. And so they captured a lot of domains, and if you asked someone about getting a domain it was "oh I got one from GoDaddy it was cheap, the service was bad but what do you expect?" and lots of people had domains from them. Then they started raising their prices until they had a nicely profitable business. They had become "established" and they continue to use name recognition to this day to attract business from people who either don't want to, or can't, shop around.

It's sort of like dialup modem providers.. You would be amazed at the volume of non-tech people who simply don't care. Small business needs a website and GoDaddy offers a mountain of either partner or full service offerings in one convenient place.

I think for three reasons:

1. They handle a lot of mom-and-pop business with actual live people on the phones and web chat.

2. For the "you're a computer guy, right?" relatives of those mom-and-pop business owners GoDaddy is large enough that most hosting sites have instructions for it directly.

3. Changing registrars is a pain. I know that GoDaddy is going to stay around. I can't be so sure for smaller dedicated registrars or that Google won't decide to discontinue their registration service and force me to change down the line. My time is limited and the peace of mind that I won't have to change is worth a few dollars a year.

They make up for it with Superbowl ads.

They have north of 90% of all .com registrations either directly or through companies that they acquired.

That sounds a bit high. Based on numbers from the last few months, GoDaddy has about 40m of the 127m .com domains, or 31%.

Sources: http://www.registrarowl.com/report_registrar_total_domains.p... https://www.verisign.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-regi...

You're ignoring all of the companies they bought.