Fwiw you don't save a few dollars with GD, they have terrible pricing.

The only - only - thing they have is a big advertising budget. Their services, support, pricing, ... all bad

Many non-technical founders go to them for the domain. By the time technical people (who know better) are involved the domain is already purchased and presumably transferring it out isn't prioritized.

In a lot of my experience, tech people first hear about a new domain when someone in marketing says "we're launching a new x. I've already done a lot of work by going to GoDaddy and buying the domain. You should be able to finish the web and services from here now that all the hard works done". You can't transfer a domain within 60 days of purchase so I usually end up going live with services there.

> avoided by anyone who knows anything

Most people don't know anything. The 99.9% of people buying domains don't browse Hacker News or stay privy of news regarding domain registrars.

GoDaddy has been caught registering domains that users search for on their site. Search to see if wowlolkittenseatingpizzaarecool.com is available. It is available and you dont buy it. Check tomorrow. It is not available but you can buy it drom the owner for $99 instead of $8.

Dirty

This is known as Domain Name Front Running and I think their evidence/excuse was that they publicize what gets searched and others buy them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

I personally use NameCheap, but my company uses GoDaddy and has since before I got there...and the company we bought? Also uses GoDaddy. In total that is about 2000 domains. Transferring them would cost a lot of money and time and in the end is not worth it to save over the long run.

Potentially getting their DNS redirected would cost even more. (Also there are no "transfer fees" - although maybe GD unscrupulously does that?) So it's only a time consideration.

You actually pay a years domain fee typically upon transfer. So it is best to transfer near your regular renewal time.

I just went through this transferring a domain from GD to namecheap.

According to the Twitter thread, Microsoft made a deal with Godaddy that makes them the default domain registrar for Office360.

Not just the default..you can't use O365 Premium with your own domain name at all unless you transfer it to GoDaddy.

I use GD simply because their advertising worked. When I registered my first domain I didn't know where else to start and just haven't bothered to transfer to another provider.

So what’s the best alternative to GD? I use moniker for some domains and I am happy.

I don't think there is a best one but better ones.

Personally I use Gandi when I want to pay a bit more to have a user friendly interface and support. When I just need a domain for myself I use bookmyname because it can't be cheaper and the old interface is fine for me.

If you are already sending your money to Amazon, AWS Route 53 is also a good alternative.

AWS Route 53 is a Gandi reseller for most TLDs. As far as I can tell[0], only .com, .net and .org are registered directly with Amazon.

--

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+registrar+for+this+TL...

I've been really happy with EasyDNS over the past 10-20 years... definitely not the cheapest registrar but well worth it in my opinion. They offer several pricing plans, but I like the $40/year registration and backup mail spool. If your main MX server goes down, I believe they hold your email on the secondary for up to a week? Cheap insurance at $3/month. Been very happy with support (live person picks up the phone, and generally is an engineer). Web interface is nice, they support standard privacy screen functions for whois, and generally seem to be good people.

My only affiliation with them is as a happy customer.

I have been using joker.com for ~20 years for several dozen domains, and have never had a problem. Based in Germany, works very well.

I had the least problems with porkbun so far.

Probably because people just complain about Godaddy but don't recommend alternatives and explain why they are trustworthy/better.

Who do you use and why?

There's a common list of providers mentioned every time on similar articles. Gandi, namecheap, dnssimple, and a few others. + all the usual cloud providers and CloudFlare.

Porkbun is also recommended usually.

NearlyFreeSpeech.net is great. They don’t upsell you, there are no ads, whois privacy is easy, and everything just works.

I see recommendation very regularly here. I use Gandi.net and they are great, but I also regularly see namecheap being recommended (I never used them though, in my book "cheap" means low quality ^^ I'm French and the English word is often used that way :) )

They do a lot of marketing, which makes them the default choice for many.