1. My sample is not representative, and many people do feel great about Godaddy.

2. Bob Parsons knows that Godaddy sucks, but he's a salesman and he's selling the brand as he'd like it to be.

3. Bob Parsons actually thinks that Godaddy is an amazing company and a strong brand.

Which is it?

They are known for selling domain searches to squatters. It goes something like this:

  1. You search for a domain
  2. Praise Jesus! It's available!
  3. You come back in 24 hours.
  4. :( sorry, a squatter has taken it because GoDaddy whored out your search to them.

I can't believe nobody else managed to get the "place where you buy domain names" brand. It's sad.

Disclaimer: I have 4 personal sites registered with godaddy. I was using a couple others, but I transferred them all to godaddy for simplicity's sake.

[1]http://www.dotsauce.com/2008/01/08/networksolutions-scandal-...

I do dislike some things about them (the cleavage in the ads is a cheap trick and their UI is terrible), but:

1. Great prices.

2. Amazing support(for the price).

3. I respect Bob Parsons and really enjoy reading his blog posts which always share hard data which is rare and helpful.

4. It works! (I have a number of servers with them and hundreds of domains and it's been 100% reliable for me in the past 5+ years)

If GoDaddy had an API so I could develop an alternative UI for their services, I would never consider leaving them (besides hosting--for big sites I use other providers).

Pleased to make your acquaintance. You now know at least one person who does not hate GoDaddy.

I buy domain names there. They are cheap and have never treated me poorly. I used to buy hosting there. They were cheap and never treated me poorly (and I'd still be there if I didn't catch Rails fever, which means $4 a month Linux hosting is a bit beneath my needs these days).

Of course, FYI, I was closing the account because their website couldn't keep me logged in and the navigation was terrible. Also, the way they bind your account to a single "master" domain name, and then other domains are served out of subdirectories of that main domain's directory is bassackward, which made it really hard to work with someone else who wasn't technically inclined in terms of putting files on the websites I had hosted there.

However, I'm still a customer for all of my .ca (Canada) sites and hosting for my girlfriend's business because:

1. Prices are very cheap

2. They are the most credible and inexpensive .ca domain registrar that I've found

3. Customer service is decent

For my own startup it's AWS all the way...

I admire Parsons because he built two successful tech startups from scratch a Silicon Valley outsider. When you think about it, all the GoDaddy girls and upsells are just a different flavor of the VC whoring that goes on in other parts of the industry.

And their Total DNS control stuff is nice.

I think that explains his desire to run Superbowl ads more than anything.

I think something like this happens to a lot of people who do startups:

"Why on earth are you leaving a 50-100k job per year, with benefits, to do a startup?"

Bob Parson seems to have to made many honest mistakes and learned from them. One of the thing i liked about him was Persistence, he kept trying and trying until he succeeded. A true entrepreneur.

That is pyrrhic victory to me.

The fact that he's saying nice things about her makes me think the opposite.

I think many people dull the sadness of loss with sour grapes. He has not. Respect.

I've been saying that there should be some other DNS system that's decided on by users. That is, flip FireFox from "default DNS" to "newDNS" and now "googel.com" goes to "google.com", because that's what the majority of people have suggested it go to, not because Google had to register this to protect from typo squatters. It would never be the case that "googel.com" goes to some squattors "what you want when you want it" bullshit page, because users wouldn't stand for that. It would get voted off the DNS system.

This system would of course use the proper ICANN DNS to resolve the main sites like "Google.com." So, now we have the situation where if you want a domain, go ahead and register fajsdf90234890342.com with ICANN, then suggest to newDNS that "mydomain.com" goes to "fajsdf90234890342.com". As users see that it's legit, it gets set. If it's obvious parked domain BS, then you lose it.

Finally, this system could be implemented today, because it's backward compatible. Unless otherwise noted, a newDNS entry goes to whatever the ICANN entry is. If users flag it down, then it gets erased. If users flag their own redirection, it gets updated.

This would be beautiful.

It doesn't appear that they have a user generate database of domains, though.

That's what you get for trying to interpret a conditional probability.