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Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

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Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#471

Post by pronoiac »

tomhoward wrote: post #24

This sucks and I feel for you. But the sad fact is that domain registrars have been doing this ever since domain names became big business in the 90s. As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a terminal window to see if a domain is available. It's included with macOS, Windows (?), Linux or any other OS anyone's likely to use. [Edit: a reply says it's not included in Windows. It seems you can download i…

> As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a terminal window to see if a domain is available.

A month or so ago, I discovered .wang was a TLD, and I immediately brought it up with friends, and we spent some time happily and goofily brainstorming. I'm not sure about the exact count, but after dozens of queries, whois started returning errors for too many requests.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#472

Post by LeonB »

goatherders wrote: post #469

.io almost always shows AVL on GD and then when added to cart its often registered because the search for that one doesn't seem to connect properly to the actual registration process for .io A 6 letter word that can be well branded and is immediately memorable? I would be more shocked if it were actually avl

This is so much more believable than the idea that GoDaddy have chosen to perform front running.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#473

Post by suifbwish »

ted0 wrote: post #226

Ted from Namecheap here. I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing. In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less relia…

The best way to do this securely is to do a whois lookup on the domain via command line to see if it has a registered date or not. Only way to steal ideas then is if someone works for the icann lookup db

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#475

Post by marcosdumay »

Cyphus wrote: post #439
marcosdumay wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying to avoid.

It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures. I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders. Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating…

> It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures.

Everything always depends... But the initial team tends to turn into the top management team, and a company managed by people that can do its main work is completely different from one managed by people that can't. It's reasonable for somebody to want to avoid it.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#476

Post by Freaken »

ted0 wrote: post #226

Ted from Namecheap here. I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing. In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less relia…

Hey Ted,

Is there a way to migrate a bunch of domain names from Godaddy to Namecheap ? We own about 200 domain names and I would like nothing more than to drop Godaddy for Namecheap, but I cannot justify the manpower (basically just me) required to migrate domains one by one.

Thanks.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#477

Post by prh8 »

cloudwizard wrote: post #184
mdorazio wrote: post #33

I had this happen as well in the past when researching domain names for a new product. Pro Tip: Stay the hell away from GoDaddy for everything. I've had the unfortunate task of managing a server hosted with them and it's been consistently awful (ex. I literally cannot upgrade PHP because the VPS doesn't support it and there is no upgrade path without spinning up an entirely new VPS on a different, and of course more…

Whenever I talk to startups, I check their domain. If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.

Frequently it's the non-technical idea person who grabbed a domain before finding technical people to work with.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#478

Post by mintone »

ted0 wrote: post #226

Ted from Namecheap here. I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing. In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less relia…

I can’t tell you how much I recommend namecheap, the service you provide is excellent as a registrar. You’ve been my recommendation for 7+ years for hundreds of clients and as long as you continue in the path you’ve followed, will be for a long time.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#479

Post by ravenstine »

I've never had a problem using who.is for this purpose.

GoDaddy is the SourceForge of hosting. I'll never trust them again, and I don't think anyone should. Not only do they still pull the shenanigans of registering domains you search for, but I've had terrible experiences in the past where they just decided to shut down my hosted sites for no good reason. I once woke up to discover that my web forum was shut down, and I got an email from them telling me that they decided that I had used a nulled/cracked version of paid software, which simply wasn't the case. No matter how much evidence I provided, they didn't change their minds and took days to get back to me. I took my business elsewhere, obviously.

Even for the average person, there are tons of better options than GoDaddy nowadays. If you need a website for your business, just use Wix or Squarespace or the like. GoDaddy is shady, even though they've tried to rectify their image.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#480

Post by HenryBemis »

ted0 wrote: post #226

Ted from Namecheap here. I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing. In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less relia…

Thank you for joining the discussion.

Any chance Namecheap can provide catch-all mailboxes?

I don't care to have 10 different mailboxes, I was stuck with GoDaddy and now with Wild West Domains just because the have "catch-all", so I can register to services with different email addresses (e.g. paypal55@mydomain.com, ebay44@mydomain.com) so I can also track who got hacked/sold my email ;)

If you do provide it, since I don't see "catch-all" on your three email options (Starter-Pro-Ultimate). If you do offer it, can you please consider adding it to the key specs?

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