Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

news.ycombinator.com

681–690 of 751 posts

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

#681
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> gives us almost no benefits. > until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. > would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective. There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godad…

Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.

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

#682
post #586
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elephant killing incident??

https://mashable.com/2011/03/31/bob-parsons-elephant-story/

Looks Like this guy pulls the philosophical train lever to save 5 and gets crushed himself.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gives us almost no benefits. > until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. > would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective. There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godad…

Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.

No company is perfect, but clearly some are better than others from the technical perspective. I know I would enjoy my work more and remain more productive if I felt like I'm struggling a little, rather than a lot, to release anything.

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really dislike GoDaddy but this is not the best signal to use. A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. A lot of things about startups are just crap early on. People do things that they shouldn't or will have to pay for in the long run. Startups accumulate debt in many ways. Being on GoDaddy might be one of those. And if the DNS resol…

> A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on

I.e. "technically incompetent"?

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gives us almost no benefits. > until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. > would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective. There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godad…

Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.

From experience, there's very big differences between the amount of terrible decisions the upper management forces upon engineers between various companies. When it's very very bad, you should leave because the odds of it being better somewhere else are very high (they might be only average bad instead of objectively terrible).

Edit: It is also exactly this kind of thinking that keeps people in bad situations. Nobody wins when anyone thinks like that, except of course the people in the exploiting position in the first place.

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

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gives us almost no benefits. > until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it. > would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective. There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godad…

Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.

> the company that writes perfect code?

You are touching on an important point, which I did not state: that there are no companies with zero pebbles on the scale.

The goal is not perfection. The goal is to avoid a pile of pebbles large enough that engineers feel hopeless / "why do I bother" / "this place is a joke anyway". Good people don't stick around long for that.

But the main point was that thinking that a technical blemish has "zero cost" is a trap. The cost is not zero. The cost is having one more pebble on the scale.

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

#689
Seen Louis Rossman talk about this thread in his latest video this morning. Wanted to chime in.

I have stopped using Godaddy for a while now because I had suspected that was happening. I wasn't 100% sure, but when I would spend hours looking for a domain name and searching through hundreds of names, I noticed a few of them with the least amount of characters and words they might consider more "premium" were taken. The few I noticed were some of the top choices I was considering using.

I do suspect they have some sort of algorithm where they take domains you might consider buying, but I can't prove it.

I've stopped searching on there for a while now and just stick with Namecheap. Never have any problems with Namecheap and their customer service was pretty good/fast when I got locked out of my account 1 time.

Now days I'm pretty paranoid about searching for domains on any domain site...

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

#690
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…

Been using Namecheap for 2 years now. Love it.

Also Louis Rossman mentioned you in his latest video. That's what brought me here.

https://youtu.be/i05uGLFZe2Y

Post reply on HN