This is pretty much the exact breakdown of information I have had in the back of my mind to find for quite a while. It's very helpful — perhaps the most useful thing I've seen posted on HN since I started reading. (At least, most useful for me!) Of course, I wouldn't want to jump off a bridge just because everyone else was doing it, but researching all the available providers for all these hosting requirements is a potentially endless job. It's nice to see the decisions other companies have made, to crowdsource it a bit and narrow down the options.
Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had good experiences with 1and1.com as a registrar. $8.99 domains, free private whois, and a decent domain management dashboard, YMMV.
I second 1&1 — they are cheap, incredibly responsive to support requests, and generally a pleasure to deal with all around.
I have 50+ domains with them. I like them okay, but I don't love em. I did call support ~2-3 time recently and they were really quite good. 24/7 and almost no waiting.
When you cancel a domain they reveal your contact information for some period of time. Maybe they can't help this, but I blame them anyway.
Overall I think they're pretty good.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#53It's surprising how many cells of that table say "GoDaddy."
For a while at Loopt we considered becoming a Tucows reseller and only holding our domains, but it wasn't worth the effort. Whoever bought our first domain used GoDaddy we just stuck with it. We've seen no pressing reason to switch.
Tucows is more of a pain. You can become an eNom reseller in a day or two very easily. As I recall, there's a little faxing involved, but no biggie. It's convenient if you need to register or modify domains programmatically.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
s/surprising/depressing/ GoDaddy's "used car lot" salesmanship makes me loathe the company. I'm in process of transferring all my domains elsewhere.
Likewise. Have a fairly budget-price but not-so-shady registrar in mind? [edit] WTF guys, why am I being modded up? I asked a question without providing additional insight - this doesn't deserve +points.
I register through Google Apps. They use GoDaddy as the actual registrar, but the process of buying a domain through them is uber-simple; the complete opposite of GoDaddy's constant upsell.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are running a user-generated content site and you get to a large enough size, it's near certain that GoDaddy will shut off your domain. We had a very, very close call with Weebly where someone from GoDaddy called at 10am on a Saturday, didn't get through, and started shutting off the domain. If I hadn't called right back it would have been disastrous. For some reason, GoDaddy sees it as their job to police the…
Were they checking the authenticity of the registration info? If so, that's them enforcing ICANN rules. They usually don't do that though unless somebody requested it.
No. They field abuse requests for phishing sites, DMCA requests, etc. When notified, we take them down promptly.
However, whenever someone makes a phishing abuse request on the .weebly.com subdomain to GoDaddy, they don't even look at your traffic or website and just override your DNS servers/records to be blackholed if you don't answer your phone when they call.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
s/surprising/depressing/ GoDaddy's "used car lot" salesmanship makes me loathe the company. I'm in process of transferring all my domains elsewhere.
Likewise. Have a fairly budget-price but not-so-shady registrar in mind? [edit] WTF guys, why am I being modded up? I asked a question without providing additional insight - this doesn't deserve +points.
I've been using gandi.net and like them a lot. I'm surprised no one of the YC companies use them.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likewise. Have a fairly budget-price but not-so-shady registrar in mind? [edit] WTF guys, why am I being modded up? I asked a question without providing additional insight - this doesn't deserve +points.
I got tired of GoDaddy a while ago and moved all of my domains to NameCheap. They've been great, although private registrations cost a couple dollars after the first year. Edit: http://www.namecheap.com
Ditto on NameCheap. I have a half dozen or so domains with them and have had a good experience there as well.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#58does anyone have experience with http://www.fdcservers.net/ ? I was looking around for unmetered 100MBps and what I am looking at looks really good and cheap. I have a dedicated server at local ISP and one at theplanet.com - I am not really satisfied with theplanet.com one and prices for local ISP (though superb ping, of course) are a riot.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody complains about the UI -- but it's domain registration! How often do you really use the UI? A couple times a year, maybe? GoDaddy is super cheap and reliable (for domains). Until somebody makes something better (and equally cheap), I'm staying.
You must be a light user; I'm on godaddy at least once a week doing something. The checkout process is obnoxious; I just want to buy something, not be upsold a billion times. I understand why they do this so godaddy probably isn't ideal for me. I just deal with it because of the price. On the other hand, I'd love to see some enterprising company (even godaddy; all it "GoDaddy Pro" or something) come up with a no-fril…
GoDaddy has a no-frills solution with wildwestdomains. We use the api in our systems and it was a nightmare to implement but works well enough.
Re: Chart of YC companies' hosting decisions
#60Does choice of hosting provider figure in selection of startups? Will one startup get preference over another otherwise equal startup if the former is (not) using a particular hosting provider/mail/registrar?