Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by pottertheotter » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #119

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…

Godaddy spammed me so much and so often that I transferred my domain to porkbun.com. It's been so problem-free that I couldn't even remember the provider's name -- I had to WHOIS my domain to figure out who was hosting it.

I've been using Porkbun for a few years and have no complaints.

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

#152

Post by adityapatadia » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #124

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…

Recommendations for superior alternatives? I'm an indifferent GoDaddy user but would be happy to switch to something else since I've never liked them as a company.

We use AWS Route 53 for domain registration. Works like a charm.

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

#153

Post by andawg » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #124

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…

Recommendations for superior alternatives? I'm an indifferent GoDaddy user but would be happy to switch to something else since I've never liked them as a company.

I use ipage for domains and hosting and never had a problem with it. I am looking at my past bill and I paid $96 for a year of hosting. I don't use it for much, just static HTML. I use ftp to push changes. Dead simple.

Looking their site they have an intro deal going now to host for a year for $2/month

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

#154

Post by im3w1l » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

sathishmanohar wrote: post #141

I was always suspicious of godaddy and you never know which domain registrars would go rogue in this respect in the future. So I created a simple shell script from which I do all my domain availability searches now. It is also way faster than using any web based searches. Link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824665

Maybe this works presently, but under the hood whois must still be querying some server who could use your query to buy it? I guess the purchase intent is lower with whois, as you may drown in other queries.

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

#155

Post by awill » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

I've used hover.com for probably 10 years. Pretty great. Simple UI, no upselling/spam and they have customer support. I've never called, but it's nice knowing it's there. I then use CloudFlare for DNS

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

#156

Post by projektfu » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

Relevant from 13 years ago: Network Solutions sued for domain tasting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123899

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

#157

Post by darkhorn » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

I had mozillazine-tr.org I think I have created it in 2007. Few years later I have stopped renewing it. But it still looked like it was registered to my fake name and creation date was same however it wasn't in my account. It had gihg Google page rank. I think thus Godaddy decided to keep it for themselves

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

#158

Post by krn » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

cpach wrote: post #113

krn wrote: post #100

After doing a lot of research, I would recommend Dynadot as the best domain registrar at the moment. My main criteria were: fair prices without any coupon codes, no-upselling, free whois privacy as standard, most ccTLDs supported, REST API for everything, and at least 15-20 years of history. I would normally prefer a European company, but Dynadot has been the registrar of wikileaks.org since 2006.

I switched over to Dynadot about three or five years ago and I have never regretted it. Very solid service IME. I’ve also heard good things about Gandi.net but I haven’t tried them myself.

Gandi.net used to have a cult-like following in its early days, was the registrar of reddit.com up until recently, and is still the registrar of ycombinator.com.

But its ownership has changed multiple times over two decades, and the company is now owned by a private equity firm. The most recent reviews have been far from great[1].

I would recommend INWX (Germany) as the best European alternative to Dynadot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822

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

#159

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

aerovistae wrote: post #124

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…

Recommendations for superior alternatives? I'm an indifferent GoDaddy user but would be happy to switch to something else since I've never liked them as a company.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #115

_verandaguy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding Gandi. I spent the past year transferring my domains over (as registrations lapsed with Route53, which is a Gandi frontend with fewer features). Their interface is very clean, their business model is no-nonsense, and I dig the managed DNSSEC.

https://domains.google is the best I found. Also, namecheap’s beast mode if you want to check hundreds of domains at once.

Google Domains did the same thing to me a few years ago.

There's a reason my personal domain is nothingofvalue.org instead of .com. Because when I went to register the .com originally and backed out at the last minute to give myself time to setup a PO Box (didn't like the ICANN publicly displaying my mailing address), I came back two days later and noticed that someone had registered the .com domain.