Review: GoDaddy
mobile bookmark huh? 14 Monday, October 13th, 2008
Interactive Producers are often tasked with domain name registration and management on interactive campaigns. To this end, I offer a Domain Checklist to help producers and brand domainers obtain domain names from the registrar provider. Let’s look at the pros and cons of GoDaddy.
Reasons to Use GoDaddy
- Search Domains
Their whois search is good at recommending similar domains. This is helpful during domain selection in the campaign’s creative strategy phase. - Cheap Registration
GoDaddy has always offered the most competitive registration rates for commercial domains. Be sure to get a significant discount using the GoDaddy promo codes from the Live Codes blog. This can be a significant savings the client will appreciate, especially when registering hundreds of domains purely in defense of domainjacking. - Smooth Domain Administration
GoDaddy offers one of the easiest control panels in the industry for domain renewals, DNS changes, domain transfers and bulk administration. Domainers can also lock accounts and plan auto-renewals for up to 10 years. - Wide TLD Variety
GoDaddy allows registration with a large number of top level domains, including some TLDs reserved for country codes and sponsored entities. Use the convenience of a single source. - Flexible Terms On Hosting
The GoDaddy hosting model is engineered for a high volume of low traffic sites. I once produced a campaign that generated so much traffic on GoDaddy servers, they had to temporarily take our site offline to move it to a different production environment. We got a surprise series of bills for the burstable load, our hosting bill jumped from $200 to nearly $20,000!Despite our success in marketing, I negotiated a significant price reduction. GoDaddy graciously agreed to accept a fraction of the cost, and they allowed us to move the campaign to a host provider better equipped to scale rapidly during traffic crunches.
- You Can Reach a Human Being
Unlike many smaller registrars, you can talk to a real people at GoDaddy. Call (480) 505-8877. This can be crucial when dealing with odd situations like sponsored TLDs, renewals, transfers, emergency DNS administration or chasing down account access due to poor management during campaign staff turnover. - Proactive Customer Service
Update I got this brief voicemail from GoDaddy just checking in to make sure everything is a-ok. Nice touch.
Reasons to Avoid GoDaddy
- Excessive Upselling During Registration
I don’t even ask my most savvy brand managers to suffer the endless stream of GoDaddy upselling during the registration. My campaigns rarely need the privacy, promotional or hosting add-ons. It can be tricky navigating the registration process, especially by domain owners that aren’t sure about what services are needed. - Enough with Old Man Perv Thing
Bob Parsons is a great example of a corporate video blog from a high-profile CEO. It’s a good mix of personality, education and inspiration for domainers.However, his boorish persona steeped in adolescence and keenly expressed in the company’s sexually charged Superbowl ads is kinda creepy (he really should consider leaving Guyland). Judging by his fan comments, he has managed to build a cult following a la other web celebs. But is his regression really such a feat in the shadow of Hugh Hefner? I’m just sayin’. Have some fun, but think a little more Richard Branson or Larry Ellison and less Tila Tequila.
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GoDaddy has always been my favorite domain registrar, but I wasn’t impressed with their hosting for the short period of time that I used it.
Tyler, I’ve had my druthers as well, but found them to be very helpful on the phone. The hosting control panel is actually more intuitive than comparable services at Yahoo. Both are cheap & pack a bunch of sited on single servers, so you get what you pay for.
Had to chuckle at the “Enough with Old Man Perv Thing” comment. More than once I’ve used another registrar for a professional contact/client because of Bob Parson’s persona. I am a HUGE advocate of keeping your DNS separate from your hosting accounts – and GoDaddy has been lightening-fast for DNS changes. However, my wife (a professional photographer but that gets me no slack) still gives me dirty looks whenever she catches Danica posing via godaddy.com on my computer at home. So I HAVE sent female friends and clients elsewhere even if the deal was a bit better at GoDaddy.
Of course, the phrase “you can’t argue with success” comes to mind. Guess it all comes down to how you define success. I would be proud if one of my daughters followed in Danica Patrick’s footsteps. I just want it to be for what they kick vs what they flash
– GoDaddy should grow up as well.
Glad to know I’m not the only one, Phil.
That makes three of us. We just signed up with GoDaddy’s SSL and the conversation went —
Mike: “Can’t beat the price at $30 per year.”
Tom: “Definitely. But I hate how hard it is to actually check out on that site with all the upselling…”
Mike: “… and Bob Parson’s is a turd.”
Too funny. Great post, Shannon.
LOL, thanks for checking in Tom.
I’ve tried GoDaddy with two clients and found their service to be very poor. I lost one of the clients and the other stuck with me through the transfer elsewhere.
Give’m Hell Jody!
Seriously? I would have thought that this was all too obvious by now.
where do you got all the information?
We got lured to use the Premier DNS because of features like DNSSEC and supposed worldwide coverage. But it turns out they only have two name servers are they are both located on the East Coast. That is not exactly worldwide coverage. Twice we had outages in various parts of the world such as Europe and Asia. Their support is downright terrible. They are clueless as to how DNS is supposed to work. They can not check their DNS performance from other parts of the world. They assured me that ‘everything was fine’ with the GoDaddy systems but yet the outage in Europe took over 3 hours. Especially when you put a low TTL on entries, other name server can not retrieve them at all, and your site is down as a result.
The kicker came after we added secondary DNS, to back up the unreliable GoDaddy DNS. We had a data center change and updated the GoDaddy DNS as our primary DNS. But it failed to update the slaves, so engineers at the other DNS company had to force a refresh. This caused hours of downtime.
We had three downtime incidents with the GoDaddy Premier DNS service and can not accept any more. So we are leaving GoDaddy behind, it simply not enterprise grade.
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