Moral/political reasons aside, have you ever seen their UI?
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
While those things are certainly annoying, they take up about 10 minutes per year of my time. Yes, GoDaddy has lots of issues, but it's not like other registrars are any better. E.g. on the front page of NameCheap they advertise that .com domains are 3.99, but when you actually do a lookup they in fact cost $10.69.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
Namecheap is a fabulous hosting provider. Love 'em. That said, highly-redundant DDOS-resistant DNS infrastructure is not their focus--they offer it as a free service with hosting, but it's best to cough up a few extra bucks and move your DNS to something more robust with AnyCast (DNS Made Easy, Route53...) when you can if uptime's important to you.
Wow - you're seriously a hero. Thanks so much for building the test and thanks (even more) for the blog post (especially the legwork on pricing). I look forward to the day when "can we jump on a call?" sales processes are well and truly dead and self-service and transparent pricing is the norm.
Right below there it says web hosting starting at 2.95 per month, and if you click on the link the lowest price listed is 3.45 per month and that's only with a 24 month commitment. Why would I go with a company that is outright trying to steal money from me? I ask because they seem to be the most recommended GoDaddy alternative.
Their UI is AWFUL. But you know what...it's intentional. All of the upselling. The current hiding exactly where the "My Account" stuff resides. It all feels very intentional as to mislead people into buying unwanted services.
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
Wow, someone tried to sell me something...oh, it was so hard to say 'no' to things I did not want to buy and did not need. Oh wait, that's right, I don't care at all. I have no problem not buying those things.
It's actually not that bad and is only getting better since they've taken on investors. Even when it was bad, it was only bad on the first few visits, once you learned your way around the clutter, I never spent any more time on the GD site than I did on any other registrar or hosting provider site. For instance, just going to dcc.godaddy.com to go right into my domain manager when needing to update a domain.
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.