GoDaddy Up For Auction

An anonymous reader writes "GoDaddy.com, the closely held website that registers Internet domain names, has put itself up for sale in an auction that could fetch more than $1 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The company, which currently has more than 43 million domains under management, is well known for its edgy advertising, including Super Bowl commercials and ads featuring different 'Go Daddy Girls,' including racing car driver Danica Patrick."

Re:Network Solutions redux

[bsDaemon]

If all their customers renew their domain for just one more year, that's already almost $500,000,000 in revenue right there, just on repeat business, and that's nothing to say about SSL certificates, hosting, or any of their other products. $1,000,000,000 is a pretty good deal for a company that almost certainly makes at least that per year.

Re:Network Solutions redux

[the eric conspiracy]

Yes, but a reasonable first approximation for the market value of a company is their annual revenue. After that other considerations may increase or reduce that value.

Re:This Is Why Privately-Owned Registrars Are Bad

[AHuxley]

A rate hike for a product that is not unique? Thats hard. All you can do is keep most of the users happy long term and try and pull more in.
Good to hold long term but no instant bump of growth.

Re:Oh...

[DarkKnightRadick]

also it's privately held so there isn't anything to pump.

Re:This Is Why Privately-Owned Registrars Are Bad

[Sudheer_BV]

Lot of companies offer domain transfer service. You transfer the domain to another registrar, pay for another year of renewal.

Re:Oh...

[Peach Rings]

No, it's more like buying a shiny new house, smashing down walls for 13 years, and trying to foist it off onto a naive buyer.

GoDaddy is infamous. When someone posted MySpace passwords to a mailing list archived by seclists, MySpace complained and GoDaddy immediately shut down seclists.org with less than 1 minute's notice. They weren't even hosting the material, just the DNS record. GoDaddy's counsel said [alternet.org] "I think the fact that we gave him notice at all was pretty generous."

As covered on slashdot [slashdot.org] they also have a habit of coming up with reasons to suspend customers' accounts and not just terminating service but refusing to release the domain to a different registrar unless you pay exorbitant fees.

Also GoDaddy shut down [domainnamewire.com] some guy's personal website because they sent him an email to update his invalid email address in the whois information and he didn't reply to it. They didn't just shut down the domain, they sold it.

What kind of joke of a service provider complies with random complaints from non-customers against customers without court order?

Re:Could we see a WikiLeaks dump

[Anonymous Coward]

Domain tasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting) essentially doesn't exist now. Back in Aug 2009 15 million domains were being tasted per month. Currently it is down to less than 60,000.

  Icann adopted a 20 cent charge for each domain that was tasted. Beyond that, a number of TLDs upped the charge to several dollars.

It went from a totally free way for companies to check the value of domains to being a very expensive way.

Re:Could we see a WikiLeaks dump

[theskipper]

I've used all the big names and Moniker.com or Namecheap.com come out on top imho.

The control panel UI is "better" at Namecheap but Moniker's is just fine too. Customer service is good at both. Namecheap has coupons to get the cost down to $9, Moniker is flat-out $9 for a .com.

Note that all registrars need to upsell (figure profit on a domain registration is only around $1). These two are comfortably subtle about it.

Neither do the scummy 60-day lock-in that Godaddy relies upon (i.e. no transfers for 60 days for any registration and/or whois changes).

Lots more detailed reasons but I'll stop there.

Bottom line is that there really is no reason to use Netsol or Godaddy.

Re:Oh...

[dgatwood]

I briefly hosted a subdomain on GoDaddy.com. I dumped them because:

• Their servers were a train wreck, with 30 second maximum execution times for all processes. This meant that copying data to or from their servers required copying one file per connection, and if that RAW file was a little too slow, boom, you had to copy it a second time, or a third, or a fiftieth....
• Their servers, despite being faster than dialup on average, randomly wedged and failed to respond to requests for minutes at a time. Somebody was obviously blocking Apache with a long-running PHP script (I was serving static content, so I can safely say that, as the only other possibility is a network outage on their end). They refused to look into it despite me giving them detailed, down-to-the-second logs of when it happened, proof of barely 90% effective uptime, etc. and they refused to move me to a different server, so I demanded a refund.
• I applied for a 10-year SSL cert, which they sold me, then refused to issue claiming that their new policy was that they could only sell certs for a much lower number of years. I threatened to sue. They refunded my money, and it was shortly after that when I demanded the refund on the ISP service as well. I now have a free SSL cert that is just as good as theirs would have been (except for having to renew it once a year), and am happily serving my static images off of DreamHost.

If someone had told me how much of a disaster GoDaddy was beforehand, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, "There's no way anybody could be THAT incompetent." Einstein put it best when he said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."

Maybe I should start the bidding at a dollar.

Re:Could we see a WikiLeaks dump

[HungryHobo]

accused?
you make it sound like there was some doubt that they did that.

When pricing a domain name for a friend I had to use a slightly altered domain name because after checking with the first registrar(godaddy in my first few tests) the domain would get locked in for (I think)72 hours so no other registrar could be used.

Essentially it locked people in to whatever service they checked the availability with first unless they were willing to arse around and wait for the registrars to unlock it.

It's shady as fuck and they seemed to have been forced to stop doing that since then.

Re:Oh...

[DarkKnightRadick]

I haven't used GoDaddy in almost 8 years. The stuff being talked about at nodaddy was enough to split my registrar and hosting up (I now use PairNIC, while more expensive has a better policy IMO, for my registrar). My web host is a free host (000webhost.com) so not much to brag on there (aside from a few neat features).

No surprise here

[grikdog]

Bob Parsons sold his previous company, Parsons Technology, purveyors of home accounting, home Bible concordance, home taxes, home legalese software, to Intuit (who sold it to Brøderbund) after Microsoft passed on the deal, so it's not surprising GoDaddy is on the block. He blazed a few new trails through the personal computing woods, I'll give him that, but he was more of a Davey Crockett than a Daniel Boone. Has a penchant for Alamos.