Just in time for the aptly named “Dump Go Daddy” day, our favorite PR pinata GoDaddy just emailed a number of press, with a fresh statement from new CEO Warren Adelman.
From the email …
The statement is from our newly appointed CEO, who makes it clear, we don’t just ‘not support SOPA,’ Go Daddy OPPOSES SOPA.
When GoDaddy publicly recanted their support of SOPA last week, many were quick to point out that such an act didn’t really mean much. As far as the Judiciary Committee overseeing SOPA was concerned, GoDaddy was still a supporter.
That’s been changed, it seems. In the latest version of the US House Of Representatives’ SOPA Supporters list (heads up: it’s a PDF), GoDaddy’s name is nowhere to be found. → Read More
Surprise! GoDaddy has just recanted their support of SOPA, issuing a press release and blasting out a massive mountain of tweets on the matter. This comes just hours after they were seemingly cementing their position, shrugging off the boycotts as something that had yet to cause “any impact to [their] business”. → Read More
If you think about all the things people search for on Google, “God” has to be pretty high up there, right? I mean, since the dawn of man, people have been searching for the meaning of life and its creator, so what better way to do that than with a search engine? But divinity apparently has nothing on cheap domain names.
When you try to do a search for “God” with the new Google Instant feature, it predicts that you’re going to type in “Godaddy” instead. If you hit a space after the “d”, it thinks you’re looking for “God of War”, the popular videogame. So the only way to actually search for “God” with this new Google Instant feature is to hit the search button. → Read More
Earlier we made fun of Bing for going “dark” today to save energy in a way that doesn’t at all save energy. But Foursquare has an actual way to do that: take down the entire service.
Yesterday, Foursquare had some downtime. That’s nothing new, startups have downtime all the time — see: Twitter, that was their M.O. for about a year — but the reason for Foursquare’s appears to be a little humorous. → Read More
Earlier this month, we reported on The Go Daddy Group doing everything it could to keep the public from knowing about its subsidiary Standard Tactics, which it used for domain warehousing. Although the practice wasn’t necessarily against the Terms & Conditions of ICANN, they sure went through a lot of trouble to make sure Standard Tactics couldn’t easily be identified as a GoDaddy company.
Andrew over at DomainNameWire was the first to take the story public, and we followed suit quickly, concluding our article with the words: “It’s really no wonder GoDaddy is trying to cover its tracks and hide these practices, but thanks to Andrew the word is now out.” → Read More
Having working in the domain name industry myself for a couple of years, I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that there’s such a big business formed around something as trivial as a bunch of letters and numbers used to ‘translate’ IP addresses. And when there’s a big business in something, you just know there will be a grey area as well where ethics are left at the door sometimes.
Andrew Allemann over at Domain Name Wire has been doing an excellent job researching the hoops The Go Daddy Group jumps through to keep its shady tactics outside of the public view, resulting in this great blog post. Turns out The Go Daddy Group, which runs the world’s largest domain name registrar GoDaddy.com as well as some other domain name related companies, is apparently warehousing its customers’ expired domain names and directly profiting from them. → Read More
Earlier this year GoDaddy won the rights to distribute domains under the extension .me, which belongs to the country of Montenegro. After a number of private distribution periods for corporations, the highly desirable extension finally went on sale this morning for $20 dollars a year (with a minimum 2 year purchase – nice). And now, things are rapidly descending into chaos. Many users have reported getting confirmations (and credit card charges) for their domains, only to receive the following cancellation notice about an hour later: Dear Jason Kincaid, The following domain name has failed to be registered: WATCH.ME Error: WATCH.ME: cannot register – already registered We will evaluate this error and retry the registration if appropriate. If we are unable to successfully register the domain name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please allow one business day for the refund to be processed. Understandably, a lot of people are outraged. And, disappointment and shattered dreams aside, there’s the issue of who actually will wind up owning each domain. A Twitter search for “hug.me” shows that at least a half dozen people hold confirmation letters (myself included). GoDaddy says that the problems are a result of a “SuperBowl -like response to the open registration” that exceeded everyone’s expectations and wound up crushing their servers. Apparently they didn’t realize that after months of pent up demand and publicity for an extremely desirable domain, they’d be seeing an onslaught of prospective buyers. The company says that disgruntled users can expect a refund in the next 24-48 hours, and that the servers should be stable now. No word on when we’ll know if we actually own our newly-purchased domains. You can try your luck elsewhere on this list of alternative domain registrars for the .me extension. CrunchBase Information GoDaddy Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The online storage market is evolving fast. In the past, users could expect no more than a simple service where files could be slowly uploaded and downloaded from a mapped virtual drive or a simple web based interface. Little competition (and the bursting of the bubble) led to very high prices for a minimal amount of storage. Over the last year a slew of new services have launched (some are launching in February) with serious web 2.0 features, reasonable pricing (including free unlimited storage) and, in at least one case (OmniDrive), the ability to read/write directly to the file with local applications like Office, on the remote server. This last feature speeds the process of writing to files significantly by skipping the requirement to download the file to the hard drive first. The Online Storage Gang We looked at a total of thirteen companies. They are: AllMyData, Box.net, eSnips, Freepository, (the unfortunately named) GoDaddy, iStorage, Mofile, Mozy, Omnidrive, Openomy, Streamload, Strongspace and Xdrive. Another service, Zingee, has yet to launch and may also (or may not) have a compelling offering. Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices. The services can roughly be broken down into storage-centric and sharing-centric. Some services, like Mozy and the unfortunately named Godaddy, are centered on storage only. GoDaddy offers online file backup with very basic uploading and downloading features – effectively a remote network drive. They are a bare-bones service with a fairly attractive price point ($20/year for 2 GB). You will not find sharing or other advanced features here. Other services offer storage but really focus on sharing files. There are a number of options here, but the best (OmniDrive, Box.net and Streamload) offer full private and public sharing. In addition, I really like the way Box.net approaches group folders, where any number of people can have read/write priviliges. Omnidrive is close to launching this feature as well. Web 2.0 Features Most of the new players (possibly with the exception of Mozy) are laser focused on key web 2.0 features. The best have multiple folders (private, shared, group, public), RSS feeds for each folder, etc. A couple, including Omnidrive, have also built features that allow subscriptions for RSS enclosures (such as podcasts), so that those files → Read More
