In December 2002 I made my first purchase from GoDaddy, since then I’ve spent $1,200 with them. Over the years I’ve seen them grow up to be a major force both in the registration and web hosting markets; I’ve also seen them go from lean and efficient to annoying and unfriendly.

Once upon a time GoDaddy had the best prices and the best search of any registrar; unfortunately things often change, and not always for the best. As time went on they added more products and adopted a very “in your face” style of marketing. For years I’ve dismissed the aggressive marketing as the cost of the low prices, but times have changed.

The aggressive marketing style, incredibly difficult to cancel subscriptions, feature lock in, and many other annoyances and issues. And why do I put up with this? It’s not the low prices, as for many things my current hosting company is far cheaper. I’m no longer locked, it’s not that. Loyalty? That it, well, that was it.

After 7 years, and $1,200 – I’ve started moving my domains over to my hosting company; and so far I couldn’t be happier. No aggressive marketing, good service, and they don’t nickel and dime me to death.

Loyalty can be a good thing, but how much is loyalty costing you? Is it worth it?

While trying to renew a few domain names recently, I found that cancelling the Privacy service that GoDaddy offers (via Domains By Proxy) is much more difficult than I had expected. The $8.99/year service conceals your name, address, and phone number from the public WHOIS listing.

Being concerned about privacy as most people are (or at least should be) it seemed a reasonable option but when multiplied by quite a few domains, it gets rather expensive. So during this last round of renewals I decided to cancel the service; figuring it would be no harder than removing the item from the shopping cart. To my surprise, it wasn’t nearly so easy.

Turns out that you have to sign into the DomainsByProxy web site with a Customer ID and password to cancel the service; so I tried the obvious and used my GoDaddy ID and password, though no such luck. I searched my email archives and didn’t find a single email from DomainsByProxy, at this point I was pretty sure whatever email address they had on file wasn’t valid, which is bad news for me. While there is an option to recover your customer ID, if their records aren’t accurate then it’s of no real use.

But there is hope.

It took a fair bit of reading and testing, but I finally found a method to get to your account IDs, and it’s fairly simple:

1. Go to the Private Registration Page on GoDaddy’s site (make sure you’re logged in to your GoDaddy account)
2. Type in some random characters into the search box
3. On the results page, click “Continue to Registration”
4. Click “No Thanks” on the ad page
5. Scroll down to the section labeled “3. Select Your Domains By Proxy® Account“

You should now see your customer IDs for the DomainsByProxy web site. The web site only shows the first four account IDs, if you have more than that you can contact DomainsByProxy and have them merge the account IDs you know. Just continue the process until you have all of your accounts merged into one.

Unless you’ve changed your password on the DomainsByProxy web site, your GoDaddy password should work. From there, you can update your information – or like me, cancel the service completely. Now you are free to renew the domain without paying the extra annual fee or transfer to another registrar.

While working on the list of tools and services to write about as part of my Start-up Tools series, Get Satisfaction has been the hardest to decide on. After a lot of reading, I decided against recommending it, though I had to write about it because so many companies have opted to use it.

Get Satisfaction is a great concept for the most part – what it boils down to is a specialized forum service for your customers to discuss issues and ideas about your products. But it’s not quite that simple, as your customer can create a site with them in your company’s name, without your knowledge as 37signals found out – (and they weren’t happy about it). The article by 37signals goes into length about the issues surrounding the service, so I won’t repeat them all here – it’s well worth the time to read if you are thinking about using the service.

While they do offer a rather anemic free version, if you want anything useful you’ll have to shell out for one of the paid versions which start at $99/month. That’s $1,188 per year, which for most start-ups would be among their top expenses.

While they have made some changes to reduce the mafioso feel that many complained about, however the feeling that you have to participate if you care about customers still lingers. With prices ranging from $99 to $899 a month for what amounts to little more than a forum service – it’s simply too expensive for many start-ups.

While I understand that they are in business to make money just as I am, my budget is still very tight and there are many other needs fighting over that same money. Supporting customers has to be the top priority, but is this really the best way to achieve that?

To me it seems that money may be better spent on hardware upgrades to make our servers faster or some real analytics to make sure our web sites are as easy to use as possible. While the service has some nice benefits, spending over $1,100 a year for access to a locked-down forum just doesn’t make business sense.

Oh, and do you want it to match the look and feel of your web site? We’ll for that you have to upgrade to their top plan at a whopping $899 a month. Yet themes are a basic feature of virtually all forum systems.

For me, I think I’ll give bbPress a shot – it’s free, open source, and easy to use – then I’ll take that $99/month and find better ways for it to serve my customers.

When it comes to small business project management, Basecamp by 37signals has been the king of the hill for some time. Now though, there is an exciting new player in the field: Open Atrium. It’s a Drupal based open source project management system somewhat like Basecamp, though with many more features.

Open Atrium is new on the scene, with beta 1 being released just 4 days ago – though it’s already rather polished and seems to work well. While there are some hiccups with the installer and a disappointing lack of documentation, it’s still very easy to install and takes only a few minutes to get running.

It has all the major features that you would expect, plus a few extras such as a twitter-like shoutbox system. Here are the highlights:

• Blogging
• Calendar
• Dashboard
• Document Storage
• Task Management

Being open source and self-hosted adds some nice benefits; unlimited customization, full control of your data, and my favorite: can be installed on a non-public web server. Having you project management system sit behind a VPN is a great way to avoid data leaks and embarrassments.

I’m still debating which is best, Basecamp or Open Atrium – but if you want to save some money, Open Atrium is worth looking into.

Good developers need good tools, it’s simple as that. If you are building software for Windows, the only real option is Visual Studio. The down side to Visual Studio? The $1,200 starting price tag. While Microsoft is now providing the free Express editions, these are aimed more at hobbyists, not serious developers.

Microsoft thankfully is here to help: If your company is less than three years old and has less than $1 million in annual revenue, they have a program to give you all that you need. BizSpark provides the key tools and technologies to get your start-up moving without impacting your budget.

The BizSpark program provides Visual Studio Team Suite + MSDN Premium for your developers (up to 25),  plus production licenses for software like Windows 2008 Server and SQL Server 2008. Unlike Microsoft’s other start-up helper Empower, there are no requirements that you use certain technologies or pursue any certifications.

While Empower does provide licenses for things such as Office for employee use which BizSpark does not, BizSpark more than makes up for it in the production server licensing.

For a start-up with little funding (normally what the founders happen to have in the bank), building for the Linux platform using MySQL and Ruby on Rails can be very tempting. Now with BizSpark the money takes a back seat (at least for the first three years), and the technologies can compete on a level playing field.

It looks like the core Silverlight 3 tools are now available:

• Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Deep Zoom Composer

Though the tools needed for development seem to be public, I’ve yet to see the end-user run-time; though I imagine we’ll see that in the release anticipated for tomorrow.

Time to have some fun.

Update: Client run-time is now available.