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?
So here we go again – my 4th hosting company since I started this blog. Maybe I’ll have better luck this time? For those interested, here’s the rundown of which hosts I’ve used, and what I’m doing today.
Radical Vision** – Lasted 4 years**
Radical Vision was once a great host, though as time went on I had more than a few issues with them. I tried to give them a chance (several chances, actually).
I recently became curious just how much time I had spent working on content for this site, which led me to an idea: it would be great to have a page that listed some useful data about the content, and how much effort was put into it. I had some hope that I could pull some of this directly out of Hugo, though unfortunately it didn’t expose the information I wanted (and certainly not in an efficient way).
During a recent discussion about the DarkMatter CA on a Mozilla mailing list, it was found that their 64-bit serial numbers weren’t actually 64 bits, and it opened a can of worms. It turns out that the serial number was effectively 63 bits, which is a violation of the CA/B Forum Baseline Requirements that state it must contain 64 bits of output from a secure random number generator (CSPRNG). As a result of this finding, 2,000,000 certificates or more may need to be replaced by Google, Apple, GoDaddy and various others.
Update 3: In 2014 the FTC filed a complaint against Snapchat for their failure to provide the level of security they promised. The findings listed below were sent to the founders of Snapchat, that email was quoted in the FTC compliant as proof that Snapchat was aware of these issues.
Update 2: The Snapchat API has changed to address the issues I pointed out to them – and the new API has issues as well.
SOPA, while it’s not likely to be passed as-is, I would be willing to bet money that something SOPA-like will be passed. It may be watered down with many of the most offending parts removed, but for those backing SOPA it’ll still be a real victory. For them getting it on the books, even in a weakened form means it can be tweaked (and extended) later.
There’s been an amazing resistance to SOPA, from the boycott of GoDaddy to public statements from celebrities such as Adam Savage – the public outcry against this horrid piece of legislation has been quite inspiring.
