Yesterday I was all ready to start switching my domains from GoDaddy. I was reading articles about how to do it and wondering how hard it was to migrate a WordPress blog. I got to work and started running WHOIS queries to see who my company’s domains were registered with, ready to start sending emails about how we should change it. Then I opened Hacker News and saw that GoDaddy had flip flopped. They bit the bullet and admitted they were wrong. Getting angry on the Internet had finally worked!
So what was the Internet’s reaction to this? “Who cares!? GoDaddy is still terrible! Transfer everything anyway!” GoDaddy did EXACTLY what everyone wanted but they wanted more? That seems pretty unfair and it defeats the purpose of the boycott. Instead of being about helping stop SOPA, it became about stopping GoDaddy.
I don’t disagree that GoDaddy kinda sucks. Their site is confusing as hell and they try to upsell you all kinds of shit you don’t need. They’ve called me more times than just about any other company I’ve ever bought anything from. But their product isn’t so bad. Their domain name prices are competitive and their hosting (for me) has been rock solid.
GoDaddy did a good thing today, and for now, the pain of switching is greater than my bad feelings for GoDaddy.
http://gizmodo.com/5870920/brave-godaddy-ceo-says-hes-neither-for-nor-against-sopa
That is why we are not retracting our boycott. Let him come out and publicly state they are firmly against SOPA now that they realize how stupid the bill is, then people will drop the boycott.
Until then, they are just trying to save face while privately chuckling at how easy it is to manipulate people into coming back.
I hadn’t seen that post when I wrote this. I’m still probably going to stay with GoDaddy, at least until they go back and start supporting it again. I’ll still keep an eye on it though and keep investigating exit strategies.