I ditched Go Daddy yesterday.
by rdjahn
I fell into using them the way most folks do, I reckon: I’d actually heard of them, so that’s where I went when I decided to get a website — which happened to coincide with my publisher telling me I needed one.
Since first registering a domain name with them, I’d become aware of opposition to their sexist Super Bowl ads, though I hadn’t ever actually watched the Super Bowl or seen an ad; and I’d heard that their customer service was rotten, but had always found it perfectly adequate; and I knew, too, that their founder and CEO-at-the-time Bob Parsons had shot an elephant for sport and posted a video of it to YouTube, but saw no reason to dump them because of what someone did with his personal time.
What finally pushed me past my inertia was Go Daddy’s support for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. For a good rundown on what’s wrong with SOPA, see this piece at Techdirt. That an internet company would support such draconian legislation just boggles the mind.
So I decided to join the boycott initiated on Reddit and drop them.
Then, in response to the outcry, Go Daddy retracted their support for SOPA — but I went ahead and dropped them anyway. Their support for SOPA was genuine; they helped draft the legislation. Their retracting that support was not; it was the result only of outside pressure. They’ve now realized such support isn’t something they can mention out loud — that’s all.
So I transferred my domain name over to Hover, which was easy — took about ten minutes of work over the course of an hour (Go Daddy was slow to handle various requests).
I was already hosting the site elsewhere, but ended up spending the day redesigning it anyway (you can find it here). It’d been getting cluttered over the course of the last year, and had far too many nested pages, so I decided to take this opportunity to clean it up some and change the look a bit.
Anyway, Go Daddy’s gone — and I won’t be using them again.
