News people love new stories. You can't report "Tech companies oppose SOPA" every day, because once you reported it, it's no longer news. Companies abandoning GoDaddy because of their support of SOPA is just another interesting piece of news to report.
I keep seeing this sentiment around HN this morning, and I find it slightly irritating.
The point is that legislation like SOPA exists because corporate lobbyists introduced it. By punishing the companies that support the bill, we undermine the bill, and discourage others to adopt our side of the issue. Laws like SOPA are driven by money. When representative democracy fails to represent your view, voting with your wallet is a perfectly valid means of challenging policy.
Exactly: and further, that kind of apathy is precisely why laws like SOPA get passed. If you sit back and refuse to take "indirect" action to further your own interests, you are just granting the field to the parties that do take that kind of indirect action (in this case: lobbying).
Well, don't stop with GoDaddy. Keep looking -- and acting.
Thing is, money talks. If/when supporters realize it's going to cost them -- both in money and in publicity -- things will start to change.
I also favor "striking while the iron is hot". If the tech community can take the current attention and focus and use it set off the metaphorical small nuclear device, supporters may be sufficiently burned to at least hesitate for a useful period of time before trying this again.
If they don't listen to your vote in the booth, make them listen to the vote of your wallet. And your blog (woof!).
While GoDaddy should not become the sole focus, moving your domains away from them is very easy and produces tangible results. Even better, it gives those of us who don't live in the United States a meaningful way to contribute to fighting SOPA.
Agreed. Whilst I agree with making a stand against GoDaddy, all of the effort going into the Anti-GoDaddy campaign could probably be better spent directly at SOPA.
I strongly disagree. Anyone and everyone is already spending lots of effort opposing SOPA. If a company that supports SOPA would suddenly go out of business (one can dream) that would send a vastly bigger message than a bunch of useless online polls and blog posts.
Probably won't happen. The head guy at GoDaddy is right-wing and is outspoken enough not to work against what he sees as his own interests.
At best, it will probably turn out like the issue at Whole Foods, formerly as seen as a very left-wing-friendly food store. The CEO gave a right-wing statement on some social policy legislation and got excoriated for his view. Eventually, after enough flaming, he backed down on the statement, but his views didn't change, just the official company line.
Call it cynicism or whatever, but I don't think Bob Parsons is capable of a real change of heart on this matter unless it seriously affects his pocketbook, and even then, he would be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
I expressed the same sentiment elsewhere [1] and the results have been interesting. Some responses were ideological, but no one really addressees the core point: there's an awful lot of effort going in to targeting GoDaddy, which is a proxy for the issue. It seems that the latent distaste for GoDaddy is driving people to conflate the two issues: 1) GoDaddy is a pretty scabby company in general, 2) we shouldn't support companies that support SOPA. Then all of the sudden GoDaddy stands alone as the fall guy.
We started our migration process for AeroFS yesterday (I actually looked through email chats with Weihan, my co-founder, and every few months we've been talking about moving away from GoDaddy; yesterday was the final straw)
Still, I'm wary of moving the domains until we're all back at the office (many of us are taking time off for holidays for the next few days).
Why any startup would use GoDaddy for DNS is baffling. Route 53 is amazing. However, must confess we currently use GoDaddy for domains (switching) and SSL certificates. Can anybody recommend some good alternatives for SSL certs that are about the same cost as GoDaddy?
SSL Certs:
I got all my SSL certs from http://www.startssl.com/
They offer FREE SSL certs (just requires a simple email verification). Name-verified SSL certs cost $59 for 2 years, EV certs go for $199 for 2 years. I'm very happy with their service.
DNS:
Like you, I switched to Amazon Route 53. Now that it's available in the Web Management Console, it's a no-brainer, especially if you use other AWS services.
Registrar: I finally got my ass in motion and just bulk-moved all my domains to Namecheap. I wanted to do that for quite a while, and their SOPA support was the final nail in the coffin.
My only problem with Route 53 is the cost. Just about any web host offers their own DNS servers as a free service. I can fully manage zone records at SoftLayer or Linode with unlimited queries at no extra cost.
10 million monthly queries on 20 domains would cost me $15/month at Amazon.
It'd only be $5 per month at DNSMadeEasy, a company with a far longer record of reliable DNS service than Amazon.
The advantage with Route 53 is really when you are already using AWS stuff. At that point sure it costs a bit more (but still less than the amount of change that I lose in my sofa in the same period of time), but it's the same place as everything else. Same bill and stuff.
Exactly. Using just AWS Route 53 'standalone' probably doesn't make much sense, but when used in combination with EC2 and their Elastic Load Balancer it starts to make a lot of sense. And the fact that you can use their APIs to make programmatic changes (say quickly change a A or CNAME record to point elsewhere) is fantastic.
Get SSL certificates from Servertastic. They are a RapidSSL reseller, whom in turn sell rebranded GeoTrust certificates. The result is that you get "the same thing" (by the end of the payment process you are filling out forms being served by GeoTrust's servers) for $13.95/yr.
More generally, using DNS service from your domain registrar is risky. Should your registrar have an outage that impacts your DNS, you run the risk of being both without DNS service and without the ability to switch DNS servers or registrars.
Understood. You do seem to get what you pay for though. If I remember correctly: GoDaddy's root certificate isn't as widely distributed as their competitors are, also their certs are chained certs.
Wow, nice work. I wonder how difficult it would be for Dropbox to switch out their SSL certs and reinstall on their servers.
One problem I ran into was having Go Daddy when I registered my domain via Google Apps. Even though I unlocked the domain and got the auth code, because the way Google uses privacy, the transfer was rejected. Any advice there would be much appreciated.
Yes, that would a huge pain to require all Dropbox users to force-update to get new root certs. It will probably take a while until they are due to expire.
Ha this is great, over at Embedly we plan to move away from Godaddy, our domains are not on godaddy, just the ssl cert (for the short term). I started moving some one-off domains we own last night to namecheap, http://twitter.com/#!/artgibby/status/149995036677910528
Our DNS is in the process of being moved to Route53 (as it has been for a short while) and we're planning to move our domains to Namecheap or another reputable registrar shortly (which we have actually also been thinking of doing for a short while as well).
My neighbor uses GoDaddy for his domain registrations. Should I move?
It's one thing when Ben Huh moves 1000 domains off of GoDaddy in protest. It's another thing if you're going to avoid doing business with a company that does $10-$100/year worth of business with a company that supports SOPA.
Here are a two things that should be higher on the list:
* Call your congressperson. It's a lot easier for a lot of us to push a few buttons on a web page than it is to pick up the phone and talk with someone.
* Avoid dealing directly with companies that support SOPA. How many of us are reading this list from a Comcast IP? Those of us that do are giving Comcast 10-100x more money than these YC companies. I'm going to be looking into switching to FiOS after the holidays (unfortunately, I know many don't have that option, but you should at least take a look).
For what it's worth, I moved all my domains to Namecheap after the elephant incident earlier this year.
But in this analogy, the witch is guilty of pouring her toxic brew in the water supply poisoning the commons. And instead of hanging the witch, we simply stop buying her services. Bad anology fails on all counts.
Its more like a really really watered down catholic banishment via money deprivation.
To be fair, there are a bunch of people who have been considering migrating from Godaddy for any number of reasons anyways. The SOPA stuff is just the icing on the cake that's pushed them over the edge. This migration has been coming for a long time.
Has one of it's competitors whipped up and a SOPA easy/quick transfer service? Seems like a great opportunity for one of it's competitors to jump on!
On a different note I have everything on GoDaddy; all my domains and hosting. In the past 4 months my sites have been hacked and I've been thinking about moving away from them. Yet I have so much there, SO PLEASE TO ANY of it's competitors whip up a SOPA easy/painless transfer your Web businesses to us page.
What do you mean by "a SOPA easy/painless transfer your Web business to us page"? There isn't something a competitor could do to make the transfer process any different than it normally is - you just have to do it.
I'm honestly not interested in spending hundreds on moving domains. I stopped using godaddy for registration after that big game hunter bs a while back.
Comcast supports SOPA right? Is there a place to find alternative phone landline and Internet providers?
I don't have any domains at GoDaddy, but this has been a reminder that US-based registrars can be forced to pull domains by the DOJ (http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-ag-1540.html) -- and the potential for that only gets worse under SOPA.
So I was thinking of switching all of my domains to a non-US registrar. I see lots of recommendations for NameCheap, but they appear to be US-based. Any recommendations for registrar (+ DNS) that aren't under the jurisdiction of the US DOJ?
Many of the important registries (particularly .com) are also based in the US, so presumably they can also be forced to do the same, even if the registrar is Canadian.
I have long wondered how far this jurisdiction goes. The DoJ could presumably not do much if they want to pull a domain name under a non-US ccTLD because in most cases neither the registry nor the registrar are US-based.
But the root zone itself is based in the US, in the sense that US persons manage and control it. Just as they could pull bar.com if foo.bar.com hosts something they don't like, could they pull .uk or another ccTLD if they are targeting bar.co.uk?
I honestly cannot understand why, in this day and age, smart people still buy domains via GoDaddy. There are so many options, all of which are more simplistic and just as inexpensive.
I'm not sure that people just with SSL certificates should be the easiest to move.
Depending on what type of SSL you've got, it could be a huge pain, or just a lot of money.
We've got an EV SSL Certificate, moving that would take some money, a big chunk of time, and more money to pay our lawyer to write the fancy letters they require. The process is several days long (likely longer now, our lawyer is on a beach somewhere I'm sure), and will require us to restart all our webservers.
In the case of SSL, I had believed it also implied GoDaddy was their registrar as GoDaddy forcibly required me to use a purchased SSL cert against a domain already in my account. Boy was that a bad experience when I found out post-purchase.
How are the top few companies getting around this?
Therein lies a great example of GoDaddy's shady sales tactics. Purchasing a domain from them is an exercise in dodging their high-pressure checkout sales tactics. It's page after page of "Would you like to add thiiiiiis lovely service to your domain purchase wink, wink <HUGE GRIN>?"
None of the additional services are required. You do not have to buy your SSL through GoDaddy if you are registered with them. You don't have to buy anything other than the domain through them, but they go out of their way to make it feel otherwise.
These companies should NOT switch from GoDaddy. Let's just make sure that everybody starts using Namecheap or Gandi (or something else) and if they have the resources available do the move only then.
Fox news just did a piece outlining Godaddy's support of sopa in glowing terms through all this boycott uproar. Today I am enjoying the delicious proof that fox news is a state run brainwashing machine. We need link bait to get the word out on internet censorship and net nutrality.
Not to personally attack at all. Honestly. But, JF- your profile says you are a developer evangelist for Microsoft. Which is one of the biggest supporters of SOPA.
Do you think it's a little unfair to provide an opportunity to pressure YC companies that use GoDaddy for their domains because of their SOPA stance while evangelizing for a company that has the same stance?
I don't claim to speak for the OP, but I don't think the point of this list isn't to point the finger at the GoDaddy customers. Instead, it's a helpful reminder to those companies on the list that they still have some services being provided by GoDaddy, so that they can participate in the boycott of a company supporting SOPA.
Agreed on your second point. Raising awareness is a great step toward the ultimate goal of fighting SOPA. A mass exodus from a hugely successful supporter of SOPA seems like a good start to me.
Isn't that kind of what we want? We want companies to know it is not OK to support SOPA either directly (like Godaddy) or indirectly (like buying domains from GoDaddy), and we want them to know that we will boycott them and actively tell others to boycott them as well.
Let's not get hung up on who uses GoDaddy now. These companies have actual work to do rather than play around with making smooth transitions between registrars. If some of them don't move let's not piss our pants over it.
I think this list being on the front page says we all just lost our focus. So what happens if they don't switch registrars and how long is our arbitrary deadline for it? This seems like some attempt to make these companies look bad rather than do something helpful.
I see this list being more of a point of interest, not a topic of opinion. It shows how entrenched GoDaddy is, even among us who think we should 'know' better. While I'm content to pay a few dollars more for a registrar I trust it's understandable why cash-strapped startups don't. Is it also possible that many of these domains were purchase via the Google Apps process, or other referral deals?
Do you have millions to spend lobbying Congress? If not, you can do the next best thing: protest in any way that can hurt financially (even in a tiny way - it all adds up) companies that CAN and DO lobby Congress.
I want to particularly draw attention to hellochair.com, just sitting there soaking up the fat of the godaddy land, while the world burns in SOPA's furnace. Hope these guys get the message.
