With the Groupon thing, they screwed up… royally. Nobody’s perfect but let’s face it: GoDaddy is a genuinely impressive company. I own a hosting business (DomainingServers.com), an article writing business (Articles.biz) and so on, so I know a thing or two about offering online services.
Let me just tell you that offering services online is definitely not easy. and let’s put GoDaddy’s business model under the microscope so we can analyze a few things.
I referred to them in the past as well but it’s something worth repeating:
1. Registration/Transfer Price
You have lot and lots of $0.99 coupons (most of you have probably used one of the coupons I shared here at DomainingTips at least once), you frequently have other coupons as well and all in all, it’s fairly safe to assume that nobody can beat GoDaddy in this department.
A lot of times, they’re actually losing money on new regs and transfers.
2. Renewal Price
Other companies have great prices for renewals/transfers as well but most of them don’t have good renewal deals.
At GoDaddy, you can frequently use a coupon and renew domains at just a little bit over the wholesale price. So GoDaddy’s “cut” is minimal, making it clear once again that they have no competition in this department.
3. Support
If you submit a ticket, they respond in a timely manner.
Or you can call them and they offer support in Spanish as well.
If you have a decent portfolio with them, you even get an account rep.
All in all, they’re great when it comes to support as well.
But what about the negative aspects?
Yes, they have aggressive upsells but you can simply ignore those, not exactly a deal breaker.
Yes, they have tasteless ads sometimes, c’est la vie.
But all in all, when it comes to the two most important factors you should take into consideration (price and support), GoDaddy is a company that has constantly innovated and for that, they have my respect.
They screw up sometimes, that’s true but let’s not lose sight of the fact that they are the best registrar by far and deservedly so 🙂
January 6th, 2013 at 3:26 pm
If cheap renewals are your bag then i suppose so, personally i wouldn’t use them if they offered registartions and renewals for .10c, that’s just me though
January 6th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
While I support other registrars I like godaddy because of price. You can’t beat a good deal.
January 6th, 2013 at 4:58 pm
Is godaddy also a better hosting company than DomainingServers.com?
January 6th, 2013 at 7:51 pm
@Ron: this article is about their domain registration services, I never used their hosting, so I don’t know if GoDaddy is a good hosting company or not. What I do know is that they’re the best registrar on the market.
Maybe in the future, competitors will become more aggressive and for us as customers, that’s a very good thing. But right now, GoDaddy’s main competitors are not in the same league when it comes to the price consistency + support combo. There are deals for new regs and transfers at lots of other companies as well but in most if not all cases, these companies don’t have good renewal deals so again, find me another registrar with a similar price *consistency* + support track record and I’ll gladly admit I’m wrong 🙂
January 6th, 2013 at 8:52 pm
GoDaddy is the BEST!!!
January 6th, 2013 at 9:14 pm
@Andrei. I agree with you 100% that Godaddy is by far the best. Like you said when its a combination of price and support there isn’t even a close second but the key is to have enough domains to get a rep. Godaddy doesn’t try to screw you with renewals either which is what everybody else loves to do, like network solutions who charges 35 bucks to renew a name and on day 1 of expiration charges you an extra 25 bucks to renew. What a joke!! Got screwed by them a few times and then decided to move all my names to Godaddy except for a few that I have at Moniker. Godaddy gives me an extra 25 days to stretch out my renewals which is great when you have a ton of names to deal with.
January 7th, 2013 at 1:47 am
Go Daddy have been fantastic for me.
The bulk of my domains are with them (568 at last count) and I also have a virtual server with them.
Their domain management interface is much better than other registrars I’ve used, particularly for making bulk changes.
My account exec’ Leah has been very helpful.
I’ve used a heap of different registrars and hosting providers – and Go Daddy have been consistently awesome.