GoDaddy.com – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Domain names are a tricky business. Everybody wants them and shopping for them isn’t the easiest for those who may not be so technical. I am going to try my best to remain objective in this quick thought. In addition to remaining objective, I’ll reserve my recommended company for a later post.

I always see commercials for GoDaddy.com. What a company?? Someone realized the potential market share for websites and domain names and flashed a bunch of sexy ladies during the SuperBowl to spark the interest for anyone to start a website!! GoDaddy.com is pretty big now with over 45 million domains under management. Stack that on top of hosting accounts and SSL certificates and we are talking quite a bit of money. Compare it to the monster, Verisign and they have a little bit to go. But don’t these commercials really draw you in?? It seems that everybody who does not work in the “tech-tech” field, seems to be drawn towards godaddy.com.

NSFW

Ok, so lets get down to it. First of all, I could not post the above commercial from YouTube without modifying the parameters because of the suggested videos afterwards. That should be a sign of how dirty the advertising is. Ha, the commercial is hilarious and quite border line or some would say beyond the line. But it’s a marketing tactic and you know what, to try and sell a very technical thing such as a domain name, that requires name servers, hosts on apache or iis, web pages in the form of applications such as word press, drupal, dotnetnuke, confluence, building your own from scratch, etc… It’s very difficult! You know what, GoDaddy.com does a great job doing it.

More of the ugly… The GoDaddy.com system is separated in so many pieces. I blame this mostly due to the amount of growth that has taken place. Look at Verisign, the largest registrar out there, they had to compartmentalize and sell of pieces of their company that couldn’t be managed properly. GoDaddy.com has extended it’s reach way too far, meaning systems that do not work well together, and that gets customers frustrated. Managing your host account and your domain account are in two completely different locations. Then try using the GoDaddy managed system and you are stairing at yet another. There is no cohesion.

All this mess is easily reflected with their customer service. I work on and can be held accountable for extremely large systems. And when I get on the phone with some of these GoDaddy.com customer service reps, it takes a little bit of patience. It almost seems that rather than improve the process, throwing cheap labor at their support system is their solution. Throw more money at advertising, then measure the loss of customers between the rate at which customers sign up, if it’s above a certain level, then they are doing their job.

All in all, GoDaddy.com is doing a fantastic job getting the customers in, the ads are quite drawing, and somehow getting all of the above. I’ve noticed many of my contracts, companies with a billion dollars plus and below, pretty much everybody is somehow using GoDaddy.com. They are in your face, if you need a domain name for cheap, that’s where to go. But don’t forget to put your blinders on with all the addons GoDaddy will continue to sell you through each page you visit. And if you do not know how to get yourself setup, you better get yourself a comfortable chair for the support phone call, because you will be on the call for quite some time.

GoDaddy.com – Great Advertiser, Below Average Provider