I really dislike GoDaddy but this is not the best signal to use. A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a product. A lot of things about startups are just crap early on. People do things that they shouldn't or will have to pay for in the long run. Startups accumulate debt in many ways. Being on GoDaddy might be one of those. And if the DNS resolves just fine, many won't do anything about it except pay the yearly fees. More importantly, startups should ideally improve as they survive from year to year and not using GoDaddy is going to be pretty low on the list of things they need to fix.
It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures.
I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders.
Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating domain ownership to AWS gives us almost no benefits. I guess having more consolidated billing would be nice, but until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar. Then again, I don't know if I'd care to interview someone who makes such large decisions based on small details with no context.
> until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
> would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company
You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective.
There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godaddy remnants. The flawed DB schema fragments from two refactorings ago which stubbornly survive. The fact that the site goes down for 30 seconds every time someone ships a change to production. The fact that shipping frequently is discouraged because of this. The overly aggressive cache invalidation strategy which causes 30% more DB load. The fact that no one is monitoring the DB load. The API endpoints with 4,000ms of latency. The fact that this will never be fixed because you are way too deep in bed with a poorly chosen framework and ORM.
All of these things can be justified from a business perspective as "not worth the effort to fix". Customers aren't leaving, revenue isn't dipping. It's fine. Just focus on the sprint.
But on every engineer's internal balance scale of "should I stay or should I go", all of these things get noticed. Each one adds a pebble to the "leave" side of the scale. For your talented engineers, two pebbles.
Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.
You are touching on an important point, which I did not state: that there are no companies with zero pebbles on the scale.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is to avoid a pile of pebbles large enough that engineers feel hopeless / "why do I bother" / "this place is a joke anyway". Good people don't stick around long for that.
But the main point was that thinking that a technical blemish has "zero cost" is a trap. The cost is not zero. The cost is having one more pebble on the scale.
From experience, there's very big differences between the amount of terrible decisions the upper management forces upon engineers between various companies. When it's very very bad, you should leave because the odds of it being better somewhere else are very high (they might be only average bad instead of objectively terrible).
Edit: It is also exactly this kind of thinking that keeps people in bad situations. Nobody wins when anyone thinks like that, except of course the people in the exploiting position in the first place.
No company is perfect, but clearly some are better than others from the technical perspective. I know I would enjoy my work more and remain more productive if I felt like I'm struggling a little, rather than a lot, to release anything.
> It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar.
GoDaddy are on my shitlist after the elephant killing incident, their predatory business practices and low quality tooling. And don't ever forget to renew your domain or GoDaddy will squat it.
I would absolutely yellow flag a tech company for using GoDaddy.
It would help to better understand your criteria vs. an arbitrary label like yellow flag.
I was not aware of the elephant killing incident, have not experienced their poor tooling (because I have not used them) and was not aware that GoDaddy squats expired domains.
Does this lack of knowledge yellow flag me as a competent person?
Domain registration often happens in a hurry. After a brainstorm that revealed an aha! In that moment, the only thing that matters is grabbing that domain while it's still available. Someone hurriedly registers the thing, with knowledge that it can always be moved later.
If you want to judge a company based on the early inception of the domain, often before deeply technical/experienced folks get involved, that's obviously your prerogative. But I think you'd be unnecessarily filtering out great opportunities in the process.
Oh, and didn't Google Domains use GoDaddy and others behind the scenes for awhile?
Is there greater danger in passing over a possibly competent startup with technical debt such as this, or greater danger in ignoring a potential sign?
Obviously it's not a 100% sign. Just a heuristic. One of many, I'd assume. But I can't fault someone for using one when the cost of a false positive so far outweighs the cost of a false negative.
Wow. That's funny because that's the exact evolution that happened at my current company (GoDaddy points to AWS and AWS does the rest) and we're now a unicorn. Being a unicorn is not a reflection of engineering quality though. That said, the earlier engineers were pretty bad (So bad that someone at one point terminated every line in Python with a semicolon. Those engineers are nearly all gone now) and I like to think that the current groups are decent engineers. But I don't see us ever going back and transferring the domain somewhere else.
Being a unicorn isn't a reflection of leadership quality either. Again, a particular litmus test that has a quality threshold may work for some and not others, it's still valid for consideration.
> It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but would be less and less of a factor as the company grows and matures.
Everything always depends... But the initial team tends to turn into the top management team, and a company managed by people that can do its main work is completely different from one managed by people that can't. It's reasonable for somebody to want to avoid it.
Absolutely. You sound like someone that could really be of benefit to my latest startup. We're doing bigly things. If you're interested in finding out more drop me a line... gator3827@aol.com
Just imagine having the OG handle[1] joe@aol.com. That person either has some credibility as being around for quite a while, or paid quite a bit for it.
1: I didn't make up the terminology, I'm just using it because it exists...
Back in the day it was trendy to affix the year you signed up for an account to your account name - rather than the birth year. It was interesting to see things like sandra96@yahoo.com still the primary email address when sending someone an email to catch up post uni.
God help me, I cannot stop myself from laughing every time I see a @yahoo or @aol e-mail address on job applications/resumes.
Bonus laughter if it's something massively inappropriate. Some e-mail stems from the last position search (this is at a college, granted it is an entry level position, but it's still a college): cuntcrasher, c00rslight, bigswag420, trideltaFcups, and my personal favorite, milfhunter9inch.
These are supposed to be professional people. This is real life. This is real. I can't wake up.
Not necessarily. I used to think that, but it's rather common for the person with the idea to just go and buy the domain on GoDaddy.
Then they'll search for technical people to implement their idea. So being hosted there is not necessarily connected with the people actually doing the work.
I think you may be used to cases where the startup idea generator and implementer is the same person. But it's not always that way.
Yeah, I joined a startup as the first engineer and inherited a GoDaddy registration, which the non-technical founder had purchased. I may have been technically incompetent but the startup's GoDaddy registration had nothing to do with it. :-)
I downvoted you because I've known many technically competent people, including startup founders, who have used GoDaddy. Many people don't realize how terrible they are.
I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but Cloudflare has as domain registry service too. They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay.
They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality.
When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now.
All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.
Google domains sometimes dumps you onto GoDaddy. Which is/was unexpected and unwelcome. Sometimes you have to buy a domain and that's the way through.
I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap).
But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)
The registrar's job is to facilitate the transaction for the domain, charge you for renewals, and give you a way to assign the authoritative name servers. For that purpose GoDaddy works about as good as any other registrar. You can debate the merits of GoDaddy as a company on [oh so] many levels, remark on their absolutely terrible user interfaces, and certainly discuss their sleazy practices, but none of this is an indicator of ineptitude on the part of the purchaser. Having a slick user interface around what amounts to a Purchase Domain button and a text box for setting name servers isn't terribly exciting or something I care about, and GoDaddy covers a very large swathe of the available TLDs (though certainly not all of them), so managing many related domains across TLDs with a single account is appealing.
All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude.
And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better.
You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc.
I also used GoDaddy to buy libre.fm back in 2009 because buying an fm domain was harder than it ought to be. I moved it to Gandi when I could, but that's because I have most other domains there.
One exception is domains picked up from a GoDaddy auction. I believe you have to pay for a year, which you might not want to waste. Or even a transfer takes a while to complete.
You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a new registrar.
Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.
GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.
Another exception is that at least for awhile (not sure if they still do), Google Domains would farm our registrations to GoDaddy, eNom, etc. So you might not have even realized GoDaddy was in the picture (at least initially).