[c2]

To answer questions about stock - most employees won't care. As far as I know - the last time they were planning to go public only the senior executives were issued any options/stock grants. There was no standard practice of issuing stock to 'regular' engineers.

Congrats to Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is pretty much the poster boy for bootstrapping (although Bob was already quite wealthy from a previous business). Apparently many people don't agree with how he ran the business and you are free to have your opinion, but I think most of the controversy at the end of the day was isolated to a few legally pressured decisions (regarding shutting down web sites, such as rate a cop) and a few bad apple executives (buying/selling domains at their own auctions). On the whole, I've been a happy Go Daddy customer for 10 years now and haven't had a single issue.

[mtogo]

Ah yes, godaddy's few, small, and easy to overlook issues such as

* Unusable interface

* Overpriced domains (overpriced everything, actually)

* Questionable spam practices such as calling you at all hours of the day and spamming your email desperately trying to get you to buy more godaddy products

* More ads than content on shopping cart and product pages

* Pages with huge "CONTINUE (and add $29.99/mo email+superAWESOMETASTIC email hosting to cart)" and tiny "Continue without adding to cart" links

* Support that makes Comcast look fantastic.

* Low quality products overall. Find me one serious developer that would use godaddy's shared or VPS hosting services.

* Random censorship of it's customer's web sites hosted there

* Alleged theft of domains[0]

* Killing of elephants

Godaddy tricks people who don't know better into using their products, then makes an impossible maze of an interface to discourage leaving. Godaddy is like a shameless salesman that will do anything to get you to just buy one more $19.99 something or other. If you model your business after that, best of luck to you, but i won't be a customer any time soon.

[0] I'm not sure if there was ever conclusive proof of this, but it sure looked suspicious. Grain of salt.

[not_chriscohoat]

The ads and interface have always been a pain, yes. But I wouldn't call their domains overpriced...I've used coupon codes from RetailMeNot and other sites for years and have gotten domains for 7.99/yr (at most). And that's renewals and new domains.

I'd say I'm not the typical GoDaddy customer, with about 8-10 annual domains from coupons...but I'm not dissatisfied.

[mtogo]

Gandi.net domains are $15 and come with whois privacy and an SSL cert valid for a year. Name.com domains are $10 always, with frequent no-coupon-code sales at around $7. Namecheap domains are $10 and come with a one year valid SSL cert and whois privacy.

By comparison, without coupons, a godaddy domain is $12, and from looking at their site it appears to be an additional $12 for whois privacy, and i couldn't find their SSL certificates start at $50.

It's true that godaddy runs a ton of promotions that make their domains cheaper, but you're spending a lot of time to get the price down to their competitor's normal prices, and without the extra goodies you get with them.

[ahi]

I do not recommend name.com. They have really sleazy DNS practices. They setup parking pages for all of your domain names if they aren't overridden with your own records and wildcard subdomains as well.

[theatrus2]

I've always liked Moniker. Consistently cheap, though not as good as,the gandi combo deal.