They're a pretty terrible registrar/host but their marketing is fantastically good. Every non-tech business owner I've met uses them. It makes me kind of sad.
Like most things it's not as simple as that. I'm a long-in-the-tooth web guy (30+ years doing this stuff) and for Legacy Reasons I use GD. I wish I didn't, but all my domains (and all my client domains) are with them. Yes I could unpick, but do I have time / inclination? No. Do I want multiple domain registrars? No.
So - yeh, agree in principle, disagree in practice.
That's fine, you just have to admit you're supporting an incredibly slimy business. That's okay, many of us do/have done that even when we don't want to, but at least you gotta tell others to offset your GoDaddy use. Two people swayed away from using it by your opinion should just about do it!
I'm curious what the reasons are. I moved ~60 domains from Gandi to Namecheap and then back to Gandi over the span of 10 months. Namecheap was cheaper, but their support wasn't as good and their UI is a disaster (IMO).
Both times I had all domains moved over in less than 24 hours.
Can you say more about how this works? I find it intimidating. And I don't understand how the cost works -- if I'm in the middle of my term with the first registrar, do I get a refund when I move it over? Like when you moved from Gandi to Namecheap and back in 10 months, does that mean you paid 3x registration, or did you get proportional refunds when transferring?
I used to have about 50 domains there and moving everything to Cloudflare was pretty simple. Just start using it as a DNS first, which I was doing anyway.
Then the transfer process takes about 2 minutes per domain so the whole process was done in a little over an hour.
I thought Cloudflare had a deliberately manual (and therefore more secure but also more expensive and slower) process for registering domains. Has that changed?
I didn't have much issue with the process, it seemed like any other. A local business is a friend of mine, they were paying too much for too little from their previous web host/dev so I transferred the domain name to CF and ran their WordPress "business card" type site through a static site generator, placed all the files in GitHub, and pointed CF Pages at the repo. Whenever they want to make changes, they spin up the current state of WordPress in LocalWP, make the changes, I run it through the static site generator and push the files to GitHub. Takes them a few hours of messing around to get their content right and takes me 5-15 minutes to jamstack it to GitHub. Free hosting and cheap/simple DNS.
I had this problem. Then I learned that Hover has a concierge transfer-in service. You give them your registrar creds, they do the work of transferring everything seamlessly for you.