An Open letter to GoDaddy

An article by Vedran    No Comments

While looking for the best solutions for my needs, as most people tend to do, I look for a fair balance between price and service. When I first started out GoDaddy was highly recommended by almost every company or individual. I decided to give you my business, a decision I may have regretted few years later. I want to make it clear that SOPA is not the only reason why I decided to leave you. As time passed my trust in you and your ability to be fair and provide honest service slowly degraded. I would appreciate if you could consider this open letter to be sort of a feedback.

I’d like to start with your website and your services. Despite recent renovations, your site is still as useless and misleading as it was before. It’s a crossroad of unnecessary screens and dozen of menus, all there with the intention on misleading, manipulating and tricking you into buying a handful of unnecessary features, which are mostly never used. Buying new domains was a nightmare for me. As if that wasn’t enough, eventually you turned your whole website into one huge sexist and chauvinistic ad; an insult to the women of the tech world. I know it’s only business, nevertheless I do not appreciate it.

Other then looks, your support service became a joke. I mean no disrespect by saying that, however, whenever I contacted you for support, I’d rarely get the help I needed. Instead I was spamed by your support staff with dozen of some strange offers I never needed, a job for sales person perhaps. While I do appreciate your effort in expending the business, when I contact support I need help, not domain/mail/hosting add-ons.

Perhaps the biggest blow to my faith in you was failure to protect your customers from DMCA suits, seeking to steel legal domains. Being your customer this frightens me. The irony in this all is that you yourself generate list of “a-like” domain names, which based on your own support of SOPA would be illegal. And yet you’re exempt from it. When I do make mistakes, unless there’s real intentional legal violation, I want my company to protect me and stand by me, and not cave in to big bullies and legal threats.

Another issue I have with your company is the whole elephant killing incident. Now, I know media can be biased and will sometimes intentionally distort the truth for their own purposes, so I’m not completely aware of the whole situation. I was not there, so I can’t judge Bob Parsons. However, from what I understand an elephant wondered into a farm fields of an African village of starving people, so old Bob decided to shoot a few rounds and provide food for these poor people. Really? A millionaire shooting an elephant to provide some tasteless food? If that was just it, I wouldn’t say a word more, but Bobs decision to brag and glamorize such event, as if it was a heroic feat, was truly an insult.

And finally, SOPA. You helped create it, you sponsored it, you supported it. I was baffled. I couldn’t believe a company like yourself would support a bill which could cause a great deal of damage to your own business. Well, I was baffled until I learned you were exempt from it. A dirty move I couldn’t appreciate. This was no longer business, this became politics and you cheated. Not only would this destroy your competitors, but would make you virtually invulnerable. A cheap dirty move I could no longer be a part of. I don’t have to remind you what SOPA stands for, so I’ll be clear: I do not wish my name be associated with any supporter of such bill. As for your more recent events, your PR stunt was a pathetic show of your disregard for your customers opinions.

I was there when boycott started on Reddit and I gladly joined in, even though I had nothing to gain from it. I’m not even an American citizen, nevertheless I will happily join the fight against those who seek to control the free flow of information. Your sudden flip-flop will not affect anyones opinion, because by now it is quite clear that you only care about business and money, and people who left your didn’t do it for money, they did it out of principle, out of reason.

In short, I’d like to compare how I felt doing business with you with a simple story.

“I walk into the bar with the intention of drinking a beer. While looking for a table to sit, I’m constantly being distracted by banners depicting attractive women selling your products. Finally when I settle down, before ordering a beer your waiters force me to go through the whole menu, before I could finally say Just beer! If I decide that I want to change something about this beer, I’d have to look through your whole bar, before I could finally find the manager. The manager is a very complicated and slow man, so changing my order usually takes a while. The worst thing is, during that whole time I’m afraid that some other guest from other restaurant would complain that my beer is same color as his and instead of helping me the owner of the bar would decide to throw me out and take my beer. During that time I slowly sip my beer and shake from the fear of inevitable, when suddenly the owner starts bragging about how he donated a carpet to a homeless shelter, while wearing a $45.000 Rolex watch. As this whole situation makes me more and more uncomfortable, the owner and bar staff announce that they will support a law which will force bar owners to build a barbed wire wall around their bars with only small door through which I can’t pass without getting scratched. And the best part, they’re exempt from it!”

If you, hopefully, understood what I was trying to say, then you can only imagine how I feel about your company. I can no longer be a part of it. As of 9th January, I have completely transferred all my domains to Namecheap. I’m quite satisfied by their warm welcome, friendly atmosphere and fast support. I already feel at home there.

Even though I only had a handful of domains, something you didn’t even feel, the principle still matters. Customer opinion matters. How you treat them matters. Your disregard for our believes was based on your greed, and therefore I can never trust you again. I want to thank you for all the good services you provided during our business relations; I won’t deny there were times when I was thankful.

Sincerely,
Vedran Omeragic