Saturday, December 24, 2011

Go Daddy SOPA Controversy - Enemy Of The People

Internet domain name registrar and web hosting company Go Daddy was recently embroiled in controversy when they came out in support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently under consideration in the United States Congress.  Go Daddy, which was purchased in July 2011 by a small group of private equity firms in a deal valued at  $2.25 billion, has now reversed course--somewhat--and now has publicly stated that they are neither in support nor in opposition to SOPA.

The Stop Online Piracy Act, which Go Daddy fully supported initially, is a law that will be harmful to the internet if it becomes law.  The law would force web hosting companies, internet service providers, and webmasters to act as the police of the internet.  Under the law as originally drafted, a copyright holder could get a court order to force companies such as payment processors and advertising networks to stop doing business with a website that is allegedly "enabling or facilitating" copyright infringement and prevent search engines from linking to those sites.  Providers of DNS services could be ordered to stop resolving domain names to IP addresses for sites a court deems to be in violation of the Act.  The maximum penalty for infringing on copyrights would be 5 years in prison.  You can kill a person and get less time in prison than that.

In a nutshell, an entire website could be shut down if anyone on that site, including a forum poster, posts a link to a copyrighted file or image that is allegedly infringed.

Go Daddy is the enemy of the internet.


Citizens of the internet are not taking Go Daddy's actions lying down.  A boycott of Go Daddy has begun.  People are transferring domain names out of Go Daddy.  Hopefully, people will be moving their web hosting to better companies as well.  The fact of the matter is that Go Daddy's hosting sucks.  It is terrible.  Go Daddy is a notorious overseller.  When I hosted my sites on Go Daddy, the server got slower and slower over time.  Eventually, it was taking 20 seconds to generate one forum page, as indicated by the page generation time at the bottom of the page.  It would take 30 seconds to load one page from click to render.

Then I moved to A Small Orange web hosting.  I recommend A Small Orange highly.  If you look over on the right side of this blog you will find some money-saving discount codes.

If you are a Go Daddy customer of domain name registration or web hosting or any of their other lousy services, please support the freedom of the internet and stop doing business with Go Daddy.  Move your web hosting to another host such as A Small Orange (a great web host).  Transfer your domain names to another registrar.  


Go Daddy does NOT deserve your business.  There are much better web hosts and domain name registrars that are opposed to SOPA and the harm it will do to the internet.  Go Daddy sucks.  There used to be a website called "No Daddy" that was set up a few years ago to warn people about Go Daddy.  When the private equity firms bought Go Daddy, they also bought the NoDaddy.com domain name to silence the criticism.

The big private equity firms have a lot of money to lose if customers vote with their feet and leave for better domain and hosting providers.  By virtue of their support of SOPA, Go Daddy does not deserve your business.

Transferring your domain names to a new registrar is not a complicated process.  It can be accomplished in a few days without any disruption to your visitors.  Two domain name registrars I recommend are Namecheap and GKG.  I have used both and recommend both of them highly.

As for web hosting, you should transfer that out of Go Daddy as well.  I recommend A Small Orange and, as you can see from this blog, I can not sing the praises of ASO highly enough.

Do the right thing and stop doing business with Go Daddy.  Transfer your domain names and web hosting out of GoDaddy.com.  The internet belongs to all of us.

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