Counter anecdote: I've quite a few domains on GoDaddy. I've transfered a few over the years, both to and from GoDaddy, and while the steps where not explained clearly I never had an issue where I was prevented from controlling my domains.

I also used their DNS service for the first time last month and found it pretty straightforward. Maybe I wasn't trying to do something that would have been complex (I didn't set up mail, for example, or any wild-card entries), but it wasn't to "impossible to easily use."

YMMV and all that.

I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it.

I've tried some other registrars (names eluded) me that were purportedly better/cheaper but found their UIs annoying and troublesome in other ways. Maybe it's a case of "the devil you know ...", but I don't find GoDaddy to be the Great Satan some make it out to be.

"I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it."

That is the worst part from my perspective. I use namecheap and it is very simple and fast to manage my domains using the namecheap interface. Godaddy seems to bury your domain management under a bunch of add-on services. I really dread helping out anyone on godaddy because I have to wade through all kinds of crap before I get to the screens I want.

Another nice touch by namecheap is that it takes 1 click to setup your DNS for google email services. I feel like godaddy makes MX configuration difficult just so some people will give up and pay for email through them.

Ditto to this. Got so fed up with the others and GoDaddy's registrar setup is the only one I've had that's still issue free. I use Rackspace for my servers and I have no issues.

Ditto here. I use GoDaddy for domain registration, and an InMotion VPS for hosting. The interface is confusing and cluttered, but their call-in support is always really friendly and reliable. Nothing makes my blood boil hotter than bad customer service, so despite GoDaddy's sins, their knowledgeable, friendly customer support team makes it worth it to me.

The purchasing process IS super greasy car salesman - I'd never ever refer a client to GoDaddy. They'd end up buying 20 things they didn't need, 20 times the cost it has to be. That gets obnoxious, but oh well - at least I know what to expect every time, and I can just say no. It beats talking to the unqualified or rude techies at other hosting companies.

Ditto - we use Godaddy's sister company's (Wild West Domains)API to register domains - nice and simple. Each domain is dirt cheap, takes one api call and we're done, we never even leave our app. Of course since we host a lot of sites for our customers we have to register a lot of domains. Setting up API access may not be worth it otherwise.

I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.

Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?

I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com).

The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.

I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.

There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.

Sorry for asking this under such a nice idea but what happens to those who have domains with a company that goes out of business?

I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.

Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.

I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.

How do you deal with increasing registry fee of 7% annually then?

Good question. I did not mean to be misleading. I was referring to having an initial yearly fee of, say, $8.99 but hidden in the fine print a renewal fee of $12.99. I can't control the yearly rate increases but I'll always just have one fee regardless of transfer, renewal, or initial registration. Sorry for the confusion.

That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.

The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.

All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).

I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.

Wow. Well... Wow. Domain registrars are things you touch once every few years, and their entire goal is to make it more time consuming to remove yourself from them then switch since its such an insignificant task, most people ignore it and keep with the same one.

Is this even legal?

If vendor lock strategies (which this plain and simply is) were illegal, we wouldn't have some certain monopolies - I doubt, for example, that Windows would still hold such a big market share.

DNS management very often sucks, whether with GoDaddy or any other I've tried.

I founded a cloud management company for EC2 (and later other infrastructure clouds), and one of the first things we included was decent dns record management. It's integrated into your apache vhosts and whatnot, but the value is really just keeping your sanity when all you need to do is add an MX record.

Yours is a widespread feeling. The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR

"The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR "

BTW, what's with E-mailing me about this? I consider it spam, especially since it ends with "Please do not reply to this email."

If people want to write to me person-to-person, fine. I don't really want impersonal ads (the E-mail made no mention of my name, another spam tip-off) about people's products.