The world’s biggest domain registrar is also the best, according to Domain Name Wire’s annual survey.
GoDaddy is the world’s largest registrar with about 20M domains registered (including reseller sites). It was also voted as the best registrar in the 2007 Domain Name Wire survey, taking 33% of the vote. Last year GoDaddy was also tops but received only 28% of the vote. Although not without controversy, GoDaddy has grabbed market share by offering domain names for affordable prices and investing heavily in marketing.
This year’s second place registrar was Moniker, which received 16% of the vote, up from 8% of the vote last year. The biggest loser this year was Register.com, which dropped from 18% of the vote to less than 1%. Here are the rankings based on total votes:
1. GoDaddy 33%
2. Moniker 16%
3. eNom 10%
4. Dotster 3%
Here are this year’s percentage votes compared to last year:
When you peel back the onion you find that the overall vote percentages tell only part of the story. When you consider owners of large domain portfolios (greater than 500 domains), Moniker ties GoDaddy for top honors with 23% of the vote. eNom jumps to 20% of the vote. Furthermore, if you look at the number of votes compared to total domains registered, Moniker comes out on top.
[The next survey results article will explain which factors registrants believe are most important when selecting a domain name registrar.]
Lance says
Your survey is seriously flawed for the following reason: Because Godaddy has so many more customers and because people will only vote “best registrar” for a company they have used, it therefore follows that godaddy would win.
The fact is Godaddy sucks for several reasons. The list is very long so I’ll just mention a few.
1 they lie on there website and make you agree to not transfer your domain if you update your whois. This is just dishonest. Nothing in ICANN policy allows for this.
2, They have a reputation for shutting down sites based on uninvestigated complaints.
If someone complains that you are spamming with your domain they shut you down without any investigation. The burden is on you to prove you weren’t
3, They have a link in there whois to report false whois. Let me ask you; what qualifies any joe blow who looks up my domain in the whois to determine if the whois is false. This is asking for abuse. The type of abuse that led to the theft of familyalbum.com
By the way, and this is an aside. I found a domain I wanted the other day at godaddy that had false whois- bad email. Nothing can stop me from puttiing in a back order for it with godaddy and then reporting the false whois.
But I degress, let me go on.
4, Their control panel is the worst in Biz.
5 when You try to renew you have to deal with nonsense like having the renew auto set to 2 years and being upsold tons of junk on the long road to checkout.
6 Bob Parsons is a self-important, egotistical, sexist ass. Grown men who where earings are pathetic. Any woman who gives godaddy business should be ashamed of themselves. Have you seen the godaddy TV ads?
They scream “I love to degrade women,” and let me point out that I am a man that thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. So if I think Parsons is sexist there must really be somehting wrong with him.
7. There is no grace period after your domain expires. The day it expires they will charge you a boatload of money to get it back. Reputalbe registrars dont pull this kind on nonsense. Why would anyone who knows anything about domains put up with this.
8 When you buy a domain at Godaddy or change your DNS to Godaddy, they steal your traffic for at least three days. That’s right folks you heard it hear first. They steal your traffic for at least three days. At any ohter registrar you can start using your domain right away. By the way this is grounds for a class action lawsuit and I am sure some clever attorney will get on it eventually.
The list goes on, but if your are stupid enough to use godaddy you probably already stopped reading.
Editor says
Lance, I address your \’flaw\’ in the last paragraph of the article:
\”When you peel back the onion you find that the overall vote percentages tell only part of the story. When you consider owners of large domain portfolios (greater than 500 domains), Moniker ties GoDaddy for top honors with 23% of the vote. eNom jumps to 20% of the vote. Furthermore, if you look at the number of votes compared to total domains registered, Moniker comes out on top.\”
As for item #8, I\’ve never had trouble changing my DNS instantly at GoDaddy.
As for your other points, many of them are valid. A lot of people are happy with GoDaddy; a lot of people aren\’t.
Lance says
Mr Editor,
Yes you can change your DNS instantly no problem, but when You change your DNS to Godaddy\’s Dns and redirect (FORWARD) your domain, the redirect does not go into effect for at least 3 days. During those three days Godaddy is stealing your traffic. Why I don\’t know.
The fact that you are seeing a Godaddy parking page tells you that the DNS has already changed and updated in the root servers and therefore your redirect should be working. But it doesn\’t work. For three days Godaddy steals your traffic. When you multiply that by, lets say, 100,000 domains, that\’s a lot of stolen traffic. This is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
If you want to do an experiment change your DNS to godaddy DNS and then redirect the domain. Check the domain every day to see how long a godaddy parking page is on your site and how long before your domain redirects.
Once again real registrars don\’t engage in these types of dirty tricks.
Godaddy is where it is today because of clever advertising and agressive pricing, not because it is a good registrar.
There are many other problems with godaddy not least of which is domain security. Did you know that the owner of Mall.com, City.com, prices.com and many other top shelf domains had all his domains at Godaddy and they were stolen. Here is link to an interview about it.
http://tinyurl.com/ynqgtd
I never heard of any domains being stolen out of Moniker.
Godaddy is too big and their are too many people working there if you get my drift. It\’s the law of large numbers. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the apple cart.
My guess is you have theives inside
Godaddy. FamilyAlbum.com comes to mind. We don\’t know who owns it now do we?
Editor says
Lance,
I’m often the first one to call registrars and other domain industry companies on things they do wrong. But I also think we need to be fair on the positives and negatives of each registrar.
For domain forwarding, that’s probably because the domain needs to be added into GoDaddy’s forwarding database. It takes longer than a dns change, but from my experience it’s about a day. There’s not reason it can’t happen automatically though.
As for mall.com, city.com, etc., the link you point to actually has the owner of these domains praising GoDaddy for its assistance getting the names back.
GoDaddy faces the curse of being big. Not only does it get the most praise but it also gets the most complaints.
Lance says
I don’t want to be in the position of praising my registrar for getting my domains back after they are stolen. I don’t want them stolen in the first place. Note, the owner of Mall.com never figured out how they were stolen. I could give him a few suggestions.
Every other registrar has your forwarding working in minutes or even seconds. Your contention that godaddy needs 1-3 days is just silly. They are making millions a year with the stolen traffic from this scam. Does it say in their terms of service that they can steal your traffic? Knowing Godaddy, it probably does.
In the case of registrars, bigger should mean better. They have more money to perfect their software and design their interface etc.
Let me continue with a few more reasons why godaddy sucks. I recently sold a few domains to people who wanted to transfer their domains to godaddy. I gave both people the auth codes. They initiated the transfers at godaddy. In both cases I and the other party received emails from godaddy saying the transfers would not go through unless I followed a link to login into an account at godaddy and approve something. Of course the domains werent’ at godaddy so there was nothing to approve in my account or any other account. In both cases the people (one of them a famous domainer who is very familiar with the godaddy interface) were confused and worried that the domain transfer would not go through. In both cases I had to explain to them that godaddy’s email is just dead wrong. In both cases the transfer went through in 5 days.
Unfortunately I still have about 2500 domains at Godaddy so I have had lots or experience with them. I am in the process of moving out though.
On another note I received an email the other form an account manager day that my domains would be auto-renewed but I first had to “confrim the last 4 digits of my Credit Card.” The only problem is that I don’t have any of my domains at godaddy set to auto-renew. This kind of thing is just dirty tricks. Come on, let get real, who sends out emails saying they are going to auto renew domains that aren’t set to auto renew. Obviously Godaddy is making these guys hussle. I don’t want my domains at a registrar where the employee’s have to hussle. It reminds me of Registerfly where there risk department worked purely on commision. They didn’t get paid unless they froze people’s account.
Another thing; Godaddy support is poorly trained. Here is where the curse of being big comes into play. They just can’t train enough people properly.
Also when you transfer your domain out of godaddy you get a scary email that says your domain has been cancelled. You blogged about this once yourself. What kind of messed up #@%& is that?
Obviously I could go on but I have to get back to domaining.
Mark says
WoW !! ,
Apparently we have what the industry calls a “sore loser” I fear Lance is either an employee of Moniker, affiliated with them, or got fired from GoDaddy for his failure to control his temper. Look the simple fact of the matter is that GoDaddy has invested a ton of money in marketing and the Domain shopping portal. These are no clever ploys to steal money from you, each and every one of GoDaddy’s products are legitimate solutions to help their customers. Very few none-technical people understand all the products and offerings of most registrars, GoDaddy has intuitively designed a customer transaction portal that explains, and yes, offers these solutions to them.
Look the company was not more than 175 (including CSR’s) employees 4 years ago, but their aggressive business model and winning marketing solutions have driven them to become the largest registrar, hosting provider and yes, SSL Certificate provider. That’s a lot of growth in a short amount of time; you cannot give me any start-up out there that wouldn’t have struggled with that instant surge in growth. And guess what it wasn’t easy they have a lot of hardworking people building solutions night and day. They never claim to be better than anyone, they have proven it! I happen to have had the opportunity meet Mr. Parsons and yes he is very content with life and is vocal about it, but he is also a strong business man and knows how to put foot to a!# to get things done. Very few people know that he sunk the entire ship while he was discovering what is now GoDaddy Software. GoDaddy is not the first major success (Parsons Technology) and probably not the last.
Lance,
You’re wasting your breath complaining, it’s not doing you any good. If you really have something to prove, prove it! Be Better, if you can. Show us what you have to offer, how is Lance (and his affiliated organizations) going to revolutionize the Domain Registration world? But if all you have to talk about negative who’s really going to listen?
uzma says
In my humble opinon all registrars have their good and bad points. i doubt any one is a clear winner. I have read all these arguments before. I stay with godaddy becuase they are “OK’. I bet moniker or any other is no better than “OK”.
uzma says
The story at tinyurl.com was interesting but some aspects were rather curious. First, the culprit was tracked to Iran? These days Iran is a new baddie and how convenient that all criminals should originate from there. I recall sometime ago dnjournal had some hacking problem as well and the hacker announced in his broken english (another proof he was Iranian) that he was from Iran. 20 years ago I think he would have been from russia. Anyway, my point is, despite my inadequate, mostly based on guess-work, knowledge of scams and IT based tricks, even i know it can be next to impossible to track down the true origins of a talented hacker. I have read of cases where whole governements took years to track down someone, and those cases where they failed probably never made to press. Your names can be stolen by anyone (even by your very close friend) and then make to appear as if stolen by someone in north korea. I reckon one can also arrange to have his own names stolen to get the names lots of pulicity. So much is happening out there, such organised, calculated conspiracies are going on, an average guy has snowball’s chance in hell of making it big. Only the select few “insiders” are making multimillion dollar fortunes and they very reluctant, understandably, to let others share in the pie. I own a few hundered names which are slowly becoming very valuable despite what others may try to make me believe. And i know ppl out there want them and will try to get them without buying if they can. Now I am probably a sitting duck with my normal pc with norton anitvirus and all that crap which any reasonable hacker must find amusing. Still I keep making all those naive efforts to protect my names. I know this pc is 100% hacked. It can’t cannot be. Every email, every password is known to outsiders. So I use another computer to log into my gd a/c which is probably hacked too. So i just have to keep making efforts to protect my names. There is no guarantee even with all the efforts I can ever be safe. And if something does happen will I have resources to fight legal battles? Due to all these considerations I have concluded serious domaining is best left to those who have the serious resources. Sure one can register few and make a few hundered through sales, ppc etc or even few thosands but anything above that is a big ask. Still…I continue in this arena with my foolish dreams. humans are not 100% rational. But i know one thing if ever i have a problem its origins will not be in iran or north korea but a lot closer.
tomas says
Lance,
I am a godaddy customer, and your email just reeks of personal incompentence. I just dropped free hosting for my son’s website last night. The change took 2 minutes to go through godaddy’s system. I then forwarded his domain. 3 days? No. By the time I woke up this morning, traffic was going to the redirect.
Also, after a domain expires, the registry charges a fee to get it back. Yes, right away. And no, godaddy is not a registry. Blame verisign for that, not godaddy. if you have a registrar who will eat that fee for you, feel free to use them to cover your own negligence, but they’ll go out of business because i think that it is a pretty hefty fee (40 dollars?) imposed by verisign, so if they pay that for you, they just lost money on your domain big time.
it is icann policy, not godaddy policy, that domains with false whois information can be challenged and revoked. and no, godaddy is not icann either. blame icann if you want, but if you were a big registrar, i hope you might think twice before violating icann policy.
just my 0.02.
Chris Nielsen says
I also think that men who “where” earings are pathetic, but if they “wear” them, well it’s not for me to judge one way or another…
I don’t like Godaddy for a number of reasons and some were mentioned above, but others are more subjective in nature and don’t bother me other others. If Godaddy was really bad, THEY WOULD NOT BE SO BIG, now would they? From buying used domains I have a few there and they will all be transfered away when they are due to be renewed. Well, all but one. I have a .ws domain that it seems you can’t transfer for some reason… Oh well.
And I did get nailed with that 60 day transfer hold after I put in a transfer and then changed the registrant from the previous owner to myself. Gotcha! I had to renew it at Godaddy so I would not lose it. I can take some small satisfaction that you can search Google for “godaddy coupons” and find sites that have codes that can get you a discount and not have to pay the full price.
Interesting thread, just remember the #1 rule of forums and blogs: “Please don’t feed the trolls!”.
Chris Nielsen says
I read past this page and looked at a few others and then noticed something. It seems like all the links in these survey results are AFFILIATE LINKS!
For me, that seriously TAINTS the validity of this “survey”. I was wondering why there wasn’t more data from the survey, since you would expect that there would be a lot of oddball responses. And I was really surprised that neither Namecheap.com or Domainsite.com that I use were listed. Of course, they don’t have any affiliate programs….
Editor says
Chris, it is true that I have affiliate links here. I use a program to turn any company that has an affiliate program into a link. There\’s no \”tainting\” of the survey. A lot of companies don\’t have affiliate programs.
Why are NameCheap and DomainSite not included in the results? If you recall when taking the survey they were not options, because they aren\’t within the biggest 10 registrars. I didn\’t list every registrar. But I listed the top 10 even if they don\’t have affiliate programs.
Stop the conspiracy theories and quit whining.
Jack says
Namecheap coupons for September 2008 are available here: http://www.ncaditya.com/namecheap-discount-coupons-for-september/
dug says
Whois reports my DNS updates as pointing to my server, they have been for 24 hours… but guess what? I am still seeing the GoDaddy parking page. Therefore I too must dispute your GoDaddy “instant update” claim. None of the other registrars I have used have pulled a stunt like that.
Jerry MILLWOOD says
I like namecheap. Easy to transfer, good deal on privacy protection. I’ve been a day or two late on renewals before, and they didnt try to screw me over.