I'm a long time Go Daddy user to register my domains. When I was brand new to the internet marketing game and picked my first domain in 2004, I used Go Daddy as the registrar because that's the recommendation I read on forum posts.

At first I was pretty satisfied with them. But then slowly my list of reasons why they are no longer my choice grew bigger and bigger.

Here are my reasons:

  • Go Daddy Commercials I never paid much attention to their home page. I would just log in and maintain my domains. But the year after my first domain registration with them, I was watching the Superbowl with my husband and their commercial came on. You remember the one. I don't know all the details, but some well-endowed woman was jiggling it in front of some elderly gentlemenfree websites domain. Then I think her strap broke (they only showed her from the back, of course) and one of the men either passed out or needed oxygen or something. I'm sure Go Daddy got a lot of brand recognition for that one. But I was so incredibly offended that I vowed to switch all my domains over somewhere else the next day. I never did it because a) it would be costly; I still had time remaining on the registrations and didn't want to pay extra just because I was ticked at them and b) it would be a lot of work (by then I had lots of domains). However I did send them an email complaining about it. Never heard back. But I'm sure it made them revisit their advertising strategy. Yeah, right. Since then their Superbowl commercials haven't been quite as bad, but I've read it's because the Superbowl censor board tightened down on them. The first 14 commercials they submitted for the 2006 Superbowl were rejected. An interesting marketing study for Go Daddy would be to see if the increased profit (if any) they get from their offensive ads outweighs the business they lose from women who are offended enough to leave.
  • Go Daddy Girls
    I appreciate the fact that the female Nascar racers on the Go Daddy website, such as Danica Patrick, are wearing leather jackets zipped up to their necks. No cheap attention-grabbing photos here. But I'm still put off by the links all over their home page of videos "too hot for tv."
  • Automatic Renewal: 2 Years I have lots of my domains set up to auto-renew because I don't want to forget to renew them and then lose them. I assumed they would renew to whatever length they were originally. I finally noticed that all my domains were renewing to 2 years, even if they were originally a 1-year term. I asked Go Daddy's customer support how I can set them to renew to 1 year. The answer was, I can't. The list in my black book is starting to grow.
  • Automatic Renewal: No Discount for 2 Years Since you don't have any choice of renewing for 1 or 2 years when you do it automatically, Go Daddy has no reason to offer you the usual incentive. You know when you purchase the domain at first, you get a cheaper per-year price if you renew for more than 1 year? Not with the auto renew. They charge you the 1-year price x 2.

So all these things have finally added up to me deciding I'm not going to use them anymore. As my domains near expiration, I'm transferring them over to another registrar.