So, I had both upvoted that guy's comment and flagged this entire thread (as in, the top-level post). To me, and I think to many other people, what is actually the core problem with HN is that it is being flooded with a ton of what is pretty much "spam": posts that are either repetitive (either to content from years ago, or even to content from last week) or content that are informing people of things that should be prerequisite knowledge.
In this case, the problem is that DNS is a distributed database, and the idea that people are hosting websites with all of their DNS from a single provider that is at the same time acting as their registrar (whose only purpose in the DNS infrastructure is to mediate your ability to change your DNS servers and renew your account) is horrific: it means something horrendously wrong has occurred in this community.
Meanwhile, the comments here are just strange: people talking about "switching providers without downtime" when the whole point of how DNS works is that you can have arbitrarily many servers and thereby have multiple providers hosting your zones at once. To even have a webpage in the first place you had to setup DNS, and if you somehow skipped that step then you probably skipped tons of other important steps. :(
Reading this entire thread is thereby just depressing: this isn't some advanced corner case of A/B testing leading to improved knowledge of how to do pricing, this is web hosting 101. Yet, somehow, we have 308 upvotes and 238 comments that have been left about an outage of a single provider for the only component in the entire stack of a website where you almost have to go out of your way to not have fault tolerance.
Then, as opposed to trying to get this discussion out of the way as soon as possible, we are just being flooded with a combination of people claiming that this is important, and that those who disagree are being "snarky", combined with opportunistic bloggers submitting tutorials like the "GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53" that was just posted.
Therefore, I will claim that it isn't drivebyacct2 that is indicative of a loss of HN quality: it is instead that somehow any of this was relevant in the first place, and that once posted it keeps spreading. I can understand people being interested when AWS or Heroku or even GitHub goes offline, but no one on Hacker News should care if GoDaddy DNS goes offline.
There is so much that "should" be prerequisite knowledge, that people simply can't know it all.
I admit that I know very little about DNS, to the point where I don't understand large parts of your post. I have a website, and I vaguely remember doing stuff to get the domain name to resolve, years ago. I know roughly that DNS translates domain names to IP addresses, but not much more. I'm okay with not knowing much more than that. I'm confident I can learn if necessary, but so far I've been learning the prerequisite knowledge of other fields.
If I was using godaddy, this thread would be helpful to me.
Unfortunately lack of hosting-related knowledge is indicative through and through here even to the actual startups out of YC. Is it too much to ask for someone to know the latest buzz about Rails but can't spell DNS? Good luck if you choose this as your crusade to educate.
You don't find it interesting that one of the largest DNS service providers has had a major outage rendering browsing many websites virtually impossible for several business hours? Not every site I am interested in using is maintained by readers of HN who should (perhaps) know better.
Are you trying to say that it is ironic because my post is also snarky? If so, I think you need to a) go do some research on the concept of irony and then b) point out where I claimed to not be snarky...?
> (informal, sometimes proscribed^)[1][2] Contradiction between circumstances and expectations; condition contrary to what might be expected. [from the 1640s]
> ^ Some authorities proscribe the last sense, "contradiction of circumstances and expectations, condition contrary to what might be expected"[2], but it has been common since the 1600s.[3]
Close enough for government work.
Definitional pedantism aside, I think my point is clear.
To be really pedantic, your assumption that there was some expectation that my post would not be snarky is fallacious. Why do you hold that expectation? See, I wasn't the one calling out the snark, I was just pointing out what from the OP could be considered snarky, and I did it in a snarky way. That isn't irony just because you held the (incorrect) belief that for some reason (again, what reason?) my response post could/should not be snarky. That is all besides the fact that you had to dig up a proscribed definition of irony from god knows where to support your faulty premise.
I agree. As much as I don't like GoDaddy and have already moved most of my domains away from them, I don't like seeing someone say "you got what you deserved for using them". What a mean thing to say.
How come others get to downvote my comments but I don't like-wise? This is what's hurting HN. Black box phenomenon like this. No information about the commenting process. Maybe reddit is on to something after all. The designer of this site is one arrogant sob.
At the risk of further degenerating into meta discussion, I'll answer your question: Downvoting privileges are opened up at a certain karma threshold. The number has changed a number of times in the past and I believe it's currently at around a floor of 500-600 karma.
This just in: "Pointless Arguments Over What's Hurting Hacker News are Hurting Hacker News."
Just knock it off and get back to posting interesting discussion. If you're not doing that, you're contributing to the "hurting of HN." And I'm well within my understanding of hypocrisy and irony to be aware of the fact that I'm committing this exact fault, so thanks for pointing that out, you're so intelligent.
What does Paul Graham have to do with people downvoting you. It's a policy to help with people reflexively downvoting and it encourages people to become positive contributors before they can moderate others. It's a public policy. It's no conspiracy.
Negative karma. There's nothing wrong with your comments, but they're better suited for the more casual atmosphere of Reddit. (which is why I like Reddit more)
And yet every other month we have posts about password breaches with tons of HN users complaining about having to change their passwords. Or we have posts from people who didn't back up their data and their cloud provider lost it, or experienced hardware failure. Or we have technically savvy people who dismiss GoDaddy problems or have literally in the past said "It's good enough, we'll just stay because it's easy".
Sure, it may be snark but I sure as hell hope it motivates at least one more person to switch. And apparently it has, unless I'm failing to detect sarcasm on one of the other replies.
This entire conversation should be useless because there shouldn't be people here still using GoDaddy.
The reasons not to use GoDaddy in the past have been entirely moral/political, not technical. I've been using them for 10 years without a DNS issue like this, so it's not quite the same thing.
Moral/political reasons aside, have you ever seen their UI?
Try registering for a domain and get an idea of how aggressively and unabashedly they try to upsell you things you have zero need for, how difficult they make it to "transfer" domains. Generally, these practices are good signs of trouble, and a good hint that it's better to take business elsewhere. I should not have to spend hours upon hours wading through BS to do trivial tasks.
While those things are certainly annoying, they take up about 10 minutes per year of my time. Yes, GoDaddy has lots of issues, but it's not like other registrars are any better. E.g. on the front page of NameCheap they advertise that .com domains are 3.99, but when you actually do a lookup they in fact cost $10.69.
It is slightly misleading (since the default search box is for .com), but all it says is "DOMAINS FROM 3.99"
which is absolutely true. Some .info domains go for as low as $3.99
That is nowhere near as bad as GoDaddy's upselling crap PLUS namecheap's configuration and control panels are really nice to use.
Comparing GoDaddy to NameCheap is like comparing MySpace (before the last major redesign) to Facebook. They both have to make money somehow (and so have certain lame tactics to be competitive), but NameCheap is obviously lightyears beyond godaddy in any informed persons mind (ESPECIALLY when actually using the service after having paid for it... NameCheap's control panels are the best i've ever seen anywhere)
Namecheap is a fabulous hosting provider. Love 'em. That said, highly-redundant DDOS-resistant DNS infrastructure is not their focus--they offer it as a free service with hosting, but it's best to cough up a few extra bucks and move your DNS to something more robust with AnyCast (DNS Made Easy, Route53...) when you can if uptime's important to you.
Wow - you're seriously a hero. Thanks so much for building the test and thanks (even more) for the blog post (especially the legwork on pricing). I look forward to the day when "can we jump on a call?" sales processes are well and truly dead and self-service and transparent pricing is the norm.
Right below there it says web hosting starting at 2.95 per month, and if you click on the link the lowest price listed is 3.45 per month and that's only with a 24 month commitment. Why would I go with a company that is outright trying to steal money from me? I ask because they seem to be the most recommended GoDaddy alternative.
Their UI is AWFUL. But you know what...it's intentional. All of the upselling. The current hiding exactly where the "My Account" stuff resides. It all feels very intentional as to mislead people into buying unwanted services.
Their UI is there to provide one purpose, confuse user's into buying stuff. It seems to have worked for the most part.
I think we just need to remember that most people reading HN is not the target audience GoDaddy is looking for (IMO).
Wow, someone tried to sell me something...oh, it was so hard to say 'no' to things I did not want to buy and did not need. Oh wait, that's right, I don't care at all. I have no problem not buying those things.
It's actually not that bad and is only getting better since they've taken on investors. Even when it was bad, it was only bad on the first few visits, once you learned your way around the clutter, I never spent any more time on the GD site than I did on any other registrar or hosting provider site. For instance, just going to dcc.godaddy.com to go right into my domain manager when needing to update a domain.
Completely agree. The small business I work for has used GoDaddy from the start and has had outstanding uptime. Sure the interface is horrible but that doesn't affect our customers.
Probably a little early to be advertising this, since we're a couple of days from an "official launch", but I'm launching NameCan.com to specifically address the problems in what I perceive to be an unethical domain management space, namely:
I run my own DNS, so this outage isn't affecting me.
But I've also been migrating my domains away from GoDaddy for purely technical reasons.
One is that the UI is constantly changing, with its sole goal to be deliberately counterintuitive. There are key places where it tells you click on a link, without just offering the link right there, so you have to hunt it down on the page. Crazy.
But the worst one is that I can no longer read their emails in mutt. At all. It was refreshing to get simple notifications from Namecheap that were short and easy to read.
That's simply not true. And even if you ignore strictly technical problems they've had in the past (and the technical issues I had helping a non-profit with a hacked GoDaddy instance on a shared box that they disclaimed responsibility for), their moral/political problems are technical problems as well. As far as I'm concerned, failing to follow a DMCA properly and instead simply re-routing DNS requests in the meantime is a technical issue just as much as political one.
It was a hosted WordPress blog. That by default makes it their fault. If WP weren't up to date, it's their fault. If the host for the shared instance were hacked and files were added to all of the shared installations (which is what happened), it's their fault.
The problem was, the malware was only visible when the referrer was "Google", so they claimed there was nothing wrong. For weeks.
I'm not sure I follow your logic. GoDaddy may make it easy for you to install WordPress but it's still up to the owner to go in and update WordPress and Plugins. I'm not saying it wasn't GoDaddy but claiming it was definitively seems a little silly...
I don't know as I didn't set it up, but I've used shared cpanels in the past and they give you one-click WordPress installs and advertised as a "one-click full solution".
Either way, when it came down to it, one of their other shared clients were compromised and their sandboxing was rather insufficient leading to most of the clients on that box having some sort of malware installed. I'm sure the person in question was targeted because it looked like a standard install and frankly, if I was targeting shared hosting providers, I'd create my malware to be easy to integrate with WordPress.
I hope that makes it more clear why I find it to be GoDaddy's fault. In the end of the day, they understood what was wrong, apologized and fixed it.
Well here's how it works. GoDaddy and all other host's "one-click" is installation only. It doesn't auto-update your WordPress install so yours likely contained an old security exploit and was easily hacked. This is by design, it would be bad to install a WP theme and then have your website broken because it auto-updated WP.
Even so, you never answered my original question. How'd you determine it was a sandboxing problem rather than your own WordPress installation being compromised? Seems even less so considering you didn't realize you had to update WordPress yourself.
Your initial comments snarkyness to usefulness level was pretty low. It was a lot of "look how oppressed I am by being downvoted," and "you are so stupid for using godaddy."
You can communicate constructively and effectively without being so asinine. Here is an example of your initial comment with a bit kinder language:
Unfortunately, GoDaddy's services are often quite lackluster. I would urge current users to switch all their Godaddy-hosted services to other, more reliable providers.
Also, always remember to follow security best-practices such as using secure passwords, conducting regular backups, and the like.
Absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion, just snark. Yet for some reason its the highest voted comment.