Despite Boycott, GoDaddy Still Supports SOPA

Dec 26, 2011 by Matt | Posted in Domains 2 Comments

As if there weren’t enough reasons to not do business with GoDaddy, they recently made it clear that they not only support SOPA, but that they were involved in the authoring of the bill.

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith’s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

Even with that lesser-publicized fact aside, GoDaddy’s support of SOPA has spurred a large boycott, which they have met with a cavalier attitude (“we have not seen any impact to our business”) and some fuzzy PR-speak leading people to believe that they no longer support the bill, while they still do.

If you are looking to leave GoDaddy, or someone you know is, there are plenty of alternatives.

Domains: Name.com, Moniker, Gandi.net, Hover (Tucows), 1and1

Shared Hosting: HostGator, Media Temple, Site5, WPWebHost, A Small Orange, Nearly Free Speech

VPS Hosting: VPS.net, Linode, Media Temple, Rackspace

  • http://news.runtowin.com Blaine Moore

    Honestly…a loss 20,000+ domain names isn’t even noticeable to their bottom line. They didn’t care when people left in droves after the CEO had a video of him shooting elephants last April, and I doubt they’ll care about people leaving SOPA. The problem is that not enough people even know what SOPA is or cares. 20,000 out of 50 million is nothing. Unfortunately.

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      The problem is that domains are a small amount of their revenue. The real meat of it is their hosting services. Persuading people to make a move that involved is much harder. ~$10/year vs $60-120 is a big difference.

      Another thing that makes a difference is convincing businesses and individuals with a lot of domains to move. There was someone on Reddit who managed domains for his/her employer and was planning on talking to their marketing department about moving their ~1,000 domains off GoDaddy.