As it were…

There was a time when I said “never GoDaddy”. I turned down contracts when the client wanted to be hosted on GoDaddy, and wouldn’t budge. Over the last few years my attitude has changed pretty dramatically. I’m happy to work with GoDaddy now, and I like what they’re doing as a company.

Recently a friend tweeted this:

I also can't understand how so many WP people have jumped on the GoDaddy bandwagon when 98% of them have bad mouthed them for years.

— jamesdalman (@jamesdalman) March 23, 2017

That is absolutely a fair question, and I think one that deserves a better answer than a tweet back, so this post is intended to be that answer.

Why I Didn’t Like GoDaddy

My primary reason was their choice to use sex as a marketing tool. Every commercial made me cringe. I felt so sad that NASCAR’s first serious female contender was cast as someone sexy rather than someone with amazing accomplishments. There was so much opportunity there to inspire young women and girls with the idea that they can break cultural norms.

A secondary reason was the lifestyle of the owner. He simply made choices I don’t like. Lots of people do, and that’s fine, but I made the choice not to use his product.

There were also some tech issues I didn’t like.  For a long time you couldn’t get shell for example. That annoyed me like crazy.

Lastly, they were the biggest player. I always root for the underdog.

What Changed

The real change came when key people inside GoDaddy decided the company was doing harmful things, and decided to do something about it. The owner sold the company and took a smaller and smaller role in controlling the company until he was simply gone.

At that point the opportunity existed to take a higher road, and they did it. The sex came out of the commercials. There are now more women than men in positions of authority inside the company.

In general things have really turned around.

What Doesn’t Matter

I recently heard someone bad mouth GoDaddy, and then someone else jump in and say “How can you hate GoDaddy?  Mendel Kurland is such a cool guy!” For the unaware, Mendel works there. And he is a cool guy, I like him a lot. I have other friends that work there too.

None of that matters. My beef wasn’t with individual people there, but corporate direction.

So Everything’s Perfect?

No. There are still things I don’t like about GoDaddy. But those things are in the same class as things I don’t like about every host as well. They’re not using protocol X, or they meddle too much in the site creation, or whatever. They’re not anything that I would feel like I need to apologize to my daughter for.

In Summary

In the past I’ve been vocal about “never GoDaddy”. I’m not that way anymore.