Leaving GoDaddy

By Bjarni Rúnar 2011-12-26, 17:39

Like many other startups, PageKite has decided to move our domains away from GoDaddy to a registrar with a more responsible attitude towards protecting free speech on the Internet. GoDaddy was one of the few online service providers to support the the controversial U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, which most of the technical community agrees will be a disaster, threatening free speech and putting many legitimate Internet companies out of business if it becomes law.

GoDaddy has many other problems, but this was the last straw. We are leaving.

After browsing around a bit, we decided to go with Gandi, a French company that has been getting good reviews online and wrote a nice position piece on their attitude towards SOPA. We agree with them, and we like their "No Bullshit" motto. It is a welcome bonus that their website is ever so much nicer to navigate and use than GoDaddy's.

These instructions made the transfer process relatively easy, and we have already transferred most of our less used domains, transferred pagekite.net itself and are in the process of moving the critical pagekite.me domain.

Unfortunately, we made a foolish mistake while transfering pagekite.net: we assumed that the exported zone files from GoDaddy's systems were formatted correctly. It turns out they were not (trailing dots were missing from the MX records - a rookie mistake) and as a result e-mail to our @pagekite.net addresses was undeliverable for a few hours. We have fixed the problem, but it may take a few more hours for the incorrect entries to expire from DNS caches around the world. In the meantime, sending mail to the same addresses at @beanstalks-project.net should work fine.

So, that's that. Goodbye, GoDaddy. Hello Gandi!