Godaddy.Com: A Masterpiece of Marketing

Bob Parsons has come up with more angles on domain registration than there are uses for WD-40. Less than a decade ago, a domain registration site merely allowed you to search for the availability of a domain name and buy it if it wasn't taken. Network Solutions was no longer the exclusive purveyor of domain names in the U.S., and new registrars were providing substantial reductions from the $35 a year registration fees previously extorted. GoDaddy also hit the scene with an offbeat name and a pricing structure you couldn't ignore.

Marketing strategies for GoDaddy included a few controversial commercials laced with mild sexuality and related business spinoffs including Domains by Proxy and Wild West Domains. Wild West Domains is an affiliate program that allows rebranding most of the GoDaddy products for sale by small webhosts or a stand-alone retail site. Domains by Proxy allows for domain registration with information about the actual domain registrant to remain private, such as in a WHOIS search. All three serve different functions but feed each other.

The Pros

You get a comprehensive control panel for managing domains and other features all with one user account.

One-stop shopping for domains, hosting, SSL certificates and everything else you would possibly need for supporting a hosted site.

A free Economy hosting account and free WebSite Tonight is included for each domain registered through GoDaddy. The caveat here is the big GoDaddy advertising banner on the top of your hosted page and another for the WebSite Tonight. You can convert over to the paid version of hosting, and the ads will be removed.

An interesting side benefit is reportedly faster DNS propagation. Techie types like to know this kind of thing. The process of going to godaddy.com involves that domain name being fed to the proper name server, which translates the domain name into a numeric figure, such as 192.168.1.10. This number is known as the IP address for the server containing the domain being requested. The IP address is unique for a given server in a particular location. Moving a website from one server to another usually entails a change of name server information. The time it takes for the root name servers to update the various slave name servers around the world can take from a few hours to several days and is known as DNS propagation. During that propagation time, your site may not be viewable and your email can go to either the new or old server.

The Cons

A side effect of all the offerings available is clutter and confusion on the GoDaddy Web site. After navigating to where you need to go a few times, there will be a comfort level for how to go from point A to point B. The site was much more navigable just a few years back.

Be sure to read the fine print on all the agreements. Actually, just about everything is in fine print, and it makes you wonder how large the legal department really is.

No 800 number for phone support is available. Your call for support or billing problems will be on your dime to area code 480. Make sure you have plenty of dimes. The consolation is that the wait times are decent, and the support staff is generally helpful.

Once you have made your domain selection and add it to your shopping cart, the arduous task of checking out comes into play. You wade through several pages of additional offers that you don't need, and in fact, wonder if anybody ever really needs. You learn to rapidly click past these potential diversions and pay for your products.

At the end of the day, you'll have gotten a good price on your domain acquisition, a decent support structure, and a good control panel for managing your domains. The basic hosting services are reasonably priced, but beware of the add-ons since many of them are normally bundled in with other providers' hosting packages that would end up costing less.

GoDaddy is the empire that Bob built with a lot of help from social networking and Internet media technology. It functions well at providing domain names and is okay for hosting if price and efficiency are secondary to having the convenience of one-stop shopping.