GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft

RobertB-DC writes "Bargain-basement registrar GoDaddy.com has decided to move all its parked domains to Microsoft servers, saying that they'll provide 'a technology platform that is security-enhanced, highly scalable and easy to manage.' This is a shift away from Linux, a decision met with derision by other registrars such as Gandi.net, which greeted the news with the headline 'Go Daddy and never come back'. Late last year, GoDaddy.com had some 'issues', shall we say, with non-Microsoft browsers."

I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back

[notaprguy]

They talked about moving to Windows and said, basically, that the costs roughly in line with Linux when you take into account administration/management costs and that MSFT was bending over backwards to meet their needs. They liked MSFT's customer service. They like ASP.NET because of the capabilities it provides. They like MSFT's vision and...most important of all...their customers liked the results when they used Windows hosting sevices.

Re:Incredible!

[TgmBxA!X8(TNDWr_,+xv]

Gandhi. G-A-N-D-H-I.

In college, I took a course called Gandhi's India, about--what else?--the life of Gandhi, and Gandhi's contributions to modern India. Come the day of the midterm, the class swelled to twice its usual size; most of the new faces spelled his name "Ghandi" in their essays. My professor didn't look too kindly on these idiots. Damn if she didn't look good otherwise.

Re:Hmm...

[k_187]

umm, you do realize that's talking about the special interactive player, and the movie plays just fine?

Re:Well, then.

[dave1212]

http://www.domainsatcost.ca/ [domainsatcost.ca]

Very solid, been with them for about 4 years with 9 domains. Not as cheap, but that doesn't matter if the service is better. They do .ca registrations as well, but I use them for everything.

I'm going to move my remaining 4 domains off GoDaddy as well and over to domainsatcost. Big business needs to realize that associating itself with MS or Windows is a bad thing.

Re:It's just an OS

[Foofoobar]

Actually, MySQL overtook Oracle last year as the number one most popular database and is installed on over 55% of ALL servers (not just web servers). Apache still holds rein as the king of web servers with 70% and the most common web server is still Linux with over 60% of the market. PHP is the number one Apache mod and is in the top 4 of programming languages on the Tiobe Index.

Keep in mind that these stats are for web servers... not ALL servers.

So yes... those stats are fairly accurate... though 70% may be high, I would say in the mid to high 60 percentile range is not unreasonable.

Re:Hmm...

[larry bagina]

Nice try, but that was due to bugs in MacOS 8.x, not a WB/Microsoft conspiracy.

Re:Who cares?

[JordanL]

Well I just called in about the 1 domain I have there, and they flat out told me that none of their domain servers and/or name servers are IIS or will be moving to IIS. A closer look at the article reveals the openning statement:

Microsoft Corp. today announced that GoDaddy.com®

Perhaps MS misunderstood what their product was being purchased for? Or maybe I was being lied to...

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

While those may make up the majority of sites, there is a lot of legitimate stuff out there. Like the other poster mentioned, there seems to be some confusion about what's actually happening. If you want to give them a call and see for yourselves, godaddy's high level support line is at 908-642-3588.

Switching?

[Homestar Breadmaker]

GoDaddy have always been MS shills. They've always touted their Windows hosting as superiour the linux. Their tech people don't know anything about linux, and try to sell you windows hosting when you have a problem with their pathetic linux offerings. Years ago when I saw them advertising how much more secure their windows hosting is compared to linux, I moved all my stuff away.

Re:Who cares?

[Denney]

The actual press-release on Yahoo! Finance states "Go Daddy® will have moved all its parked domains from Linux to the Windows platform." That does not include domain servers or name servers. If my understanding is correct, parked domains are on one set of servers, while all the other services are being provided from other sets of servers. Thus, I think you were told the truth by the GoDaddy folks, and Microsoft is also telling the correct story, although the heading of the Press Release makes the news sound bigger than it really is.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Well, then.

[geniusj]

I was involved in this project, and I'm pretty sure I can relay the following information at the least:

    The only thing that has changed are our PARKED web servers. Linux and open source is still used in many other places that are not changing. I can't go into specifics on this stuff, but I just wanted to clarify that that is all that changed. Hosting is still offered under both Linux/PHP (and I believe RoR) and Windows/ASP, and Linux is hosting many other systems as well.

Re:Microsoft probably paid them for this...

[The Famous Brett Wat]

It's a fair assumption. Microsoft have been playing this game for quite a long time now. Look, for example, at Netcraft's April 2002 survey [netcraft.com]. This is about as close as Microsoft ever got to Apache in market share. Consider the following quotation from that page.

Some of the big moves are because Microsoft has been able to identify people who control very large numbers of sites, are not bound tightly to a particular technology, and persuade them to switch to Microsoft servers. The leading domain registrars, Verisign and register.com, are prime examples of this.

"Per$uade", or "purse-swayed", I'm sure.

Attempts to purchase survey results like this seem a little desparate to me, given the long term trend. Still, you can get an idea of the effect Microsoft is purchasing by looking at the January 2006 survey [netcraft.com], where Apache lost nearly a million sites worth of share to the "other" category thanks to a bit of tweaking by GoDaddy. See that page for more detail.

Re:Who cares?

[ImaLamer]

I own two domains that are "parked" there until I can use them (i.e. iheartje.ws) and who cares? Their parked domains have no reason to really stay online. They exist to advertise for GoDaddy and their minions until you setup shop. In a way I assume that is why there are so many sales at GoDaddy.

No matter you can get Linux & Windows (shared) hosting still:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp [godaddy.com]

and it's all Fedora on the dedicated side:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/dedicated.a sp [godaddy.com]

Not really a story.

Re:It's just an OS

[fluffy99]

Yeah, but how many instances of MySQL are actually being used? Seems like it gets installed by default on a number of distros. A real statistic would be how many total rows are handles by Oracle versus MySQL. Personally I can't stand Oracle because their security sucks and they keep quietly announcing serious vulnerabilities and then making it difficult to get the patches.

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

This Number is NOT GoDaddy, its some random dude in New Jerseys cell phone

Misinterpretation

[pingveno]

They are not removing their Linux hosting. Go to godaddy.com, Hosting & Servers, Virtual Dedicated Servers. All of the preconfigured plans use Red Hat Fedora Core 2. The "Hosting Plans" section of their web site allows the user a choice between Fedora and Windows. This move to Windows is in just in a certain part of their system. Removing support for Linux web servers would be suicide. Microsoft's web serving numbers aren't going anywhere from this decision.

Re:Incredible!

[natmakarvitch]

> Ghandi never struck me as the kind of guy who trashtalks others

Gandi.net was sold in September 2005, a new team is in charge.

--
http://www.makarevitch.org/rant/rant.html [makarevitch.org]

GoDaddy.com - a death by a thousand cuts

[DrXym]

I've never met such an irritating, insidious service as GoDaddy. On the surface it sounds great - cheap domain names, cheap hosting, cheap this and that. But as soon as you sign up you discover you've just bought a crippled service and you're going to be nickel and dimed to death to improve it. Advanced functionality is disabled, "value add" software is beta or plain out of date, the user interface is pretty crap, there's no shell and you're constantly spammed by GoDaddy both by email and through ads on the gateways you pass through to work your accounts & email.

In their favour, the hosting more or less works as intended, but in my experience the hosting software is pretty awful. As soon as my hosting is up I'm off to somewhere else.

Re:Incredible!

[raju1kabir]

Except if Indians start using roman letters, I believe translation is opened... therefore, Gandi, Ghandi and Gandhi, as long as they sounds the same, are conceptually equal, and should be considered as such.

They don't sound the same.

GH is a softer sound than G.

DH is a softer sound than D, pronounced with the tongue flatter against the roof of the mouth.

In Hindi, I believe that D and G without the softening 'H" simply don't exist (but could be wrong). In Arabic, 'D' and 'DH' are completely different letters, likewise 'G' (Egyptian, anyway) and 'GH'. Baghdad is not pronounced Bagdad; the GH should sound like a French R. They aren't any more the same than 'Mop" and 'Top' are.

Re:Incredible!

[fatphil]

Gandhi hated kaffirs. And was pro-Apartheid.

He lived in South Africa for quite a long time, and
wrote a lot while there. Almost everything he wrote
about the blacks there was negative, and to be frank,
downright racist. The "uncivilized races", he called
them. That's trash talk in anyone's book.

Sorry, but the infallable image of Gandhi is one that
needs to be punctured. See the Penn & Teller 'Bullshit'
episode about 'heroes', where they also crucify the
Dalai Lama, and Mother Theresa. (The latter being someone
I consider to be downright evil in the extreme.)

FP.

Only Microsoft Announced This?

[qazwart]

I found it interesting that GoDaddy didn't make a joint announcement with Microsoft on this issue. Nor, is this mentioned on GoDaddy's website. Apparently, GoDaddy didn't think this was that big an announcement. I also noticed that only the nameservers are mentioned (which are relatively few machines), and not the rest of GoDaddy's infrastructure.

GoDaddy offers multiple Linux platforms, and their Windows platforms don't offer such services as PHP hosting, Ruby on Rails, or Perl/CGI scripting. Their Windows platforms only do ASP and .NET stuff. Certainly, if GoDaddy was abandoning Linux, they'd switch their PHP, Ruby, and Perl hosting to Windows too.

I suspect that GoDaddy and Microsoft worked out an agreement where Microsoft would provide free technical assistance, free software, and maybe some hardware if GoDaddy agreed to switch their nameservers from Linux to Windows. GoDaddy would get help setting up .NET hosting, and Microsoft gets to make a big announcement about a big Windows win over Linux.

Re:Incredible!

[StephanGandi]

Actually, if you want to decide by yourself what we really wrote, please go there : http://www.lebardegandi.net/ [lebardegandi.net]. You'll find the post named "Godaddy, and never come back", where I basically say I admired the development of this company until now. And how all of this is logical : one day Microsoft will probably absorb Go Daddy (or another company like that), to prepare their new "Vista world" ...

Re:My guess: Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change.

[jav1231]

I haven't had any issues with them yet. So far it's been fine. My site works and my RSS feeds work. Now if they move me to an IIS server, I will leave despite all that.

Re:Incredible!

[pnutjam]

Info on Mother Theresa [rotten.com]

Re:Incredible!

[mfrank]

Christopher Hitchens also wrote a book that painted Mother Theresa in a not-so-favorable light.