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."

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It's just an OS

[BadAnalogyGuy]

An OS is no good without applications on top of it.

If GoDaddy doesn't have the wherewithal to develop applications for Linux, maybe they'll have better luck with Windows. It gives them the ability to use ASP.Net on the server side with all the benefits that entails.

Re:Who cares?

[biocute]

It does, as bragging rights for Microsoft to show that its server solution is hosting xx% of the internet.

Sigh...

[OxygenPenguin]

I use GoDaddy for my hundreds of domain registrations....too bad to see them make this decision. Not to be a blatant Microsoft troll, but it is nearly generally recognized in the server community that Linux/Apache is a more secure solution than Windows. Why would GoDaddy site security as their reason to change vendors?

I wonder why...?

[Zarel]

I think we can all agree that, at the very least, Linux SERVERS are better than Windows servers.

And, GoDaddy should at least know that much.

So, the question is, why are they doing it? Do you think Microsoft is paying them to do this? Did management's preconception that "Windows is what we use on our desktops, so it MUST be good for our servers" override any rational thought? Did they think it would trick customers who didn't know better and think, "They use Windows, just like our own computers, it must be good"?

Any thoughts?

Microsoft just dropped them some cash

[codepunk]

MS is just pissed off that they keep loosing market share on netcraft so the likely dropped godaddy a big ole wad of cash to move all those worthless
parked domains to IIS servers....To think there is a technical reason or advantage is pure hog wash...

And don't give me a bunch of bull about how great .net is. Being a ex asp programmer I grabbed the latest copy of visual studio and had a little go with
it.....guess what, it is still the same buggy piece of crap it always was.

Re:It's just an OS

[pavera]

Except as the article states and then quickly dusts under the carpet, this only applies to their parked domains which host no services, no actual sites, and are just place holders. They won't be developing any applications for these domains anyway.

If they were moving actual hosting to windows, then maybe this would be real news, but they can't do that, actual hosting requires offering windows and linux as the platform, they aren't going to force their customers to rewrite all of their php/apache/mysql web sites in asp/iis/sql server

Re:Well, then.

[the eric conspiracy]

I have half a dozen myself, and the only reason I have this many is Go Daddy is so inexpensive. As far as parking domains, who cares? It's just a "under construction" or whatever site. For real hosting you pick one of the innumerable other options that give you PHP/MySQL etc. for a few bucks a month, or more elaborate if your traffic needs it.

My guess: Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change.

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience with GoDaddy shows that the company takes advantage of people with little technical experience by confusing them. Visit the GoDaddy website [godaddy.com] yourself and see what you think. It's filled with ads, especially when you are in the second and third pages of registering a domain.

I'm guessing Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change. That would fit with my conception of the behavior of both of them.

Re:I wonder why...?

[Foofoobar]

Well I have known Microsoft to bend over backwards to give away their product just so that they can have a poster child. I also know that Microsoft is trying to get into web hosting. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of business arrangement coming down the line.

I expect all their Apache customers will be bailing and going elsewhere... not a smart move when you consider the market share Apache has and how many people applications use the LAMP stack.

My Prediction??Watch their business drop by at least 25%.

They will come back...!

[bogaboga]

I beg the Linux zealots not to do their thing right away. GoDaddy will come back sooner or later. Nothing can hide a fact, nothing! We've seen this before. They will come back. May be this is part of the incompetence I have seen in US companies lately. I hope I am wrong.

Re:It's just an OS

[jbplou]

70% of websites around the world.

Bullshit. There is no way I believe that exact combo has 70% of the web sites. Lets see Linux might have the most but I highly doubt they have 70% are you saying that Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Misc O/S only total 30%.

What about sites that use PERL , ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, or just static HTML, once again I doubt that only totals 30% of sites.

Then the big one MYSQL is not used on 70% of sites, I worked at a web host for a while and know that most hosting customers don't even really know what a database is, let alone use one.

Re:I wonder why...?

[glwtta]

I think we can all agree that, at the very least, Linux SERVERS are better than Windows servers.

Eh, that's not really true - better at what? I'm sure there are plenty of applications where Windows kicks Linux's ass, a blanket "better than" isn't really something you can apply to something as complex as a server OS.

I personally would never consider a Windows environment for any of my work, but that's mainly because I have no desire to be Microsoft's bitch; clearly this is not as important to many people.

So what

[icepick72]

Oh c'mon, Go Daddy is not suddenly the bad guy because they chose a different technology platform. They didn't choose it to make Linux advocates resentful or to make Microsoft partners happy. It was a business decision. They think it will help them for their specific need. If Mac OSX would have been more helpful to their business they would have chosen it instead, or Atari OS or whatever. So what if they had problems with non-Microsoft browsers in the past or not; the author tries to draw a correlation but it's irrelevant. The author is just acting stupid I'm afraid to say. I mean, the issue is very interesting in and of itself, but I want to see mature discussion. Let's not put Go Daddy down because we prefer apples over oranges. I would rather see mature discussion about the switch. Indeed the good posts are already coming in ...

Re:I wonder why...?

[Stevyn]

I think your statement that all linux servers are better than windows servers is way to general for any rational person to believe.

Second, do you really think management came to this decision because they noticed the green start button on their screen? They did this over money. Microsoft probably wanted their business enough to charge them next to nothing and offer better support than Linux forums can offer. If they can take that savings and pass it along to their stockholders or customers then good for them. In the end, it might be costing Microsoft some money for the PR.

But to say Linux servers are always better and to think they did this on a whim is incredibly myopic.

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

[schon]

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.

Translation:

Costs are the same, but it costs money to switch, therefore MS is trying to buy their business.

The fact that only the "parked" (read: bare pages with no interactivity and exceptionally low risk) will be changed means that GoDaddy is trying to take them up on it without really taking any risk.

Re:My guess: Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change.

[mabu]

In my 12 years of working on the Internet, no registrar with the possible exception of Network Solutions has caused more wholesale heartache for legitimate customers than Godaddy. They are the biggest bunch of sleazebags on the planet. At least NSI had an excuse... they had monopoly power early on and exploited it. GoDaddy came out of the gate with the intention to defraud, mislead and exploit consumers. Every time I have a client who is using them, my immediate response is, "Oh Fuck!" That's how much they suck. That's how difficult it is to get any decent amount of customer service; that's how much bullshit I have to go through in order to get my client domains operating properly. There is no worse domain registrar on the planet in my opinion than GoDaddy. If you're a total moron, you use GoDaddy. That's it plain and simple. There are no people who disagree with me; there are merely people who haven't been screwed over yet, and will be eventually. That's the GoDaddy creedo that they haven't figured out.

Please to let me say I told you so. If you're smart you won't deal with Godaddy. I have no incentive to say this beyond the fact that my many years of trouble and torment from these jerkwads forces me to not even wish upon my worst enemy, the sleaziness that is their operation.

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Re:Microsoft just dropped them some cash

[t35t0r]

got some buggy code to back up your statement?

Re:It's just an OS

[WoodstockJeff]

the "AMP" part of LAMP runs on Windows as well.

But, it doesn't run as well on Godaddy's Windows servers as it does on their Linux boxes. This is because Godaddy has chosen to make liberal use of "Safe Mode" and "OpenDir" restrictions on the Windows boxes, presumably to protect them. Should NOT be necessary, but they feel it is.

If you have a program that opens files in multiple directories, or enumerates files in a directory, you have to ask to be hosted on a Linux box at Godaddy.

Re:Well, then.

[WindBourne]

Ok, so you were involved. Just out of curiosity, why the change? I can not see any advantage to you unless there is more income coming in from elsewhere.

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

[Rogerborg]

I think they're about to find out the difference between pre-sales and after-sales service.

Linux VS microsoft

[chrisranjana.com]

"Our business is based on providing the best possible service at the lowest possible price."

So now windows is cheaper than Linux ? Really by how much ? Maybe security wise they think Microsoft windows is better than Linux. But I really cannot buy their arguement that they went the windows way because it was cheaper !

Re:Who cares?

[Mr. Underbridge]

I can't put ads on my own error pages?

Not what it says, really:

"in no event shall Your web site consist of...pages comprised primarily of other advertising".

That tells me that you can't have a *site* that is devoid of content and is basically an ad farm. If you have a site that's full of content with an ad here or there, including on your error pages, that's not a problem as I read the above.

Re:Misinterpretation

[Irish_Samurai]

This is what I don't get about Linux zealots. As I understand it, Linux distros are open source so you can change things under the hood if you want. If GoDaddy has a team of well skilled Linux programmers and admins on staff, shouldn't they be able to change the code to a form that will suit their needs?

And if that is true, what does it matter if the release is no longer supported and was originally intended as a testing system? I thought the whole point of Linux was to be able to change it to suit your needs and support it yourself if you had the skills.

Re:Incredible!

[belmolis]

In the romanization of Hindi and other languages of India, bh, dh, and gh are used for so-called "voiced aspirates". The difference between these and their unaspirated counterparts b, d, and g has nothing to do with tongue position. Rather, it is a matter of what phoneticians call phonation type. The ordinary b, d and g have modal voicing, in which the vocal folds vibrate in the usual way. The "voiced aspirates" have what is called breathy or murmured voicing, which results from the vocal folds being held together rather loosely. The glottal source spectrum of murmured sounds is much noisier than that of sounds with modal voicing. You can listen to a contrasting set of examples here [ucla.edu].

Re:It's just an OS

[Anonymous Coward]

It gives them the ability to use ASP.Net on the server side with all the benefits that entails.

Good to see you've included a list of those "benefits". Headaches, more like.

In the old days

[HangingChad]

Back in my day, the ancient days of IT...three or four years in the dark past, it was big news when a company switched to Linux. These days it's a headline when a company switches to MSFT.

MOD parent Offtopic

[GuloGulo]

And do it every time he decides to derail a legitimate discussion by bringing up US politics.

He's the worst political troll on this site, and I'm happy I finally remembered to foe him.

Summarizing the summary

[metamatic]

So basically:

- All the domains that are empty (parked awaiting content) will be served from Windows servers

- All the domains that have content, that somebody cares about, will be served from Linux as before

Gosh, what a victory for Microsoft.

Open Source vs. Closed Source

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one factor in the open vs. closed source battle that keeps getting overlooked. Open source thrives on two things. First, it is extremely easy for anyone to give it a try. Between open source apps like OpenOffice that are available for Windows to Live CD distros of Linux that can be run by anyone who can burn a CD, the cost of giving them a try is tiny. They don't require an infrastructure of retail sales outlets and various other middlemen. Second, the survival of most open source projects is not dependent on sales.

Open source projects start and thrive in an environment where all they really need is good communication (the Internet) and a chance to gain some mindshare to attract users and developers. Because of the licenses, the projects can outlive individual developers and companies that support them. By driving down transaction costs the cost of starting up an open source project and of its growth are drastically diminished.

Closed source, on the other hand, is tied to the economic fortunes of its owners. Ever stumble on Microsoft's part, including the recent Vista delay, represents a loss or delay of revenue to Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft can weather that storm currently. Not all of its partners can.

Open source will not destroy closed source. It can't. On the other hand, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Microsoft is the largest software company. Assuming that the Halloween documents are to be taken seriously, they decided years ago that open source is the number one threat to their business. Since then, they have been completely unable to do anything to significantly slow its spread. Open source projects will outlast their closed source competitors in many cases.

Re:Incredible!

[bertramwooster]

Mod parent a troll. While Gandhi was hardly infallible, there is little documentation to show that he hated kaffirs or was pro-apartheid. One or two isolated quotes does not a character define. An episode of Penn and Teller's show time is not "documentation".

Re:Who cares?

[mrsbrisby]

At least one good thing can be said for the Windows-based sites, they do actually do something.

Yup. They get defaced and broken down more than any other system. That despite not having a majority.

most of the windows-hosted sites are ecommerce

Err, no they're not. As the article points out, most windows-hosted sites are parking pages.

Strip out all the 1-page personal websites where you have a thousand hosted on 1 server by the huge hosting companies (eg 1&1) and you'd have a pitiful number left.

While we're at it, let's "strip out" anything else that disagrees with your pretension that Windows are superior.

Let's group all Windows platforms together, and separate all unixish platforms.

Let's ignore any site that didn't pay for vendor assistance! (after all, they're not doing business)

Let's ignore any site that didn't sign up for the survey with a Microsoft browser (after all, they're evil hackers!)

Or do you really believe that it's easier to manage 10,000 customer sites with different needs, than it is to manage one site, with a single need, and lots of lead time before changes?

It is a pity Netcraft don't release their SSL site survey as I think that would be a lot closer to a 50/50 split.

Lemmie guess, one of those gut feelings right?

Or maybe you're basing this on the free report they published in November 2004, you know, when RSA was still patented and you had to get a commercial license to use SSL?

Re:Microsoft just dropped them some cash

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe your coding skills are just as buggy as they used to be.