I was checking my email this afternoon, all unsuspecting, and suddenly this crap bomb appeared in my inbox from my web hosting provider Media Temple:
I am proud to share some momentous news with you today. GoDaddy, the Internet’s largest platform for small businesses, has acquired (mt) Media Temple. We will continue operating as an independent and autonomous company and our mission will remain unchanged. However, new investments from GoDaddy will provide us the necessary resources to strengthen our focus on web professionals and will help accelerate our plans to expand internationally.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you surely have seen GoDaddy’s incredibly sexist ad campaigns. But here’s a nice refresher course for you, just the same:
Ms. Magazine: Top Five Sexist Super Bowl Ads, 2013
The Moderate Voice: GoDaddy: Poster Child For Silicon Valley Sexism
Geek Feminism Wiki: Go Daddy’s advertising
Miss Representation: #NotBuyingIt: Go Daddy Disappoints, Again
GoDaddy has also been critiqued for really terrible user interfaces and “dark patterns” – a user interface designed to trick you into doing something or buying something that you didn’t want or intend. Read more about some GoDaddy’s dark patterns tricks.
I actually had 12 domains registered with GoDaddy from really early on. I never hosted files on their servers, but when their domains were $3 and $5 a year, I registered quite a few of them. This was before all the horrible sexist advertising and before the dark patterns took over their interfaces. Once they started their terrible ad campaigns, I began moving my domain registrations, but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy to do as I had hoped. I had purchased some of my domain names under an email address I no longer had. When I changed emails, I updated all of my contact addresses for each individual URL. But unbeknownst to me – this is an example of one of their dark patterns – those changes didn’t also apply to the privacy settings on those URLs. So when that address when away, I couldn’t turn off the privacy settings in order to move the domains to a new domain provider. I finally found the log in numbers to the privacy accounts by searching on an ancient backup drive I put in the closet 6 years ago, and was able to update my privacy information in order to move, but it took me months to get it sorted out. So I was GoDaddy-free, finally!
Annnnnd now I’m back. I host 12 sites on Media Temple architecture. I’m going to be moving them sometime this spring, unfortunately. So far, Dreamhost, Digital Ocean and Pair.com are front-runners for new hosting providers. We shall see.