GoDaddy issues free SSL certificates to OSS projects

https://www.godaddy.com/ssl/ssl-open-source.aspx

by iancarroll • 13 years ago

12 21 13 years ago

godaddy.com

georgehaake• 13 years ago

I'd rather pay.

lolwutf• 13 years ago

GoDaddy's plan was to use SOPA to give themselves a monopoly as a domain registrar.

Don't forget it.

BummerCloud• 13 years ago

Hyperbole.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/24/godaddys-chief-sopa-su...

Osiris3• 13 years ago

The rumor internally is that she helped write the law and was trying to use it as a way to gain political points for a potential future political career.

rco8786• 13 years ago

We all hate GoDaddy still, I get it. That said, this is actually a pretty brilliant plan for them to begin to get back into the community's good graces.

kbar13• 13 years ago

It's a pretty good plan if people STILL don't heed the advice of others to stay the fuck away.

Even if you ignore the whole SOPA mess, and the scumbag CEO, and the shady marketing techniques, all in all you still end up with shit service, which is the thing you're trying to buy.

tracker12• 13 years ago

Parsons hasn't been CEO or even an executive in the company for over a year now iirc. Also, there's been a fair amount of effort to support FLOSS (including contributing back to the community) as well as internal movement away from proprietary solutions towards open-source software.

It's worth mentioning that I just joined GoDaddy a few months ago as an employee, feeling a lot of the same concerns. Hosting really needs to get their changes under way, I don't work in that area. I also have mixed feelings about "sales and support" being the same people.

I will say the checkout isn't nearly as bad as it once was, and there's movement to improve things.

As to the advertising, most of that's pretty much changed the past couple years as well.

Don't get me wrong, for my own projects, I'm far more likely to use linode or digital ocean if I'm hosting somewhere... I also feel that movement towards things like docker.io are far better in terms of direction than a lot of enterprise VM infrastructures being implemented. It takes time to change course for an aircraft carrier.

If it weren't for a lot of the internal changes coming from the top down, I would not be here at Go Daddy today.

hijinks• 13 years ago

its free for a year.. this is nothing but a pr/marketing stunt

cenhyperion2• 13 years ago

I'd rather pay a decent company good money than give GoDaddy my name and email.

A short list of reasons I refuse to use GoDaddy and actively encourage people to get away from them:

* Sexist advertising.

* The founder has repeatedly gone to Africa to kill elephants.

* They actively supported SOPA

* The founder expressed support for torture in Guantanamo Bay

* The customer support is a nightmare at best

* Hosting is inconsistent, slow, and of general poor quality.

* Constantly trying to upsell you the customer

* Godaddy mocks developers in its advertising

Canada• 13 years ago

I came here to post that exact list.

tracker12• 13 years ago

Sexist advertising: I don't think there's been a racy commercial in a few years now... Not that I thought they were actually all that bad to begin with, especially compared to most advertising in general.

The founder is no longer a part of the company.

Agreed on SOPA, and think there are some cultural changes, and not sure where things like this will fall... I know Go Daddy has been militant on many, and similar issues.

Again, Bob Parsons doesn't run Go Daddy today, and hasn't iirc for over a year.

I have mixed feelings about support and sales being the same people. In some ways its' good, in others its' bad, and it really depends on the specific person you talk to.

Hosting, there's changes under way, but agreed as a general rule.

See above on sales/support.

I'm not sure that I've seen advertising really mocking developers.

I will say I've been a GoDaddy employee for about three months now, and the culture really isn't what it used to be in a lot of ways.. I was really apprehensive coming in, considering some of the above comments, as well as other insights into GD's past. That said, things have and are changing.. it's not quite my ideal, but then again what is.

cenhyperion2• 13 years ago

it's not quite my ideal, but then again what is.

Many of GoDaddy's competitors. I don't have, and have never had, such complaints about Hover, Gandi, Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, or any number of other domain/hosting companies.

My trust in them as a company is gone so far that excluding some truly revolutionary changes I'll never touch one of their services again.

Osiris3• 13 years ago

I started working at GoDaddy right after the SOPA issue with some reservations. I'll try to address your points.

* Advertising

If you haven't noticed, marketing has taken a completely different approach. At our last "town hall" meeting, the CEO confirmed that there will, "be no more GoDaddy girls". Now we have Jean Claude Van Damme playing bongos.

* Founder

Bob left the company when it was purchased by investors over two years ago.

* SOPA

This was an internal fiasco. It was driven by an executive in the legal department and was not known in other parts of the company. From what I'm told, Bob didn't really understand what she was doing. No one that works here agreed with that position, included senior management.

The justification she gave was that it would allow GoDaddy to more proactively take down "bad" sites. However, we already have a department that deals with that.

* Support

I haven't called so I can't comment directly, but I will say that at least there's someone to call. Google and many others don't even provide a means to talk to a real person. 2/3 of employees at GoDaddy are call center. Internally we do recognize that support can be improved.

* Hosting

There's current a big push with new infrastructure to improve this.

* Upselling

There's actually a common feeling among employees that this behavior is... not the best. It was brought up a few months ago at a corporate "town hall" and there has been work done to improve and simplify the customer experience. Changes are happening but there's a lot of work to be done.

* Mocking developers

Are you referring to that kissing commercial? That was weird. Again, there's been a dramatic shift in advertising and push to target specific segments, including developers.

Don't forget, we're developers here too. We want to build great products and our new management team has, at least in my department, given us a lot more freedom to be more innovative. In fact, my department is getting ready to announce new products aimed at helping small businesses.

I understand where your perception comes from and management recognizes that. The company is trying hard to do things differently now.

tyleregeto• 13 years ago

GoDaddy should give free domain registrations to all the small businesses and individuals they've taken advantage of over the years. Their website is still deliberately confusing to trick less than tech-savy customers into spending more than they need to.

logjam• 13 years ago

No thanks, GoDaddy is a slimy, incompetent organization.

pera• 13 years ago

CAcert.org issues free certs as well, though not every OS/browser have this CA installed by default... it's a shame because they provide a nice service imo

http://www.cacert.org/

uladzislau• 13 years ago

Free first year - that's the catch.

zxcvgm• 13 years ago

Why would anyone use this when startssl.com issues free certs that are not only limited to OSS projects?

See https://konklone.com/post/switch-to-https-now-for-free?hn for a walkthrough.

dibbsonline• 13 years ago

Godaddy signs with a low exponent (3), so you might find you have to lower the security on your app server (like we had to on weblogic)

Osiris3• 13 years ago

Wow, did this really get flagged off the front page?

gdempl• 13 years ago

I've worked happily at GoDaddy for years in Hosting and can say I don't get caught up in the politics. What's good is millions of customers and thousands of servers, which translates to plenty of development challenges. The performance of hosting these days is actually really good. In the past it might have been good or it might have been bad, just depended on whether you landed on an overloaded server or not. It was never our intention to overload servers, we simply grew faster than we knew how to maintain. Until we launched a performance team to tackle this issue, and now the performance is really good. Takes time for customers to recognize this. Performance is one of those things most people don't notice unless it's bad.

The company's history has a few blunders, but there is also a lot of good - millions donated to charities, thousands employed - creating jobs in a down economy, great benefits, and from the inside, I can say, customers come first. There has always been a do right by the customer mentality. For every poor customer support story, there are a hundred positive ones, untold. I've liked working at GoDaddy because the value of the product I help create is high. This is no rip off, everyone wins and I can be proud of who I work for.

The new CEO and new executive leadership team are leading a great new vision focused on helping small businesses kick-ass. It's really very moving and makes me proud to work as developer at GoDaddy.

GoDaddy issues free SSL certificates to OSS projects

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