Women, Leave GoDaddy Behind

The following post, Ditch GoDaddy, is from my blog that focuses on web development and internet issues.  The article focuses on GoDaddy’s terrible customer service.  However, GoDaddy has one of the most blantantly crass advertising campaigns I’ve seen.  They often use naked, or nearly naked women, as an incentive to visit, view, or make purchases from their website. Currently, a blog post from their owner posted on the site states, “Bob’s Latest:  The SECRETS to finding and hiring GREAT employees. + 2 Smoking-Hot Go Daddy Girls!”  While there are numerous reasons to leave GoDaddy, my opinion is that women have best reason of all to kick GoDaddy to the curb.

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If you follow the buzz on the internet you probably know that GoDaddy has raised the ire of plenty of the internet’s faithful. Their latest and most damaging transgression is supporting “SOPA” a poorly written law opposing internet piracy. While opposing internet piracy is hardly a radical stance, GoDaddy was in position to know that the specific law drawn up would cause huge headaches and potential legal problems for many reputable internet sites. Godaddy eventually withdrew it support for this law when customers started leaving in protest.

This, however, isn’t GoDaddy’s only public relations blunder. The president of company trumpeting his ‘big game’ hunting, and a series of tasteless and trashy commercials have left many web professionals looking for an alternative. While they are the most well know domain name registrar they are also likely the most disliked as well.

Yet my complaint about Godaddy is due to their customer service and business practices. I strongly recommend looking for another registrar like Network Solutions or NameCheap, because GoDaddy misleads its customers and bleeds money from them through their dubious practices. The most recent example I encountered is of a client who purchased a domain and email service believing they had also signed up for a hosting account. Technically they could ‘host’ their domain at GoDaddy, but it was a severely limited plan that only allowed for a canned page to be ‘hosted’ at Godaddy, which left them without the actual service they needed.

My initial problem with GoDaddy is that I placed an order using their ‘speedy checkout’ option. This wasn’t a short cut through the order process like it sounds, it was a sneaky way to get customers to sign up for auto-renewal for particular products. Obviously I hold responsibility in this mistake, I should have read over the fine print. However, Godaddy has made a lot of money by misleading people into purchasing the wrong product.

They also hold your credit card number, and you can only check out if you agree to let them hold this information on file. For most online businesses, this is a voluntary choice, not a prerequisite to ordering. GoDaddy is the last company I trust to hold my credit card information, and I highly recommend not allowing them to store your information. At one time, GoDaddy was the only real cost effective choice for domain registration. That is no longer the case, and taking your businesses elsewhere to a company that will treat you fairly is a prudent and wise decision.

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I have moved my business to NameCheap.com. I have nothing against Network Solutions, but NameCheap is more affordable and has a good domain management set up. SWITCH2NC is a coupon code you can use to get a dollar off each domain name transfer (effective early March – don’t know the expiration date.) There are other domain name registrars as well, these are just two of GoDaddy’s most prominent competitors. -Katherine Morrison

Cato Institute Lays Out Problems with Big Government Spending

A Flashback & A Great Laugh

Can’t help but enjoy this McCain speech at the Al Smith Dinner in which he has then-Senator Clinton in stitches.

Obamanomics Explained

The Catch 22 of Big Government – Creating a Monster

The Oil Spill in the Gulf has yet again highlighted one of government’s major failings – government regulators and bureaucracies are inept. President Obama is being criticized for his reaction to the leak, and some are comparing it to President Bush’s reaction to Katrina. However, a more suitable comparison is the financial meltdown that occurred late in President Bush’s second term. For both presidents there was little that they personally could have done prior to these terrible events, and both had strikingly few options after the event occurred. While they both have to answer questions about the effectiveness of government under their watch, in reality these events aren’t showing a failure of the executive branch, instead they show the massive failure of government regulation and associated agencies.

In both cases the failure of regulators has been so complete that it’s left the citizenry asking, ‘How did this happen?’ After the financial meltdown people wondered what good the SEC is if it can’t figure out blatant financial cons like Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes have been around for eons, and shouldn’t be particularly hard to detect for someone with proper education/training. However, it’s the credit default swaps that appear tanked several large banks along with the U.S. economy, yet there was no recognition of this problem by the SEC until it was too late.

The question that most everyone has heard post oil spill is, ‘Seriously, they don’t have a plan to stop the leak?’ It seems like such a no-brainer that if a company drills offshore there should be a plan in case something goes wrong. Not just one plan, but several plans both to prevent disasters, and to mitigate disasters if they do occur. Now we’re over a month out from the initial explosion, and BP is still guessing about what might possibly stop the flow of oil. Again government regulators by definition have failed. Similarly the Minerals Management Service appears to be a joke.

Thus we end up with Government’s Catch 22. There is a need for some regulation, yet the government clearly sucks at regulation. This unfortunately is on both a big scale and on a small scale. I work for a company that was recently visited by an FDA regulator; much of it was the theatre of the absurd. Our file cabinets are now much more clearly labeled, and we provided copious amounts of information about things that have nothing to do with the FDA. Not a huge deal, but somewhat depressing when considering how much money is being spent on useless regulation, and how many serious violations are likely being missed.

There is blame to put on Congress. They are responsible for oversight, and clearly they’ve failed at providing adequate oversight of these agencies. Yet there is an even bigger problem than Congress. As a country our regulatory agencies have failed and continue to fail. We need a better system. First, we need a better selection process for picking the people who run these agencies. Choosing the buddy of someone powerful or choosing someone who has done political favors for an influential person clearly is inadequate selection criteria. Experience and knowledge matter – a lot, if people running and participating in these agencies don’t know their stuff then they don’t belong there. While that sounds obvious, clearly it’s not happening.

My theory is that people with a military background may be better leaders for these agencies. The one person during the gulf disaster that has inspired any confidence (and basically the only person that hasn’t talked in circles) is Admiral Thad Allen. Maybe the structure and the directness that a military commander would bring to an overly political government bureaucracy could help. Congress also needs to wake up and worry less about placing blame after a disaster, and instead provide the proper oversight to these agencies; that could even prevent disasters. Finally, voters have to demand that this problem is addressed. This isn’t a glamorous issue, but it is a critical one. There is a real need for voters to insist that politicians give sustentative answers on how they will make government work again. As a country we’ve created a monster with big regulatory agencies that suck up money and fail to effectively regulate. The fix isn’t obvious, but it is vital.

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Big Government’s Catch 22 – We’ve Created a Monster

Senator Coburn Blogger Call – Addresses Fiscal Crisis and Potential for the U.S. to be in the same position as Greece in Four Years. (embedded mp3)

Good Guy’s Tribute to Two Women – with Humor

Check out Full Story at National MS Research WalkMS 2010 – In a Dress and Heels

Quote from Corey Blake’s nationalmssociety.org page…

So to make this a little more interesting and maybe entertaining for you, I’ve decided to do something different for this year’s WalkMS. Last October, I read a story about an 84-year-old woman named Lan Yin “Eiko” Tsai who rides her old one-speed bike 150 miles for the New Jersey City to Shore event to raise money for MS. She’s been doing this for 26 years – always in a dress and heels. The article has this great picture of her in a green turtleneck dress and embroidered jacket. She is pretty inspiring. Then I started to think about the daily discomfort and struggles that people with MS go through every day. I see it in Nahleen [his wife] every day. Her courage and discipline are also inspiring. So I thought maybe I could make my 3-mile walk this April in Pasadena for WalkMS more reflective of that daily discomfort while at the same time paying tribute to Eiko and Nahleen. And at the same time, looking like a dork. I know I’m good at doing that

So I’m doing WalkMS in a dress and heels.

Best Chris Matthews Video Ever

Video unreliable, also available at Newsbusters -> http://newsbusters.org/people/dana-loesch

Finally, someone succinctly makes the point that both sides of the political spectrum have their crazies, and that pigeonholing all the people that have problems with the health care legislation as radical or racist is intellectually dishonest. Best moment of the interview is when Chris Matthews mutters under his breath “this isn’t working.”

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Dana Loesch Owns Chris Matthews in Debate About Tea Party Protests