GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft 445
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."
Incredible! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Informative)
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:Incredible! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Incredible! (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Incredible! (Score:3, Informative)
Gandi.net was sold in September 2005, a new team is in charge.
--
http://www.makarevitch.org/rant/rant.html [makarevitch.org]
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Incredible! (Score:3, Funny)
"I am Gandhi of the Indians. Our words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS
We have decided to rid the world of your worthless civilization. Prepare for WAR"
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fair. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe they hope to obfuscate their security by running Apache on Windows. Send all the malformed POST requests you want. Win32 isn't going to successfully execute your Linux code!
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
> hosting xx% of the internet.
You are close to the truth. Watch Netcraft. Anytime Microsoft gets near the 20% mark a fresh deal is announced about some parked domains moving to IIS. They really can't afford to drop into the teens and retain any credibility as a player in the server space so they spend whatever it takes to prevent it.
The more important number is Netcraft's active domains number and IIS is only at about 25% there. That gives a better picture of where they stand. Take out their own massive net operations and those of their slaves (Dell, HP, heck, most everybody who sells PCs, software or who develops heavy on Windows) who use IIS because they fear the consequences of using anything else and it would really be pitiful.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Misinterpretation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misinterpretation (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Summarizing the summary (Score:3, Insightful)
- 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.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not really a story.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://documents.secureserver.net/show/document.a
in no event shall Your web site consist of the following: search results, registration, "thank you", error, email or chat pages, pages comprised primarily of other advertising or pages that contain any of the following types of content: pornographic, obscene or excessively profane content or content intended to advocate or advance computer hacking or cracking, gambling, illegal activity, drug paraphernalia, hate, violence or racial or ethnic intolerance.
I can't put ads on my own error pages? Even if I'm hosting 30 domains on a dedicated account? Since when is bad web design a reason to shut a website down; so what if I plaster the thing with ads? And saying that gambling and drug talk isn't allowed goes a little far as restrictions vary from state to state and even from city to city (in the USA).
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
It's just an OS (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It's just an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's just an OS (Score:5, Funny)
So in this case it's WAMP.
Or WIMP if you use IIS...
Re:It's just an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's just an OS (Score:4, Insightful)
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:It's just an OS (Score:2)
So, percentage of distinct, individual sites? Maybe. Percentage of internet web pages as a whole? No way.
Re:It's just an OS (Score:5, Informative)
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:It's just an OS (Score:2)
Netcraft confirms it - the haiku (Score:5, Funny)
News at eleven
All your base to Microsoft.
Well, then. (Score:2)
Now, while I don't mind Windows (yes, counter-culture here on Slashdot) for my desktop OS, I can't stand using windows for anything related to hosting web sites, if only for the fact that I'm used to working with Linux, MySQL, and being able to chmod (yes, Windows boxes have something similar, but it doesn't work nearly as well through FTP).
So I'm assuming the service is going to start going downhill. Anyone c
Re:Well, then. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, then. (Score:2)
Re:Well, then. (Score:3, Informative)
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
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:Well, then. (Score:5, Informative)
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:Well, then. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, then. (Score:2)
Still, I'll check it out. Thanks.
Sigh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Closed-minded and brainwashed (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the first sign was when they started turning spammy (both in letting spammers keep their registration despite the terms of service, and in thier own behavior.)
best line in the whole article. (Score:2)
riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!!!!!!!!!!
Re:best line in the whole article. (Score:2)
I wonder why...? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:I wonder why...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:I wonder why...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I wonder why...? (Score:2)
Since we are talking about DNS services here there is no blanket and the MS operating systems and applications are left behind. If you spread the blanket to include web serving software a lot of other things still leave it behind, due to the overhead of NT. If you are talking about .NET applications or something to talk to MS Outlook (outlook not so good), then MS Windows is going to be the only thing that do
Re:I wonder why...? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
GoDaddy.com looking for people with Linux Skills (Score:3, Interesting)
http://jobsearch.monster.com/jobsearch.asp?q=linu
Examples:
Linux Systems Manager
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=399
Senior Linux Software Engineer
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=401
Re:GoDaddy.com looking for people with Linux Skill (Score:2, Interesting)
I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back (Score:5, Funny)
Well, there's no doubt that when all is said and done
Re:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back (Score:4, Insightful)
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:I saw the go daddy pres/CTO speak a while back (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft just dropped them some cash (Score:3, Insightful)
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
it.....guess what, it is still the same buggy piece of crap it always was.
Re:Microsoft just dropped them some cash (Score:3, Insightful)
Bye, Daddy, (Score:2)
Must... not... puke... (Score:2)
Gnnrh, erk, urgh, aangh... twitch... spasm
I need Windows reliability for my parked domain! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not stupid - I wouldn't trust the job of handling web redirects to any of that old legacy stuff like UNIX. That stuff was old back when I was using Windows 3.1... and Windows has gotten a lot better since then. When people try to access my domainnames, I expect the performance of Geniune Windows.
I know that sometimes domain names need to be rebooted too, like when critical updates get applied, but that's okay. I wouldn't want my domain names parked on an unpatched, so-called "highly available" server.
No sir, it's genuine-windows-advantage-plays-for-sure for me and my domain collection.
Re:I need Windows reliability for my parked domain (Score:2)
Re:I need Windows reliability for my parked domain (Score:2)
Re:I need Windows reliability for my parked domain (Score:2)
They will come back...! (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft probably paid them for this... (Score:5, Interesting)
So yeah... I would assume the same. How much money/services did they got from Microsoft?
Re:Microsoft probably paid them for this... (Score:2)
Since Microsoft is paying for netcraft stats on those dead/parked domain names, GoDaddy could put everything to IIS by default, and those who choose to stay with Linux may do so.
This would have created a win-win-win situation for customers, GoDaddy and Microsoft.
Re:Microsoft probably paid them for this... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
"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: (Score:3, Insightful)
So what (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what (Score:2)
They've been the bad guy for ages [google.com].
I would sooner have my fingernails pulled out with a rusty pair of pliers than EVER do business with Godaddy.
How to counter this (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think 10,000 outfits such as GoDaddy are going to have a pull anywhere near Google collectively.
Re:Mod parent DOWN (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, what has Google ever given back to the OSS community it depends on to supply Linux, MySQL, Python, etc.?
Does employing a huge number of prominent open-source developers count for anything? OSS coders gotta eat, you know. A partial list, off the top of my head: Guido Van Rossum (Mr. Python), the Gaim lead developer, the Camino lead developer, Spamassassin lead developer (I think; not sure), a bunch of Firefox developers ... the list goes on. These people are paid to work on OSS projects and contribute code back to the community!
Re:Mod parent DOWN (Score:3)
Lets disregard the fact that most of their coders are from the OSS world, and contribute heavily. Perhaps the single best thing that they have given is a superior search engine that is browser neutral. Yahoo and MSN have done a piss poor job of supporting anything but MSIE. Now that Google has come along, Yahoo has improved, but MSN is going to get far worse; Why? To counter the threat that google h
It had to be said... (Score:5, Funny)
Not totally ditching it... (Score:2)
rhY
Marketing Ideas (Score:5, Funny)
"Microsoft, recommended by 9 out of 10 get-rich quick customers"
Seems kind of appropriate that MS is out to capture the scammer segment of the market, doesn't it? (Apologies to folks who park sites to protect themselves from scam artists.)
Godaddy and Microsoft: two peas in a pod (Score:2)
GoDaddy can... (Score:2, Funny)
Ok so I've already said that [slashdot.org] in the last Slashdot story [slashdot.org] about GoDaddy. But really, I didn't have any interest in doing business with GoDaddy before (though do buy domain names occasionally), and if they are stupid enough to choose Microsoft products for their servers, well I don't I'll ever have interest in doing business with them.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Security through feature removal! (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to run anything on Godaddy's servers that accesses files in PHP (which includes things like include and require in directories other than the current one), you have to ask to be put on a Linux server. This is because the only way Godaddy has found to keep Windows "secure" is to disable features... It's one of the reasons they recently stopped supporting "one button install" for PHPBB; it wouldn't work if it was on a Windows box, due to safe mode restrictions.
Fortunately, that isn't a problem with parked domains!
Godaddy isn't one of the good guys anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they're good guys no more. Today they have broken this long standing promise and sent their "Newsletter" to every single customer. The contents: Promotional crap for a bunch of services I don't give a rat's arse about.
IMHO, MS is Buying IIS Marketshare. (Score:5, Interesting)
From GoDaddy's point of view, it's a no brainer. Who doesn't want money? Besides, there isn't even any evil involved in this one.
Bad Advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Will their new slogan be, "Microsoft - where do you want to park today?"
Good move. (Score:3, Interesting)
GoDaddy.com - a death by a thousand cuts (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
I use MS DNS 2003. It's nice. It's easy to use. I enjoy having a GUI built in and supported by the developer in addition to having the power of command line editing. The only thing I wish I could change is that it uses a sequential zone serial number instead of a dated one (ie, instead of 2006032301, 2006032302, 2006032303, it uses a raw format - 1, 2, 3...)
I really don't see what the big deal is...
In the old days (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So.... what about the non-parked domains? (Score:3)
If you believe this, I have great waterfront property in Florida I'd be willing to let you have. Cheap.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. (Score:2)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
I will never buy the Matrix DVD. I hated that damn movie. But your accusation is serious and interesting. Please provide a link.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2)
Whatever. I've been using macs for over a decade now, and all us old mac users remember the little "Fuck You" messages from MS, whether it be the system-wide bugs that only ocurred after installing Windows Media Player or MS Word or Internet Explorer, or the Matrix DVD, all the sites that would
You mean below where it says CD-R? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My guess: Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change. (Score:2)
Godaddy horror story (Score:3, Interesting)
The only upside to the whole thing was office depot kept sending coupons
Re:My guess: Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change. (Score:3, Informative)