Domain registration company GoDaddy came under heavy criticism from animal rights activists after its CEO Bob Parsons posted a video online where he hunts elephants in Zimbabwe.
Parsons defends himself by saying that he only hunted those species that they destroy farm crops and could potentially cause starvation of local farmers and their families.
Several human rights groups decided to call it quits with GoDaddy with PETA reportedly closing their account with GoDaddy.
Among the few benefiting from GoDaddy’s misstep are its competitors, such as NameCheap.com, that is offering a transfer of domain names from GoDaddy for $4.99 of which 20 percent will go to SaveTheElephants.com. Clever!
Now, I’ve never been a fan of GoDaddy’s. Their prices are not so good (com domain for $12 and up when you can buy one from Google for $10), their customer support is responsive but not that all that helpful, and the glorious hosting is not all that great (a total of 1 hour of downtime over the past month on one of my websites). And hey, what’s up with your hosting control panel? How can they still be using that custom made usability misfortune when there’s something called CPanel? But I digress.
In this day and age how silly can you be to post photo and video of sensitive nature to the public? Of all the people should have known that once that info gets out of control there’s no way of stopping it.
GoDaddy’s lack of valid explanation to this date is another reason for concern. Bad news these days travel with the speed of wild fire. The longer you wait the more work you will have to do later dealing with the consequences.
As I said, I am not a big fun of GoDaddy, but this whole situation certainly does not make me want to recommend it to my clients. I’d rather choose NameCheap.com instead.