It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.

When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.

That's what makes this particular story so egregious.

Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.

Vast majority of domain owners are not technically inclined today, probably hasn't been so for decades now.

If we ask 100 likely buyers family feud style, where would they go buy a domain, GoDaddy likely is going to be the top answer by a wide margin.

They wouldn't know about any bad news/ security incident with the brand either.

Exactly. Had to chuckle at:

> [...] is one of the most competent IT guys I know. The GoDaddy account had [...]

Don't think I've ever heard something good about GoDaddy.

You’d be surprised how many enterprises use them. Also their managed hosting support is surprisingly competent. I’m not a fan of their service but some of our clients use them and anytime their servers have had issues support was quick to fix. Way nicer than having to jump in and do it myself. And so far it’s all been local support and not offshore.

To be fair, 10 years ago the alternatives weren't as obvious to non-technical buyers.

I also found this very, very strange. With their broker campaigns, godaddy built a strong shady facade. Still wonder how people fail to see.

The domain has been acquired 27 years ago

Came here to post the exact same comment. They have a history of amateur-hour stuff like this, too, don't they? For me, the brand has always been associated with "bet it all on marketing" rather than technical competence.

The primary reason I used to prefer GoDaddy is you could call them 24/7 and talk to a human who could fix it. Historically I have preferred companies with phone support over submit-a-ticket-and-wait.