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Moving from GoDaddy to DNSimple – an illustrated journey

I just moved all my DNS things from GoDaddy to DNSimple. The reasons are self-evident; here’s the visual journey.

The public face

Danica Patrick: Model, racing driver who can go fast in circles and attractive promo face:

Danica Patrick - pretty face, but does she know her way around a zone file? Doubtful...

Anthony Eden: Coder, open source contributor, founder of DNSimple and rocks a mean beard and pipe:

Anthony Eden - he has a beard so you know he knows networks

Signup

Step 1:

Ok, not a bad start, just some basic info (you sure you don't want me to confirm my password though?!)

Step 2 (she’s also quite pretty – not sure she has a lot to do with domains though):

She seems happy, but doesn't have a beard like Anthony does

Step 3:

Ok, for the sake of gender equality I'll forgive her the beard

Step 4:

Odd to hold a laptop like that though...

Step 5:

Moving on, this is a capacity planning question, right?

Step 6 (any moment now they’re going to want the size of my undies):

I had a man from India call me once and ask me exactly this question, right before he asked for my credit card number as well

Step 7:

Need another option: Getting pissed off with all these questions

Step 8:

Other - Troy Hunt wrote a semi-scathing blog post about GoDaddy

Or on DNSimple – step 1:

Wait - how can I signup properly if you don't know my revenue and axpected growth?!

That is all.

Passwords

GoDaddy:

This is known as the "please don't SQL inject us" password policy!

DNSimple:

They seem to be missing the little icon that tells you all the nutty password restrictions... Oh wait - THERE *ARE* NO RESTRICTIONS!

So I changed my password to: Super strong! -> ? ^'":\&><~;`*)(_-=+|[]{}.,/

(And then changed it to something else, just in case you’re wondering…)

Login insecurity

Insecure:

We're gonna logon like it's 1999!

Secure:

SSL - check. Not hard, is it?

Two factor authentication

Oh, you appear to be one of the 96% of the global population that is not American:

Cultural awareness FTW!

Of course you can have 2FA, why on earth not?! Let us send you a confirmation SMS and a free Authy app:

2FA done good

Registering a domain

No, I don’t want the .com.au version:

Would you like fries with that?

Nope, none of those other TLDs or variants of the same name either:

Ok, but you want to upsize, right? Ya gotta upsize!

No, I don’t want to buy this:

What about a shake? Can we sell you a shake?

Or this:

Ok, two words: Steak Knives

This either:

C'mon, I've got a family to feed - buy our things!

And did I really have to scroll through all that crap just to continue?!

Already told you I didn’t want this on the last screen:

One of my kids has a gammy leg, I REALLY need you to upsize

Oh FFS, we’ve been through this already:

My wife needs shoes too -Manolos, please

No, no, no – no more crap!

She'll need two of them too (shoes, that is)

Oh good, it’s the end – hang on, it’s meant to be $9.99?!?!

This is like buying and airline ticket: Cost is $100. Oh plus a booking fee. You want luggage with that? If you want a seat we'll need more money. Want to sit with your kids? More money again please.

Or alternatively, add the domain (hi Scott!):

Wait - where are the ads?! Where's the up-sell?! Ok, WHOIS privacy is *kinda* an up-sell, but this is the point you want to know about it and it's not exactly in flashing lights and garish colours.

And register it:

And... we're done. What am I going to do with all the free time I now have on my hands?!

Job done.

Configuring DNS

Go and work it out yourself:

DNS can be *hard* (ask me how I know!), have we really not progressed beyond manual entry of DNS records in the last decade?!

Hi, what’s the name of your Azure website (or other service) and we’ll sort it out for you:

This, I like! If I don't have to see an IP address when I'm setting up DNS, I get a little bit happy :)

On being socially engineered

Because they let a hacker just keep guessing someone’s credit number until they got it right then allowed him to take over the victim’s account and made it very bloody hard on him to get it back:

Seriously WTF - what sort of security control lets an attacker brute-force human operators?! I mean I've heard of social engineering, but this is ridiculous!

And DNSimple? Refer back to the picture of Anthony and the aforementioned beard – does this look like a guy who’s going to be socially engineered?!

Promoting the service

Because the girls look pretty (mostly), but they don’t give me much confidence in what GoDaddy actually does:

Those are some impressive MX records!This is EXACTLY the same expression I always have when looking at a, well, you know...Where's the pitch?! Ya gotta have a pitch! Oh yeah, the naked chick...All these people were logged out of thier GoDaddy account whilst in the middle of something important simly because they didn't click any buttons for a while. They're clearly pissed, as am I when it happens.There's nothing we can all relate to better than a gorgeous young woman getting it on with a chubby, pasty, bespectacled geekNothing says "We know domains" better than spraying champagne over a a gorgeous girl in a white tank topIt's a bit hard to read, but those are actually valid SPF records on her arms and TXT records on the thighsAt least the support staff have lovely looking, uh, "personalities"

Because these guys promote – and actually use – DNSimple. They’re not as pretty, but they know their MX records from their CNAMEs and that counts for a lot in my book:

Hanselman - he rates it Richard and Carl - also rate it, you want to listen when these guys talk

Summary

My domains are precious; they protect huge investments in time and money and I don’t want some sleazy-marketing, privacy-invading, password-character-limiting, insecure-auth’ing, anti-non-american, up-selling, “work-it-the-hell-out-yourself”, socially-engineerable, ceo-elephant-shooting business looking after them for me.

Like the idea of DNSimple? Use this referral link and get me a month of free service: https://dnsimple.com/r/a89cec6963b179

Oh – and before your begin moving all your things, read Transferring a Domain without Downtime.

Enjoy!

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Hi, I'm Troy Hunt, I write this blog, create courses for Pluralsight and am a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP who travels the world speaking at events and training technology professionals