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:
Anthony Eden: Coder, open source contributor, founder of DNSimple and rocks a mean beard and pipe:
Signup
Step 1:
Step 2 (she’s also quite pretty – not sure she has a lot to do with domains though):
Step 3:
Step 4:
Step 5:
Step 6 (any moment now they’re going to want the size of my undies):
Step 7:
Step 8:
Or on DNSimple – step 1:
That is all.
Passwords
GoDaddy:
DNSimple:
So I changed my password to: Super strong! -> ? ^'":\&><~;`*)(_-=+|[]{}.,/
(And then changed it to something else, just in case you’re wondering…)
Login insecurity
Insecure:
Secure:
Two factor authentication
Oh, you appear to be one of the 96% of the global population that is not American:
Of course you can have 2FA, why on earth not?! Let us send you a confirmation SMS and a free Authy app:
Registering a domain
No, I don’t want the .com.au version:
Nope, none of those other TLDs or variants of the same name either:
No, I don’t want to buy this:
Or this:
This either:
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:
Oh FFS, we’ve been through this already:
No, no, no – no more crap!
Oh good, it’s the end – hang on, it’s meant to be $9.99?!?!
Or alternatively, add the domain (hi Scott!):
And register it:
Job done.
Configuring DNS
Go and work it out yourself:
Hi, what’s the name of your Azure website (or other service) and we’ll sort it out for you:
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:
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:
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:
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!