Possible mass exodus from GoDaddy as their statement supporting SOPA makes the rounds

At the moment of writing this, the top link on the front page of Reddit (a popular social news site) is a thread condemning GoDaddy (a major domain registrar) for their apparent support of SOPA. With over 10,000 “up-votes” and 1126 comments (and counting), GoDaddy’s statement seems to have struck a serious cord with the techies and IT folks who largely compose Reddit’s audience.

The Reddit thread, titled GoDaddy supports SOPA, I’m transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day, is garnering some significant support of it’s own.

I’m currently a GoDaddy customer, but have never really felt great about the company as a whole. They are notorious for blasting users with up-sells every time they try to register a domain, they have incredibly junky interfaces and tools, their hosting service is terrible and they rely on sex and sleaze to drive their advertising. The owner, Bob Parsons, has also been called out numerous times for his extreme right wing ideals. He also faced down some elephant hunting controversy awhile back. All in all, I wish I had listened to my gut and kept away from GoDaddy, but their ubiquity led me (like many others) to overlook the discrepancy in values in favor of reliability and business longevity.

Silly us. I’m not looking forward to the chore of moving my 30 or so domains from GoDaddy to another registrar, but in light of current events – I think I’m going to have to grab my pitchfork and jump on the bandwagon.

The consensus around the web, and particularly in the aforementioned Reddit thread, is that Namecheap is the ideal alternative – with a solid history and lots of satisfied customers. After a look around, I’m inclined to agree with the consensus.