What surprises me is that it took the SOPA fiasco to get people to move their domains from GoDaddy. A while back, I bought one domain from them and it took less than a month for me to transfer it out. The service was just that bad.
Not only is GoDaddy a morally reprehensible company, but more disturbingly they're not even a good registrar. They constantly try to upsell you, they plaster your domains with ads. They don't even allow certain certain kind of DNS records… (their UI doesn't allow for a wildcard CNAME for example). I don't need elephants or congress bills to stay far away from GoDaddy, their crappy product is more than enough.
To be fair, editing DNS records has nothing to do with being a registrar. Free DNS servers aren't even a service all registrars provide, and they're one most customers don't use -- they use their web host's. For anyone building a tech business, you have no excuse for tying your DNS service to your choice of registrar.
Most people running a tech business use an unmanaged VPS or dedicated server. Running your own DNS server is kind of a pain—so, when all registrar run their own DNS servers and most have pretty good UI for record management, why not use them?
For what it's worth, I use domainsite.com. They're a solid and cheap registrar, and though their UI isn't the prettiest, managing domains and DNS records is fantastic. I use them for everything.
What surprises me is that it took the SOPA fiasco to get people to move their domains from GoDaddy
Yeah, they suck, but in the last 5 years I've logged into godaddy exactly 5 times to renew all my domains and then forget about them for the next 11 months.
Not only is GoDaddy a morally reprehensible company, but more disturbingly they're not even a good registrar. They constantly try to upsell you, they plaster your domains with ads. They don't even allow certain certain kind of DNS records… (their UI doesn't allow for a wildcard CNAME for example). I don't need elephants or congress bills to stay far away from GoDaddy, their crappy product is more than enough.