Goodbye GoDaddy

After more than 14 years using GoDaddy as a core part of my hosting and domain stack, I’ve made a deliberate shift away from an all-in-one provider. Today, my environment is a mixture of self-hosted infrastructure and more specialised MSSP-aligned hosting providers.

Why I’ve Moved On After 14 Years — And What That Means Going Forward

This wasn’t a sudden decision, and it certainly wasn’t driven by ill feeling. GoDaddy has played a meaningful role in my journey for well over a decade. However, the needs of modern, agile businesses—particularly those operating in and around cyber security—have changed significantly. Large, generalist platforms are no longer always the best fit.

Cyber Security Has Changed the Game

Cyber security is no longer an optional layer or an afterthought. It is foundational. That reality brings complexity: compliance requirements, nuanced legal activity, constant monitoring, and environments that don’t always fit neatly into automated risk models.

As providers scale, automation becomes essential—but automation also brings blunt decision-making. Increasingly, legitimate business activity is being false-positively flagged as suspicious or illegal, with limited recourse, slow remediation, or no meaningful human review. For companies operating in security research, testing, or regulated technical domains, this friction becomes a real operational risk.

Specialised hosting providers and MSSPs are built with these realities in mind. They understand context, intent, and nuance in a way that mass-market platforms often cannot.

Cost Up, Service Down

Another unavoidable factor has been cost. Over time, pricing has increased while service depth and flexibility have steadily declined. Support has become more transactional, more scripted, and less empowered to solve non-standard problems.

This is not unique to GoDaddy—it’s a pattern seen across many legacy internet giants as they mature. At scale, revenue optimisation tends to take precedence over innovation and customer nuance.

We’ve seen this cycle before.

Companies like AOL and CompuServe were once synonymous with the internet itself. As they grew larger, heavier, and more automated, they struggled to adapt to a faster-moving, more specialised ecosystem. New players emerged, better aligned with modern needs.

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

For startups, consultancies, security firms, and agile teams, flexibility matters. Being able to speak to a human who understands your environment matters. Having infrastructure that can be tuned, explained, defended, and audited matters.

Large providers are excellent for many use cases—and for many customers, GoDaddy will continue to be a solid, accessible choice. But for organisations operating at the edges of technology, law, and security, “one size fits all” increasingly fits no one particularly well.

A Positive Transition, Not a Breakup

This move isn’t about burning bridges or assigning blame. It’s about alignment.

The internet has matured, and so have the businesses built on it. My hosting strategy now reflects that reality: smaller, more specialised providers where appropriate, and self-hosted systems where control, visibility, and accountability are paramount.

GoDaddy helped get me here. It’s just no longer where I need to be next.

Looking Ahead

For those in the know, UnshakeableSalt is growing—and evolving its operating model accordingly.

Over the past few years, much of our focus has been deliberately quiet. We’ve been deeply engaged in security operations work for UK Government clients, and that work will absolutely continue. However, behind the scenes, the organisation itself has been changing shape.

We are expanding into a set of niche services that align closely with the large-scale data handling and analytical workloads we’ve been delivering in the security operations space. While Splunk remains close to our hearts and firmly embedded in our DNA, it is no longer the only string to our bow. We’ve been investing in additional capabilities and platforms that complement—and in some cases extend beyond—traditional SOC tooling. More on that will be announced later in the year.

Alongside our public-sector commitments, we are seeing rapid growth within our financial services client base. This sector brings its own challenges: scale, regulation, resilience, and scrutiny—all areas where our experience translates well. As a result, we’ll be devoting more time, resources, and focus to supporting these organisations as they navigate increasingly complex security and data landscapes.

The changes in our hosting and infrastructure strategy are not isolated technical decisions; they are foundational to this next phase of growth.

2026 and 2027 are shaping up to be genuinely interesting years for us—and we’re very much looking forward to what comes next.