Go Daddy's founder is Bob Persons of Parsons Technology fame.  He founded the company in his basement in 1984.  I used to use his tax program "Personal Tax Edge" every year to do my taxes and became a fan of his software as a result of it.  He sold out Parson's Technology back in 1994 to Intuit of "Turbotax."  It was a big mistake, in my opinion but what do I know?

A couple of years later, I noticed in the "Computer Shopper" that he had founded the company "Go Daddy" which peaked my interest.  Well, years later (last week) on a whim, after receiving an email ad from the company I decided to try things out by setting up a domain  "alanhbrowne.com."   Things just didn't work for me as I misunderstood the setup process but after trying a couple of days, I decided to try their customer support.  The first attempt was met with complete confusion on both sides of the "fence."  The guy at the other end didn't know just what my needs were as a customer so he didn't give me the right answers.

After a couple more days, I decided to give customer support again.  This time both the support guy at the other end and yours truely "lurched uncontrollably" into the solution when he realized that I wanted to  tie the new domain name into an existing website.  The initial cost of registration was $9.95.  I ended up having to buy another feature called "Main Domain Forwarding" which cost an additional $8.95 - not too bad for covering my ignorance in the mysteries of the web.   Now instead of giving out a complicated URL to my friends all I have to say is "go to www.alanhbrowne.com"  which, for the time being suits my purposes just fine.  Certainly not the "Cadillac" version of giving your web site a domain name but, as they say, "works for me."

I give Go Daddy good points for a really neat idea, good customer service and an excellent attitude - expecially the second guy "Shawn."  There you have it - a "quick and dirty" way of getting your long URL a nice short and catchy redirect URL to give out - again "works for me."