It Harder for Woman’s Husband to Find a Job — GoDaddy Makes

With missing www., site shows page full of ads.

[Updated: It looks like the web site may not be hosted at GoDaddy. It’s on the firm’s nameservers, but the IP address on the site shows Apple. GoDaddy states it’s not hosted with them. That would mean the only thing GoDaddy is guilty of is hosting ads on the www version of the domain while it’s being cnamed (or otherwise forwarded) to another web hosting service. That’s not GD’s web hosting groups’ fault; it just means the firm is profiting from a clients’ domain they think is not in use. Most domain registrars do that. Whether it’s right or wrong, in this case it makes the firm look bad.] This morning I visited CNN.com, where the featured story was regarding a woman who is using the web to help her husband find a job. Frustrated as her husband struggles to find a job, Robin Stearns registered a domain name at GoDaddy and created a web site to get publicity for her husband. It has no doubt worked.

The domain name in the article is MyHusbandNeedsAJob.com. I typed that into my browser and was surprised to see this:

Huh. I must have mistyped it. So I copied and pasted the URL from the CNN article and got the same result. Surely they didn’t have a typo in the article, as the picture in the article also features the same domain name.

Then I typed www. ahead of the web address and presto! It worked.

Is it really that difficult for web hosting firms to default both www. and the domain without the www to the same page? Not really. Perhaps this is a tricky way to capture traffic. [See update above]

With a front page CNN.com article, I suspect Robin’s husband will get a job in no time. In the meantime, she may want to fix the www issue so it no longer shows GoDaddy ads and then beef up her GoDaddy web hosting package so the site doesn’t go offline.