I was reading a thread about the best place to register and a few people were saying "Not Godaddy". Why is that? I'm new to the whole webmaster scene but Godaddy seem to have good prices and my current site with them seems fine.
GoDaddy's good, it's probably the best selling point for domain names so if you're a domainer planning to buy and sell your domains it's a good site. There are cheaper alternatives, but they might not have as good of service as GoDaddy.
To answer your question, GoDaddy has close to 22% of the worldwide registration business. They have registered more than twice the number of domains as the second place Enom. When you are the biggest in the world, some things will slip through the cracks. There is no way around this. When that happens, you get pissed off people. Then you take the web into account and you get people that read other people's stories and made them their own, pass it on as a "I know a guy" story, or other fabrications/imbelishments that increase the number of bad stories. Often time these people never used the service in the first place. They have good prices that are consistent (some of the places that offer great prices hit you for significantly higher than GoDaddy on the second year). They have a good service. However, there are those out there that really have had bad experiences. That's to be expected (GoDaddy has close to 20mill of the 80+mill registered domains).
bluegrass special certainly has some good info there. Personally, I have registered around 10 domain names with GoDaddy, some of which I have had for several years. I used a different registrar originally (can't even remember what it was) but was referred to GoDaddy by my brother. I have had some minor issues with updating nameservers and email stuff, but I think that some of the blame for those falls on my own mistakes.
I would recommend namecheap.com. I have used them every time I have bought a domain, and they accept Paypal which is really good.
Some people don't like Godaddy because it's a bit of a pain to buy a domain with the milion of upsell pages they present to you before checking out, others don't like then because of the recent news where they suspended someone's domain or something like that, fogot the exact reason though. If you're looking for the most secure & respected company, it's Moniker