I'm sorry to be callous, but at this point I feel little pity for someone still buying domains through GoDaddy. It is a terrible company with terrible policies, terrible management, and a horribly misogynistic marketing team. Why are you continuing to pay them rent on your domains?
You're not being callous at all. There are some companies that are known to frequently mistreat customers and have harmful policies. Any halfway savvy user (which OP appears to be) should know this and it's unfortunate when they get burned. It's even more unfortunate when a less technically literate person gets screwed by GoDaddy.
Having said this, I'm super happy OP wrote this. We should not forget that yesterday's GoDaddy is the same as today's GoDaddy. I really feel for OP, and I know how it's easy to feel as though bad stuff only happens to other people, but my hope is that posts like this will continue and the beast will starve.
I suspect that GoDaddy will begin to employ the same tactics Nigerian scammers do in order to weed out the savvy customers with blogs, and will try to ensnare technically illiterate people with credit cards.
I tried to unlock and transfer the domain first..see the note at the bottom..
Since it was going to take a while (couple of days) and since the domain was going to expire in two days..I decided to renew the domain anyway with godaddy.com to try transfer it later.
I was about to post this when I saw your comment and I second you. When I was looking to buy a domain, they looked like a very popular choice, thanks to ads and "positive" reviews.
In fact, some of my less tech savy friends have brought domains and even hosting from them.
As a freelancer, I've had only problems with them. From confusing navigation to bad control panel for hosting, they have everything in place to trouble me.
NameCheap is my go to place for domains and they are really great.
While I agree with this sentiment and had a similar reaction ("doesn't everyone know GoDaddy are scumbags?"), I upvoted this article. We need to scream this from the rooftops, get stories like this spread far and wide. Until GoDaddy goes out of business, everyone needs to be made painfully aware of how dangerous it is to be their customer.
I am using namecheap for 5-6 years now (can't remember for how long). I never had to do anything except manually renew the domain I needed.
I also set myself in a mission to 'help' people who need help with setting up their DNS and uses Godaddy to transfer them to Namecheap first before helping out - simply because I wouldn't want to deal with Godaddy horrible UI.
To date I think I've been able to move about 100 domains out of Godaddy.
--
By the way it's a shame since I know some Godaddy Execs and they're very nice, I feel they're like trying to navigate a old ship that won't turn its course no matter how much energy they put in.
I also use namecheap, they're great. One thing I like about them compared to GoDaddy, which I used to use, is that the control panel for a domain is tiny yet does everything I need. The number of different control panels, all of which took forever to load and were horrible to use and navigate, is one of the reasons I no longer use GoDaddy.
The only registrar I will tell anybody about anymore is Gandi (gandi.net). For ~$15USD you get the domain, private registration and an SSL cert for a year. I don't like some of what Namecheap has done in the past and I've had nothing but stellar service from Gandi.
I've been hearing great things about Gandi pretty consistently from everyone who uses them. I'm in the process of moving my domains over to their service and so far (given, only a few months in) nothing but smooth sailing.
They're the only ones I've come across as of late who offer 10 year registrations other than GoDaddy. That's the only reason I've stayed with them, and now I can be rid of their god awful interface.
I have used domainmonster for several years and have had no issues at all. They have an excellent customer service too.
The only practical technical difference with Godaddy for my purposes is that they do not support catchall addresses for email forwarding for security reasons, but this is minor.
Not that I disagree with your point, but GoDaddy ran a lot of tests and the ads with scantily clad women put in seemingly compromising positions or being taken advantage of returned the most money in sales. So it's not like they're just doing it for fun; it's all business.
But yeah - don't use GoDaddy. (edited for clarity, I hope)
"It's all business" is the worst excuse in the world for being a shitty human being.
I would rather somebody be an honest asshole. At least if they can admit they like being misogynistic, there's a chance they might get their act together one day.
But being willing to make the world worse because it lines your pockets? And then saying, "Oh man, it's not me, it's that darned business thing making me do it"? That's a sad rationalization, a total unwillingness to take responsibility for your actions.
That's only true if they have no effect. But I think it's absurd to say that superbowl commercials have no influence on culture. The whole point of advertising is to influence. I agree that their success is a symptom, but at that scale I believe it is also a cause.
It isn't the scantily clad women necessarily it is that they are really the only registrar people can think of when they want to get their own domain because godaddy is the only domain registrar that advertises on tv.
Registrar here. In other words competitor to Godaddy.
Not enough info in this story to call out godaddy on this.
Sounds as if the domain was deleted and went into redemption. In redemption registrars are charged $40 plus the cost of registration (.com .net .org .info) to get the domain back. And they mark that up. If you don't pay for a domain it gets deleted. The registrar has no reason to delete a domain that isn't expired. Very hard to believe that godaddy would delete a domain unless explicitly told to do so. Hard to believe that a system that manages so many millions of domains did that either.
Generally Godaddy's TOS should spell out exactly when they delete a domain that hasn't been paid for. Usually there is almost always a grace period.
Regardless of what is being related here I wouldn't say from reading there is any reason godaddy decided to delete the domains if they weren't already passed expiration.
I think what happened here is a story is being related based on talking to someone at godaddy that doesn't understand what is going on with their deletion process. (That's the crime here a bad CSR is the story). That we do run into plenty.
I paid to renew the domain $29.00 since it was a .co domain.
GoDaddy deleted the domain AFTER the renewal was done, simply because I removed the credit card information from them so that I can manually renew the credit card.
Also - the $29 was charged, domain was renewed..and then cancelled 2 days later without permission. Sounds weird..more coming up.
Godaddy didn't really refund but kept the money even after I supposedly have cancelled all the domains in their account..
What about the security angle? The registrar should log these transactions with the IP address and probably the UA string so they can tell the customer what computer they were using when they did it. And if it wasn't them, then investigate how their password was stolen or security was breached.
I could believe this - once you have load balancers, multiple proxies and different servers all over the place - getting the IP address of a request can become difficult.
If there's no business driver in making that happen, then it quickly falls by the wayside and you are left without the "luxury" of that information being available in a readily accessible form (i.e. suitable for a CSR).
You can argue that that isn't acceptable of course.
I used to use GoDaddy until they charged me $25 simply because my WHOIS info was inaccurate. They could have emailed me to update it, but instead charged me the fee and THEN told me if I didn't fix it, they would cancel my domains. I immediately transferred all of my domains to Gandi.
I bet they would have tried to upsell me on private WHOIS service as well, even though Gandi offers it for free...
In chess, you would call this a two-pronged attack (And you are forked either way). Not many people know this, but you pay 30% more for domain renewals if they are set to auto-renew.
1) First of all you charge people 30% more for auto-renew. See a discussion here:
2) Now, with the customers feeling outraged that they are being charged more, they cancel the auto-renew, and they get to put on an even larger charge.
It is a horrendous dark-pattern that first of all exploits a customers continued goodwill by keeping up auto-renew, and then secondly, from trying to save money, GoDaddy exploit users who are trying to make their money stretch just a little futher.
Well, I am not a fan of GoDaddy, and have transferred all my domains somewhere else last week, but in their defense, 30% might be a convenience fee, which is justifiable.
People don't (and shouldn't) charge based on what it costs them to provide a service - they can (and should) charge based on what value they deliver to a customer.
That said, I believe in building long-term value for a customer and I do that by not charging exorbitant fees, but it's a reasonable and potentially moral decision to charge people a 30% fee in return for "never having to worry about it".
True pricing is always somewhere between cost and value. Always charging at the high end means you are always trying to capture 100% of the value created. I think that's wrong, in that the transaction is no longer a positive-sum interaction for both participants, which undermines the basis for commerce.
Regardless, there is nothing morally justifiable about charging 30% more to do less work. The autorenew system is easier not just for the customer, but for GoDaddy.
The only reason to price like that is predatory. GoDaddy is taking advantage of various asymmetries to gouge. Which is exactly how GoDaddy does everything else, so I'm entirely unsurprised.
A couple of years ago I was talking to a retired programmer who used to work for AT&T. He told me that many of the telephone options that people paid extra for cost AT&T effectively nothing; it was just a matter of setting some variables in the software.
I had the same thing happen - I tried to turn off auto-renew by deleting my payment details and somehow managed (through godaddy's misleading interface) to cancel all of my domains effective immediately. I lost something like 30 domains in the process and support refused to re-instate them for anything less than something like $3000.
This is old news, but you shouldn't be giving these guys your money.
Wow..never realized that this actually happens. How come no one has dragged them to court on this? Deleting credit card != waiving off the service that has been paid in advance for the next year(s).
If I recall correctly (although this was a couple years ago, my memory has faded) I think when you deleted a card it took you to a list of domains to configure for auto renew and it wasn't clear if you were canceling auto-renew (now that you had no billing info) or if you were canceling the domains entirely. For added confusion, clicking a button when anything was checked didn't do anything immediately (because of some background DB batching) and so as a normal user you would assume that things weren't sticking and you would click another button to see if it worked... by the time the UI refreshed, you had killed all your domains.
GoDaddy employee here. I don't work on the shopping cart, but I can say that we're under "new management" (new CEO started in January) and there's currently a huge push to completely revamp the GoDaddy homepage as well as the shopping cart and other pages.
Management is under no illusions that the old/current system is far too convoluted so the company is pushing through some pretty dramatic changes.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of code to change so the changes are going to take some time to get deployed to customers.
As far as this particular incident, I can also confirm that if you have auto-renewal turned off, when the domain expires there's a cost to GoDaddy to get that domain back.
I was on a support call during orientation when someone had something similar happen. Their CC had expired so the domain didn't auto-renew and someone else purchased the domain after the grace-period. The only thing that customer service could do was offer (a paid) service to try to put them in contact with the new domain owner (also used GoDaddy to purchase it) and assist in transferring the domain back.
If you want, feel free to email me exactly what steps caused the problem and I'll forward that on to QA for that group to try to reproduce and perhaps resolve the issue.
"As far as this particular incident, I can also confirm that if you have auto-renewal turned off, when the domain expires there's a cost to GoDaddy to get that domain back."
Specifically "when a domain expires".
A deletion and an expiration are two different things.
A domain name (with respect to .com .net .org .info) is automatically renewed at the registry level (Verisign/Afilias/PIR) upon "expiration". The registrar (godaddy) then has to issue an explicit "delete" command in order to get the money that they automatically pay (and have to have in an account at the registries) to credit their account. And they have 45 days to do so. After that they are out the money that it costs them for the domain.
Consequently the following is true:
1) When a domain expires there is no cost to godaddy to get the domain back.
2) When a domain is deleted (and goes into "redemption") there is a cost to godaddy to get the domain back.
3) Godaddy doesn't need to delete the domain (and save the reg fee ) until 45 days past "expiration". As a matter of course most registrars (including us) don't wait until the last minute (system glitch might cause not deleting domains that customer didn't pay for).
4) If "auto renewal" is "turned off" I don't see what that has to do with the time/date the domain is deleted at all. That's just a method of payment.
Using the same registrar: Yes - only the same registrar has access to the domain. Built into the system (.com .net .org .info). No way at all around that.
By the same person: According to ICANN/Registries: Yes. But there is nothing to prevent a registrar from putting it in someone elses name in the sense that there is nobody policing that action. Also there is nothing to prevent a registrar from putting the name back in the original owners name and changing it a day, hour, week, month later either. (But as I said even though Registrars have to certify they aren't doing this there is nobody enforcing this at all.)
Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by avarice. This is just like Goldman Sachs, deliberately confusing the customer and then making money off that confusion.
When GoDaddy did this to me I let the (somewhat unimportant, fortunately) domain lapse and bought it back with Hover.
Looks like you have many domains. My unsolicited advise - do not keep them all in one place and NameCheap is not the only better one. I am from India and use BigRock(Indian) and Name.com. No problems till now. Choose at least 2-3 and distribute. Keep a track. I am sure you have made calendar entries to track their renewals &c, or maybe there's some automated service for that(would love to know, if there's one).
I agree. NameCheap is a good option though. They have been leveraging GoDaddy's fuckups to gain new customers. Their social media antics have got them a lot of socially savvy customers. So they know that, if they stray, they will be flayed publicly, and all the goodwill will vanish quickly.
Another registrar I will recommend is Dynadot, simply because I have used them for several years without any hassle, and they have a live support that's actually helpful.
Normally I would try to be fair to the registrar, after all we are only hearing one side of the story, but it is very hard to defend a piece of shit company like GoDaddy and frankly I don't have much sympathy for anyone who continued to pay them to screw them over (removing card on file or not). The time to have moved away from those scumbags was when they came out in support of SOPA. There are very few companies that I reserve a place in internet hell, GoDaddy are one of them, they seem to be proud of being utter assholes.
I am a happy customer of hover.com, simple prices and includes whois privacy. Great control panel and zero problems over 2 years. Great service ad definitely not assholes.
I'll throw another vote in for Hover, their site is much nicer to navigate and service were recently very helpful to fix an issue involving email delay (that turned out to be caused by my ISP).
GoDaddy's dashboard might be bloated which can be confusing but I doubt they deliberately delete domains after removing the credit card info from your account (as long as a domain hasn't reached the expiration date of course).
As the GoDaddy representative correctly mentioned, it is the registries who are to blame for any restore fees. It's bad enough that you as a customer lost domains so Verisign, PIR, Afilias or any other gTLD registry shouldn't ask for anything else but the normal renewal fee.
GoDaddy do all kinds of things you wouldn't expect, and often they're just one of many frequent snafus. I had a domain go dead for months because they weren't pushing changes to the underlying registry, and they had no idea what was going on. They didn't fix the issue until I'd called dozens of times. Their staff are poorly trained and it appears as though they're prone to lying to get people with complex issues off the phone as quickly as possible.
They're a horrific company and you'd be surprised how badly things can go wrong and how little recourse you have.
Yep. A while back they sent me an email saying one of my domains, one not even registered with them, was listed for auction.
It turned out it was all a scam to get me to sign up for some sort of protection or monitoring service. And the sales rep was obviously an experienced scammer, not just some hapless phone operator. He eventually swore at me and hung up.
If those guys were on fire, I wouldn't piss on them to put it out. And as far as I'm concerned, anybody who works there is complicit in a (possibly technically legal) criminal enterprise.
a) I renewed the domain before expiry. Before that I had unlocked it for transfer but did not complete it since I realized that this might take a couple of days
b) Godaddy charged me for the domain renewal which effectively confirmed me as the owner for another year.
c) After 2 days, godaddy abruptly cancels the domain and transfers it to the registry even though my ownership is confirmed for the next one year.
It doesn't sound like any body else is here to blame except Godaddy.
From what I understand, they either
a) Did this because I initiated the transfer or
b) I removed all credit cards from the system because I did not want renewals to happen without notice.
Just saying that GoDaddy can't do anything about the restore fees imposed by the registries. If they screwed up it should be carried out at the firm's expense but I highly doubt they would delete a domain without being explicitly told so.
I think the delete domain behaviour is linked to the deletion of the credit card..that is not acceptable is what I have been saying. Looks like someone else has also had the same experience....(in comments)
Registrar here (Misk.com). Wanted to share some information on the restore fees discussion. Yes, registries charge hefty restore fees. Using .com as an example (since it can be different for each extension), there is a renewal grace period that can last up to 45 days (we delete at 40 days). Once the name is deleted, the name goes into redemption for 30 days after that. This is where the high fees are hit due to the registry. The thing to note is that some registrars no longer delete names after the renewal grace period ends and pass the name into an auction system. Hence the name never goes into the real redemption period. In those cases the name is still in the renewal grace period and charging higher redemption fees is a business decision by that company. You can tell if this is the case if after a registrar's redemption period, anything happens to the name except becoming available to register by the public (after a 5 day pending delete at the registry). The real redemption period is 30 days and is reflected in the whois record. Domains should still be renewed before expiration since things could change at any level and there is no reason to risk it.
Here are the expiration policies I could find for GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Misk.com (us):
GoDaddy's dashboard might be bloated which can be confusing but I doubt they deliberately delete domains after removing the credit card info from your account
The bulk of GoDaddy revenue comes from renewals and it's cheaper and easier to keep a customer as opposed to acquiring a new one.
It's much more likely that there's a bug in the code or some other non-malicious technical problem that's involved here.
I've used everyone from 1and1, GoDaddy, NetworkSolutions, and eNom as registrars. Most of these guys have cluttered slow interfaces which are painful to use.
I've most recently become a fan of Hover.com ( https://hover.com/hH8tN94H ). NameCheap.com, Name.com, and Gandi.net are also decent alternatives.
Is it unreasonable? I'd recommend Hover too, and also would have used my affiliate link. If I didn't have one I'd still happily recommend them, but if it doesn't cost you anything why shouldn't I get a cut? That's kind of the point of affiliate codes.
We have to weigh this kind of thing against the fact that if you do business with GoDaddy, there's a good chance an internationally famous supermodel will suck mouth with you for 30 seconds on national television.
Last weekend my domain was up for auto-renewal with GoDaddy but my credit card had expired so they switched the domain over to a GoDaddy landing page. I wasn't exactly pleased to see my blog replaced with ads. Fortunately there's an ICANN renewal grace period, so I didn't lose the domain and was able to switch it over to Namecheap.
"Fortunately there's an ICANN renewal grace period"
Renewal grace period isn't an ICANN thing it's a registrar thing. We're a registrar. ICANN doesn't specify what we give as a grace period at all at least in terms of anything that would cause a violation in our contract. They do ask us to specify the days that we will allow in a grace period but I've never seen any feedback at all as far as any restraints on what that time period should be.
I accidentally let my domain name expire. How do I get it back?
You may be able to get it back for 30 days after it has been deleted by the registrar. This period is called the Redemption Grace Period. Only your original registrar can perform this service. The registrar is allowed to charge you a fee to restore your name during the Redemption Grace Period.
This reminds me of that guy lamenting over staying with Yahoo as a domain registrar. Since the writer was a techie in Silicon Valley, I don't pity him. GoDaddy being a crappy domain registrar has been known for years now. It's not some new secret, nor is it super expensive just to transfer your domains before they expire (if you really value them that much - I've transferred domains where I still had five years left). Since he mentions trying to transfer his domain to namecheap, I feel that the writer is really just a victim of a combination of both laziness and being too cheap. Still, I'm glad someone is still relaying the warning about GoDaddy.
> I cannot believe that this day and age, someone could be so cheap with their own long term customers.
There's a reason GoDaddy offers the cheapest deals.
Godaddy are one of the most incompetent companies I've ever had the misery of dealing with. Their web interface, customer service and general customer experience are all awful.
I've always moved my domains away as soon as possible (I've only never had domains with them when purchased from another member).
This is unique, usually GoDaddy by default makes the payment recurring without your permission. I was forced to stay another year just because at the time of registering one of the domains with them, they had made it as a recurring payment in my PayPal.
Ofcourse, I learned my lesson the 2nd year when everything got auto renewed ( with the unwanted extra perks ) so as soon as that happened I removed GoDaddy from my PayPal Subscriptions list. And tried to move out quickly from there.
But generally even after expiry you have the 30 days of grace period and during that period its still is yours. Happened to one of my domains at namecheap, I missed the renewal date and it went into the grace period but I was able to renew it in that grace period without any difficulty.
name.com and name cheap are both backed by enom. name.com is explicitly owned by enom and namecheap is an enom reseller. Not saying that enom is an asshole, just that its a good idea to know who you are really dealing with. Both of these shops have to abide by enom's policies.
FWIW Namecheap are no longer an ENom reseller, they have been an ICANN accredited registrar since 2009. (I remember when Namecheap had to come to an agreement over the domain ownership between themselves and ENom when they were moving from reseller to ICANN registrar)
An email concerning my most recent transfer to NameCheap included the following line:
eNom, Inc. has received a request from [Me] on 22 Jan 2013 to become the new registrar of record.
The subject was:
Domain Transfer Request for [Domain]
The message included links at transfer-approval.com for verifying the transfer.
The whois information for namecheap.com shows NameCheap, Inc as the registrant, but eNom as the registrar (which may mean nothing at all).
So, there appears to continue to be a link between Namecheap and ENom, but it might be limited to NameCheap using eNom services and/or not updating account information to display the right info. It's easy to be a customer of NameCheap and assume they are a reseller or that eNom is the parent. If that's not the case, they have some work to do to clarify things. That said, I'm a happy customer.
I just spoke to someone at Namecheap and it looks like they didn't resolve the agreement issue over who owns the domains as despite becoming and ICANN accredited registrar they're still operating as an eNom reseller.
I guess they don't want to end up like Registerfly (a former eNom reseller, who got ICANN accreditation - which was eventually terminated) when eNom terminated their relationship with them, eNom gave Registerfly customers the ability to instantly push their domains into an eNom account through verifying and acting on the email sent to them including a free transfer so there was no fees to the customers.
Registerfly ended up losing the majority of their customers (through that and a ton of poor business decisions etc) & Godaddy ended up buying the remaining domains in Registerfly's portfolio [1] - it didn't acquire the company as ICANN was taking legal action against Registerfly for its continued noncompliance of the court ordered injunction.
Any company with the resources GoDaddy has, if it had good management, would have an order of magnitude better user interface. Instead, these assholes burn their cash on advertising and an army of customer service reps who get paid to stonewall over a simple issue for half an hour. I can't believe anybody still does business with GoDaddy, especially HN regulars who read a story like this every month.
would it be legal, if the author paid them whatever they wanted, transferred the domain out of godaddy's control and then requested a CC chargeback with the bank?
Banks usually side with the customer.
I believe you are correct. I tried to do a chargeback once because the company refused to believe me, and there was no way into my account where my credit card was stored and they would keep charging it year after year. And they wouldn't just delete my card from their records.
I tried a Chargeback, but the credit card denied it after the "big" company argued it.
So, I ended up changing he number of my credit card, and they ended up canceling my account for non-payment/renewal.
I had a similar experience with a monthly recurring billing, and the helpful lady at the credit card company suggested getting my credit card reissued with a new number (effectively by marking it as lost / stolen).
Unfortunately pre-authorised recurring payments are not interrupted by this method. They will continue to show up on your statement against the old card number until you either pursued them to stop, or cancel your credit card entirely.
I would definitely charge back every unauthorized charge they make, and charge it back again if they fight it and win (yes, you can do this, and yes, it does work). It's not worth their time to fight small chargebacks at all[1], and the damage multiple chargebacks can do for even relatively large payments often makes it not worth going through multiple rounds.
Although at that point, I'd consider simply reporting the card as stolen. In effect, at that point it is. Once the PAN is marked as invalid by the issuing bank, those recurring charges should definitely not be able to go through (exception: some sort of wacky bill-pay system that bypasses the credit networks entirely; yes, these exist, although normally go the other way)
[1] As a merchant, your chargeback rate is unaffected by winning chargebacks, and the fee (typically starting at $15, and often marked up) is per-incident. Meaning if the customer fights the charge a second time after you win the chargeback, you're out $30 and now have two chargebacks in your history, not just one. Between the hard costs and whatever the human factor is in fighting the charges, it quickly becomes non-economical to fight them.
I had a similar experience with one of my client's domains on hostpapa.com. They have needless levels of complexity in who you can communicate with, who can actually action any changes, and everything reply seems to be delayed by a day or more. This means that simple conversations and requests can take several days to complete. They also started conjuring up previously unmentioned fees at one point, which had to be paid to one or other completely separate departments.
In the end, the domain went into redemption through them dicking about with forwarding emails back and forth and opening new tickets, and my client (through stubbornness as much as anything) refused to pay the $95 to release it. It was eventually snapped up by a domain squatter when it expired, and I fear it shall remain there forever, since I doubt anyone will pay $1.5k for a relatively obscure name.
There seems to be some case law that suggests that domain names are at least similar to property, but I imagine that in most cases the user agreement strips most of that away in the registrar's favor.
Well, I am sure someone thought this but you should not be using a mainstream service like godaddy in the first place. You could be right/wrong but because they are huge they will never care. There are lots of small domain name services try them and good luck.
I once lost a domain for clicking by accident the 'delete' button. I sent them an email asking then to undelete the domain since it was an accident, got no response. I don't know why a feature to delete your domain was so easily accessible.
Recently switched away from GoDaddy when they raised their renewal rate on .com domains to $14.99/year. 33% more than most other registrars. No thanks.
GoDaddy, along with every other registrar, is grossly overpriced.
I have a few dozen domains and I've never spent more than $3 a year on them.
Just do a search for $0.25 domains or similar and you'll find coupon codes for registrars even worse than GoDaddy (read: Network Solutions or Register.com) offering 1 year .com for $0.25-$0.99. After 9 months or so, transfer to a registrar that's having a transfer sale. For $1.99 or however much they charge, you'll be able to transfer your domain name and have it renewed for another year.
if you book a domain through google apps it registers with godaddy, there is no option to change the nameserver via google apps nor godaddy allocates any account for it, thats not fair
