I moved away from GoDaddy a couple of years ago. Now I have a few expiring domains left on there.
Last week I got a notice they were going to charge me for a renewal, which I did not want. So I called the support guy. Twenty or so minutes later, he sent me to a link to fill out a form where all would be taken care of.
Except it wasn't. Just like my previous few encounters with GoDaddy, when I went to the link I learned some obscure detail about my contract with them prevented me from getting what I wanted -- yet allowed them to charge me in full. I'm not going to go into details. It's a perfectly reasonable request on their part. The problem is they have created this monster of add-on services and items, all with little footnotes and gotchas. And it's all geared to extract more money from me.
Last time I had a domain going to expire that I wanted to keep, I went to transfer it over to my new domain guys. The domain was expiring in a month, but I had to complete a GoDaddy form online to make it happen (sound familiar?). The only way to complete the form online was to check a checkbox. The checkbox said that once I checked it I couldn't transfer the domain for another 90 days. Fuckers got me again.
I could tell you a few more like that. It's always some finely-detailed bullshit that ends up with you paying them more. Last week they got me for around 180 bucks.
So now I plan on using the domain I couldn't cancel. I go to the DNS settings. Looks like the new DNS manager is overly complicated and impossibly to use easily. The "adventure" continues.
I swear I hate those bastards. I consider myself a nice enough person, and I have been disappointed by online services in the past -- no big deal. Some online companies "get it" and some not-so-much. But GoDaddy has crossed a line with me somewhere. I'm not sure if it's the used-car-salesmen experience I get checking out or the policies that exist seemingly to endlessly screw me over in various and sundry ways, but it's just a really, really, really bad service in my opinion.
Counter anecdote: I've quite a few domains on GoDaddy. I've transfered a few over the years, both to and from GoDaddy, and while the steps where not explained clearly I never had an issue where I was prevented from controlling my domains.
I also used their DNS service for the first time last month and found it pretty straightforward. Maybe I wasn't trying to do something that would have been complex (I didn't set up mail, for example, or any wild-card entries), but it wasn't to "impossible to easily use."
YMMV and all that.
I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it.
I've tried some other registrars (names eluded) me that were purportedly better/cheaper but found their UIs annoying and troublesome in other ways. Maybe it's a case of "the devil you know ...", but I don't find GoDaddy to be the Great Satan some make it out to be.
"I could easily live without the day-glo rampage of add-ons whenever I try to register a new domain, but I've gotten used to it."
That is the worst part from my perspective. I use namecheap and it is very simple and fast to manage my domains using the namecheap interface. Godaddy seems to bury your domain management under a bunch of add-on services. I really dread helping out anyone on godaddy because I have to wade through all kinds of crap before I get to the screens I want.
Another nice touch by namecheap is that it takes 1 click to setup your DNS for google email services. I feel like godaddy makes MX configuration difficult just so some people will give up and pay for email through them.
Ditto to this. Got so fed up with the others and GoDaddy's registrar setup is the only one I've had that's still issue free. I use Rackspace for my servers and I have no issues.
Ditto here. I use GoDaddy for domain registration, and an InMotion VPS for hosting. The interface is confusing and cluttered, but their call-in support is always really friendly and reliable. Nothing makes my blood boil hotter than bad customer service, so despite GoDaddy's sins, their knowledgeable, friendly customer support team makes it worth it to me.
The purchasing process IS super greasy car salesman - I'd never ever refer a client to GoDaddy. They'd end up buying 20 things they didn't need, 20 times the cost it has to be. That gets obnoxious, but oh well - at least I know what to expect every time, and I can just say no. It beats talking to the unqualified or rude techies at other hosting companies.
Ditto - we use Godaddy's sister company's (Wild West Domains)API to register domains - nice and simple. Each domain is dirt cheap, takes one api call and we're done, we never even leave our app. Of course since we host a lot of sites for our customers we have to register a lot of domains. Setting up API access may not be worth it otherwise.
I share both your criticism and praise, but would add that GoDaddy allowed me to do bulk contact editing which (along with pricing) was the reason I switched to them c. 3 years ago.
Margins may be low, but the domain registrar market seems ripe for disruption. Are there any interesting upstarts in this space?
The goal was to make a domain name registration and management system I'd like to use. That means no upselling and no charging for standard services like whois privacy, url forwarding, and email forwarding.
I also made it easy to set your domain names to not auto-renew and to transfer away your name.
There is also no magical price change the second year or hidden fees that show up at the end of the purchasing process.
I'm actually a reseller of Key-Systems. If I go out of business you'll still have access to all of your domains and be able to manage them through Key-Systems and RrpProxy.net (http://key-systems.net/). They also run Domain Discount 24 (http://dd24.com/) and are a fairly large registrar.
Thank you for being so clear (and open) about it, makes me want to try it and maybe transfer everything there.
I have a quick repair only. If you see your site with Chrome on Windows 7, there's something about the text that doesn't feel right, it looks too thin to be readable at some sizes. For example, the navigation on the bottom left or (even worse) the text inside the inputs of the login form. It's because of Myriad Pro, not sure if you feel like changing it for some more usual typeface like Arial.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll fire up Parallels and do some tweaking on the font type. I do all my work on a Mac so I typically just test with IE on Windows and test the other browsers on OS X.
Good question. I did not mean to be misleading. I was referring to having an initial yearly fee of, say, $8.99 but hidden in the fine print a renewal fee of $12.99. I can't control the yearly rate increases but I'll always just have one fee regardless of transfer, renewal, or initial registration. Sorry for the confusion.
That's true - there definitely would be some room for disruption in the domain registration market.
The thing with GoDaddy, which is bigger than it's 8 nearest competitors combined, is that they've been successful on the back of mass marketing, and earning more dollars off of every single customer they have.
All those add ons, that we geeks so easily ignore, are just mindlessly added on by a large majority of other customers who really have no idea what they need. So instead of earning $2 or $3 for the domain registration service, like other registrars do, GoDaddy ends up earning $200 or $300 from those customers (which gives them more money to use towards marketing again).
I think a major hosting company with a good reputation might be able to make inroads into the domain registration industry (Amazon or Rackspace perhaps), but I don't think most people would trust their domains with a startup.
Wow. Well... Wow. Domain registrars are things you touch once every few years, and their entire goal is to make it more time consuming to remove yourself from them then switch since its such an insignificant task, most people ignore it and keep with the same one.
If vendor lock strategies (which this plain and simply is) were illegal, we wouldn't have some certain monopolies - I doubt, for example, that Windows would still hold such a big market share.
Yours is a widespread feeling. The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR
BTW, what's with E-mailing me about this? I consider it spam, especially since it ends with "Please do not reply to this email."
If people want to write to me person-to-person, fine. I don't really want impersonal ads (the E-mail made no mention of my name, another spam tip-off) about people's products.
DNS management very often sucks, whether with GoDaddy or any other I've tried.
I founded a cloud management company for EC2 (and later other infrastructure clouds), and one of the first things we included was decent dns record management. It's integrated into your apache vhosts and whatnot, but the value is really just keeping your sanity when all you need to do is add an MX record.
I agree with GoDaddy being horrible, but this really isn't just their fault. Certificate revocation does exactly what it says. It's a technical term that everyone using SSL should know and understand the implications of. Their offer of creating a new certificate for you for $15 actually sounds pretty decent.
And, you don't have backups of all your data and domains? While running your sites on a shared host? This really sounds like something that was bound to happen to you. Be glad you got it fixed and I hope you learned your lesson.
I ran into the same situation the author did when getting SSL for a freelance client of mine.
The problem is that nowhere in GoDaddy's certificate purchasing or setup process do they ask you what domain name you want the certificate to apply to. They just apply it to the "primary" domain on a hosting account, which is basically the first domain you set up and associated with that hosting. I kept expecting that the next step in the setup process would ask me what domain I wanted to use the certificate for until there was no next step and the cert was pending setup on the wrong domain.
At no point did they indicate that their single-domain certificate only works on the primary domain until I was on the phone with customer service before revoking it. We ended up going with a multi-domain cert (which they did give us a discount on) rather than change the primary domain on the hosting account because their service representative said that would require downtime for all the sites on that hosting account.
It seems that GoDaddy created a certificate for the wrong domain in the first place. Still, the author should have pointed out the problem and ask GoDaddy to fix it instead of revoking the certificate himself.
I swore off GoDaddy years ago when I was setting up a website for a friend. It took an entire night to FTP up about 100k worth of files to his account. His website was extremely slow as well, so it wasn't just me.
We're talking about a website that got maybe dozens of hits per day.
He was a paying customer!!!! I've never had such a bad host, even from free ones.
Also, I absentmindedly signed myself up for their WHOIS privacy protection. Holy crap was that a mistake! I can't cancel it because it's actually offered by another company Domains By Proxy, but they won't let me log in because the account was magically setup using some bogus credentials and information which they got from the ether or something. So I can't even migrate that account away without sending them a driver's license, and THAT's assuming they have my correct name on file (which is a real possibility that they don't, since nothing else seems accurate). GoDaddy is no help, I have to call DomainsByProxy (which is GoDaddy, btw). DomainsByProxy is no help either, unless I send them a scan of my driver's license.
It pisses me off so much I just haven't been able to bring myself to do it. It's cheaper just to keep paying. Yuck.
I noticed transferring a domain to different Godaddy account immediately cancels that domain's privacy-protection service. You can probably try that first before transferring your domain out of Godaddy.
Domains by Proxy emails you credentials when you sign up. People don't pay attention to this delete or never look at the emails, then get pissed when they can't login.
Their hosting blows, but I've never had a problem with registrations.
That's what they told me too, but I have every (non-spam) email I've ever gotten going back to 1998, including the emails when I bought these accounts, and there is nothing from DomainsByProxy at all in there.
It's possible these emails got sucked up by the spam filter and are therefore lost to history. However, looking at how it works, and after talking with "both" companies, I'm inclined to feel and believe that they were intentionally deceptive.
I had the same problem, but finally discovered that DomainsByProxy uses the same password as Godaddy. The hard part is finding your customer id.
when you make a new purchase at godaddy, it gives you the option to link your new domainsbyproxy purchase to a previous account. it lists all your previous login ids.
so just grab those login ids and use your godaddy password for each of them.
Once I was able to grab the right login id I was able to use my godaddy password (the original password you used when you purchased the privacy protection, if you changed it since then, it will not be the same as the new password). Once logged in it was easy to remove the privacy protection and godaddy immediately reflected the new status.
No one should use GoDaddy, ever; there are many other registrars in their price range that don't share their onerous practices with regards to transfer, takedown, security and privacy and which have much better customer service.
Namecheap as well. I used to be on GoDaddy and sure, everything they do is spelled out but why do they have to make every transaction so annoying and difficult? So many screwy add-on options. Namecheap just keeps it simple to me.
The only thing with Namecheap is that I got a little confused when the whois guard stuff (or whatever they call it) didn't apply like it expected. My memory is a little fuzzy about the scenario right now but I bought three whois guards, applied one and then the other two couldn't be applied to my other domains. I ended up having to get support involved but they cleared it up within an hour. A little confusing? yeah. Annoying? no.
I'll chime in. I've been using them since 2007. For me, they're nice and straight-forward. They don't offer any bulk discounts (NN% off for 5 years, etc), but they do occasionally hold sales.
They also raised their rates a few times. When I first joined, they were $8.88/mo. Then they went to $9.29/mo, then $9.69/mo, and now $10.16/mo. Arguably, this may be one of their downsides, but I've never minded. I believe other registrars were also raising their rates around the same time too. (NOTE: prices include the ICANN fee.)
You realize VeriSign increases the registry fee 7% each year. NameCheap from my calculation is actually eating into their own margin each year slightly.
I used to use them back in around 2004, love the company, owner is wonderful. Only reason I don't use them is I got a much better deal at Fabulous.com which is designed for large portfolios. I still recommend them to basically anyone looking for a registrar that isn't holding 100 domains or more.
Only a couple times in the last year, just used them to register the name for the startup my wife and I are hacking on, however they came highly recommended by a friend of mine and Googling turned up many happy customers.
Not the person you asked but I've used namecheap for 3 years now and haven't had any issues, the whoisgaurd they offer is cheap when it comes up for renewal and you don't have to have a card or anything on file for when renewals come up, they do email you a bit when they do but I don't mind that.
The interface isn't going to win any awards and most of my domains use linodes dns so I can't say how well their dns stacks up.
I also have a few domains on nearlyfreespeech which is quite a bit down on the interface but their terms are great.
>The interface isn't going to win any awards and most of my domains use linodes dns so I can't say how well their dns stacks up.
Their DNS has been fantastic for me. Very straightforward interface, and even has a few nice touches like being able to automatically set up mx records for you if you use Google Apps on that domain.
I've got most domains with omnis.com now - still have some with godaddy, but I move them over when I can. omnis has been fine for me for the past 2-3 years, haven't had price increases yet, and I get a small discount > 50 domains - my per domain cost is $8.20/year IIRC.
OK kids, here's what you need to know. There are three levels of your relationship with Godaddy:
Level 1: You're in balls deep. You register your domains with GoDaddy, use their DNS servers and host your shit on their servers. You also get your SSL certs from them. That's what the OP was doing.
Level 2: You're in up to the balls, but that's where it stops. You register with them, host your DNS with them but your website lives on another providers servers and you get your SSL elsewhere.
Level 3: You wearing a condom and don't give them their own key or underwear drawer. In other words, you register your domain with GoDaddy but you host the DNS somewhere else like DNSMadeEasy which costs, but is reliable. You also host your site somewhere else like Linode for example. And your SSL cert is something that costs more but is reliable. I have an EV cert from Verisign which costs but you get better conversions.
Level 3 is the only place you want to be. Pay them the bare minimum, immediately delegate the DNS hosting to a reliable rock solid provider that doesn't black-list DNS servers and use that provider to point your A record to whatever web host you're using. You get cheap domains and the only time you have to wade through GD's cluster fuck interface is when you change DNS providers or want to register another domain.
My primary domain did over 27 million DNS requests last month via DNS Made Easy with a 12 hour TTL and it's been registered with godaddy for over 4 years now with no problems at all.
If my DNS provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within 72 hours (at most). If the mail provider messes up, I change to a new one and I am back within X hours (where X is the TTL set for the domain). If my webhost messes up, I am back within X hours (because I of course make offsite backups), etc.
The only part where one needs a 100% reliable business partner is domain registration. And after hearing all the horror stories about Godaddy, I would not trust them, not even if I was wearing your methaphorical condom.
