
GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them - azifali
http://asifali.me/post/42323712160/godaddy-deletes-my-domains-and-charges-me-to-restore
======
mmanfrin
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?

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Could we be constructive and maybe name some GOOD domain registrars - so that
if people read this and are on GoDaddy they could move?

I've heard good things about "namecheap."

~~~
windexh8er
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.

~~~
drbawb
I'll third Gandi.

The transfer from GoDaddy went smoothly. (The longest part was waiting on
GoDaddy.)

The free SSL cert is quite a nice bonus, and their customer service is great.

I'm considering purchasing hosting from them in the near future.

~~~
npsimons
I'll fourth Gandi; nothing but simple, non-obnoxious domain name registration.

------
larrys
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.

~~~
robert-wallis
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.

Does your registrar log information like this?

~~~
azifali
GoDaddy is apparently too big to do this OR they don't have access to this
data readily.

~~~
piggity
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.

------
chrisacky
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:

<http://chrisacky.com/images/godaddy_bull.png>

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.

~~~
ludwigvan
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.

~~~
benburleson
Computers were invented to do things like auto-renew. There is absolutely no
reason to charge 30% for the "convenience" of auto-renew.

~~~
tjic
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".

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
newhouseb
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.

~~~
azifali
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).

~~~
newhouseb
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.

------
Osiris
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.

~~~
larrys
(I own a registrar)

"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.

~~~
Osiris
Thanks for the info. As I said, I don't work in Domains so I'm not as
knowledgeable about this process as you are.

Question, if a domain goes into redemption, can it only be renewed again by
the same person using the same registrar?

~~~
larrys
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.)

------
jessaustin
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.

~~~
azifali
Thank you for that advice. I will remember that...I will be moving my domains
to Hover or namecheap soon.

~~~
fakeer
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).

~~~
Indyan
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.

------
da_n
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.

~~~
mctx
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).

------
treitnauer
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.

~~~
kintamanimatt
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.

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
sahaskatta
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.

~~~
timerickson
Was the affiliate link really necessary?

~~~
Firehed
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.

------
danbmil99
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.

~~~
azifali
:-)

------
kens
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.

~~~
larrys
"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.

~~~
vidyesh
I might be wrong ( since you are a registrar )

 _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._

<https://www.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/faqs>

~~~
larrys
We are talking about two different things.

You are referring to "redemption" and I am referring to a grace period.

Redemption comes after the domain is deleted which is after a any grace
period.

------
chaostheory
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.

------
Fizzadar
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).

------
vidyesh
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.

I hope you get your issue resolved efficiently.

------
crdoconnor
Use a registrar that isn't run by assholes:

Name.com, Gandi.net, Namecheap.com

~~~
freejack
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.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
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)

~~~
jackalope
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.

~~~
itsprofitbaron
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.

[1] [http://blog.icann.org/2007/05/registerfly-
update-29-may-2007...](http://blog.icann.org/2007/05/registerfly-
update-29-may-2007-godaddy-takes-over-names-from-registerfly/)

------
kbar13
godaddy really blows. they seriously do make things a lot harder for the
customer so that they are -forced- to stay with godaddy.

And their retarded overhyped ads don't help either; why are they putting up
trash ads at ridiculous rates?

~~~
artursapek
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.

------
paulftw
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.

~~~
niggler
Godaddy would fight the chargeback. It's not like CC companies always side
with customers -- the company gets a chance to make an argument.

What most likely would happen is Godaddy would point to some line in the ToS
and then point to you agreeing to it.

~~~
dpcan
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.

~~~
sc00ter
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.

~~~
niggler
"pre-authorised recurring payments are not interrupted by this method. "

That depends on the nature of the authorization. The easiest way is to just
terminate the card

~~~
Firehed
And ding your credit history? No thanks.

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.

------
jwarren
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.

------
adnam
GoDaddy? You were warned. No sympathy.

------
josephwesley
I've never spent money with GoDaddy (and never will), but everyone I know who
has done business with them has gone on to regret it.

~~~
helloamar
i back that

------
brown9-2
This is a tangent, but are domains really considered "private property"?

Are there other types of property where ownership can expire?

~~~
IWentToTheWoods
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.

Here's a slightly outdated article that provides a good introduction to some
of the legal issues: <http://www.domainhandbook.com/property.html>

(IANAL)

------
seivan
Do people know what other companies GoDaddy owns, so you can avoid them? I
know Outright is one of them.

------
3327
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.

------
adjin
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.

------
detay
I moved all my domains to namecheap for a similar reason.

~~~
orn
Same here, they are great !

------
arbuge
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.

------
RKearney
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.

Sure it's more work, but it's much cheaper.

------
pixeledanny
I used to have my domains on GoDaddy but I switch to Bluehost after a year. I
recommend it to everyone. Great customer service. Bluehost.com

------
elliottkember
123-reg pull this kind of stunt all the time. I recently had a 2-month debacle
where I nearly lost my domain due to their terrible systems.

------
heldrida
I had to use GoDaddy once, it was a terrible experience.

I use name.com and never had issues! The interface is very clean and the
service is cheap.

Good luck!

------
tharri
I've had 300+ domains with GoDaddy for over 10 years now and I've never had a
problem with them.

------
michaelrkn
Try badger.com - it's the only non-shitty registrar I've ever used.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Never heard of that one. Out of interest which others have you tried? I hear
good things about some others quite often, so I'm just wondering. :)

------
murtali
thank god I picked namecheap - been a happy customer since middle school (~9
years)

------
brass9
GoDaddy? No sympathy.

You deserved this...

------
Shubzinator
Name Cheap it is.

------
dmak
And that is why I use GoMommy.

------
helloamar
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

------
binceipt
did you cry ?

~~~
azifali
Lol :-) nope...because most of my domains were still working..except the one
that was close to expiry.

