The only problem that I’ve ever had is that they tend to send way too many renewal notices.

Funny, I always found the fact they charge roughly 3-1/2 times what seems to be the market price a little irritating. And they used to make it quite the hassle to pry a domain away from them — although that’s gotten better lately…

And when was GoDaddy ever a Trusted Registrar or anything but sleazy? I always thought of it as like having an AOL e-mail address.

I transferred my domains to GoDaddy about a year and a half ago because Tucows was giving me the willies.

What Domain Registrar is actually trustworthy?

Who is the Trusted Registrar if GoDaddy is truly sleazy?

I have been registering domain names since 1996 and the issues over the years have been grim and grimmer as the internet was wild and wooly in the Registration process.

It also got harder and harder to conduct business when 3 rd party marketing companies opened up who claimed to be a registrar but were just using their own account with a legitimate registrar.  If you needed control you couldn’t get it because all of your records actually were just part of some client 3-rd party.

If you Google Tucows over the years you read a lot of nasty stuff about them, too.
I was hoping that I had finally found a company that I could trust in GoDaddy.

So, guys and gals, since so many are running from GoDaddy into whose arms are you running now?

Sounds like SOPA is the “GoDaddy” law.

First we had to admit we were wrong:————start snip
First, reply to abuse@godaddy.com with a statement that you (or your employees, affiliates, 3rd party marketers, etc.) will no longer send messages to individuals that did not ask to receive information specifically from your domain name.——end snip

Then we need to pay them $199 (I said $250 above, but I was wrong)
—————-start snip
Second, include in this statement authorization for GoDaddy.com to charge a $199 non-refundable administration fee to the credit card on file for your account (you may want to log into your Go Daddy account and confirm that the card on file is valid and has not expired).
—–end snip

Here is the time frame they demanded (They sent this over the July 4th Holiday)
————start snipPLEASE NOTE you must reply with the requested information within 48 hours, failure to do so may lead to actions such as the suspension or cancellation of your service.
——end snip

And here’s what happens if we try to leave without paying the fee:
———start snipIf you choose to transfer the domain name to another registrar, we first require that you pay a $75 administration fee before your domain name can be transferred. This fee is used to cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the outstanding spam complaints Go Daddy has received regarding your domain name.—–end snip

Nice, huh? 

As a precaution, to make sure we paid, they locked down domain transfer and then charged us $75 to unlock it so that we could move to a different domain registrar. On top of that they gave us just 48 hours to make our decision – and sent the notification after work hours on a Friday before a long weekend. 

We would have been able to prove we didn’t SPAM since the person actually signed up for information on our website. But they demanded our server logs for the period. And again, if we didn’t hand them over within 48 hours – they would effectively take down our site. I happened to have logged in over the weekend – thank goodness.

Our company employs 15 people – and virtually all of our revenues are generated from online sales – so we had no choice. Even a few days outage could have been very expensive.

Their strong armed tactics really caught us off guard. But a quick Google search showed these shakedowns to be a common occurrence among Go Daddy customers. 

Oddly – we still do business with them, but not for DNS hosting, just for their cheapo hosting accounts – and never for anything mission critical, because they cannot be trusted to pull this trick again.

I’m OK with anti-spam measures, but this was a shakedown plain and simple.

No need for DDOS anymore; just barrage a site with bogus copyright infringement claims!

Some people should just be invited to step off the Earth before they do any more harm.