4 ms·

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 r

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. Did I mention I didn't like it so much?

dlikhten 15y ago
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. Is this even legal?
- slowpoke 15y ago
  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.
jamesbritt 15y ago
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.
- silverbax88 15y ago
  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.
- joelhaus 15y ago
  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?
  - jeffbozek 15y ago
    I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com https://www.coffeeanddomains.com). 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.
spottiness 15y ago
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 http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  "The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR 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.
SebastianStadil 15y ago
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.

dlikhten 15y ago

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. Is this even legal?

slowpoke 15y ago
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.

jamesbritt 15y ago

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.

silverbax88 15y ago
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.
joelhaus 15y ago
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?
- jeffbozek 15y ago
  I'm taking a stab at simple registrations and management with Coffee & Domains (https://www.coffeeanddomains.com https://www.coffeeanddomains.com). 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.

spottiness 15y ago

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 http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR

jamesbritt 15y ago
"The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR 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.

SebastianStadil 15y ago

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.