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Tell HN: Godaddy canceled my domain, gave me 2h to respond, then charged €150
I use my own domain to host a simple homepage. I also use it as a custom mail domain.
Initially, I bought the domain on godaddy.com when I was getting into the realms of software engineering.
I always found the user interface hard to get used to, but it never bothered me enough for me to transfer my domain.
Especially because I run the DNS through Cloudlfare and, therefore, I have fairly little contact with the interface of godaddy.
Today Proton (my mail provider of choice) surprised me with a warning that there were problems with the setup of my domain. A quick research revealed that godaddy had cancelled my domain. It showed up in the Redemption Grace Period. This status code indicates that godaddy has asked the registry to delete my domain. After 30 calendar days + 5 days following the end of the redemption period, my domain is purged from the registry database and becomes available for registration.
I immediately contacted the godaddy support hotline. Mainly because of my mail account and the services connected to it. They confirmed the termination. The reason given was that I had failed to respond to an e-mail - that was sent yesterday on a Sunday(!) at 9:51 PM. Then at 0 o'clock my domain was terminated. So I had a breathtaking 2 hours to respond. Which is especially fun because I go to bed at 10pm. :-D
To make matters worse, the mail ended up in the spam folder because Godaddy's reputation seems to be bad and was titled: "Update your privacy settings and personal information.". Even under normal circumstances, I would have ignored this email. How should someone suspect that in a few minutes from now on the own domain is going to be killed.
If I understood the service employee correctly, this mail means that something was wrong with my payment data. And indeed, there was an old credit card on file. However, a PayPal address was also stored there, which still worked. Via this address, I was later even debited the penalty fees that I supposedly had to pay.
After some back and forth with service, I was then given an ultimatum: Either I pay €150 fine, allegedly required by my government to be charged for domains that enter the grace period. Or I lose the domain.
The latter didn't sound very inviting, as I like my domain and also don't feel like switching all accounts to another domain/provider. So I paid the fee.
Godaddy confirmed afterwards that there were no further emails or announcements. The service employee even confirmed by phone that apart from the mail and the subsequent generous transition period of 2 hours, there would have been no further information.
TL:DR If you have a domain with Godaddy, just make sure that the payment information is correct. Otherwise, it might get expensive.
- voydik 4y agoUse Gandi.
- brightball 4y agoI've moved everything away from GoDaddy to Cloudflare at this point. There are a few domain extensions that they don't support yet, so I moved those to Namecheap instead. As soon as possible though, everything is going to Cloudflare. It simplifies my life.
- null_object 4y agoQuestion: how quickly can you (and everyone else who has a domain registered with Godaddy) transfer your domain to another registrar?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoAll the admin probably takes an hour at most; it's an automated process with some identity verification, and most registrars loooove to have you as a customer so they want to make it as easy as possible for you. There may be a mandatory waiting period. And finally, there's DNS caches; if you know a migration is upcoming, it's worthwhile setting the TTL to a lower amount.
- toast0 4y agoIf you're doing it right, your registrar doesn't run your DNS, so there's no DNS migration. Of course, if your registrar is also doing DNS, email, and web hosting for you, it's messy. For this poster, I don't think they can migrate to a different registrar while their domain is in the 'redemption' period, and they may not be able to migrate within some time period (30 days?) of renewal, either.
- oneplane 4y agoTL:DR If you have a domain with Godaddy, move on to a proper service. Depending on what you need, https://dnsimple.com https://dnsimple.com seems to have a good reputation, I also see a bunch of people spreading their risk by putting DNS on one big (cloud) provider and all other services on other providers. This means that while Cloudflare does DNS registration now, you might still want to use Cloudflare for your DNS zone and something else for registration. That said, Cloudflare still has a good reputation (for paying customers!). The idea behind that is the (generally) low fee of DNS registration is easy to monitor/check and maintain, so if all else fails you at least retain your domain name as an identity which is generally the foundation to everything else. While it might suck to lose the contents of a mailbox or a website, if you still retain the DNS registration you can always re-create. Other service providers that don't structurally screw your DNS over (re-including the ones I mentioned): - AWS - Cloudflare - Leaseweb - Rackspace - transip - OVH - dnsimple Those are the ones I have used (and most of them currently use) myself, but there are others that do domain registration and seem to come recommended by others: - GCP (Google) - EasyDNS - porkbun - Microsoft - Hetzner - key-systems GmbH (usually via one of their partners) - Scaleway Most of them I do have some personal experience with (for what it's worth... we're just strangers on the internet here after all), but I never really had to do any long-term (10+ years) DNS registration with them. If you are in an ITAR area, conflict region or trade sanctioned region, none of this will help tho.