You're mis-remembering that story. GoDaddy (their registrar) charges more for auto-renew than for manual renew. So people wishing to save money disable auto-re

You're mis-remembering that story. GoDaddy (their registrar) charges more for auto-renew than for manual renew. So people wishing to save money disable auto-renew for that registrar. GoDaddy's interface is really bad, and somehow when you remove your CC information it also asks you if you want to remove the domains entirely too (default: yes). People click through without paying attention (thinking "it is just my payment info, what can go wrong?!") and BOOM their domains are gone. Naturally GoDaddy charges a fee to restore the domains...