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?
Registrar here. In other words competitor to Godaddy.<p>Not enough info in this story to call out godaddy on this.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>1) First of all you charge people 30% more for auto-renew. See a discussion here:<p><a href="http://chrisacky.com/images/godaddy_bull.png" rel="nofollow">http://chrisacky.com/images/godaddy_bull.png</a><p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>This is old news, but you shouldn't be giving these guys your money.
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.<p>Management is under no illusions that the old/current system is far too convoluted so the company is pushing through some pretty dramatic changes.<p>Unfortunately, there's a lot of code to change so the changes are going to take some time to get deployed to customers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>When GoDaddy did this to me I let the (somewhat unimportant, fortunately) domain lapse and bought it back with Hover.
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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.
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.<p>I've most recently become a fan of Hover.com ( <a href="https://hover.com/hH8tN94H" rel="nofollow">https://hover.com/hH8tN94H</a> ). NameCheap.com, Name.com, and Gandi.net are also decent alternatives.
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.
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.
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.<p>> I cannot believe that this day and age, someone could be so cheap with their own long term customers.<p>There's a reason GoDaddy offers the cheapest deals.
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.<p>I've always moved my domains away as soon as possible (I've only never had domains with them when purchased from another member).
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I hope you get your issue resolved efficiently.
godaddy really blows. they seriously do make things a lot harder for the customer so that they are -forced- to stay with godaddy.<p>And their retarded overhyped ads don't help either; why are they putting up trash ads at ridiculous rates?
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.
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.
GoDaddy, along with every other registrar, is grossly overpriced.<p>I have a few dozen domains and I've never spent more than $3 a year on them.<p>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.<p>Sure it's more work, but it's much cheaper.
I had to use GoDaddy once, it was a terrible experience.<p>I use name.com and never had issues! The interface is very clean and the service is cheap.<p>Good luck!
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