brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

There’s more reasons to drop GoDaddy than their SOPA support. Here’s my GoDaddy horror story

This graph shows what relying on GoDaddy.com as my domain registrar did for my business.

This week the internet's dominant domain registrar, GoDaddy, angered the online community with its support for SOPA, a badly flawed piece of legislation that is being opposed by nearly every reputable online firm of any size.

I won't go into the many flaws of the laws Congress is considering, or the trail of entertainment industry money that's leading straight to the campaign coffers of Congresscritters. Interested parties can find that elsewhere.

What I want to do here is give my own first-hand account as to why you shouldn't do business with GoDaddy, above and beyond it's long track record of unethical behavior and tendency for in-your-face marketing practices.

Back in late February 2011, I had an issue with the Plesk administration software I was leasing that was running on my firm's dedicated server that couldn't be resolved by even the software's vendor. This necessitated a switch of servers, something I had to accomplish on the double-quick or incur hefty charges. (I no longer do business with Parallels, makers of Plesk, either, for what it's worth, but that's another post for another day.)

I use several .IT domains for my business, one of which was, at the time, had the master DNS nameservers for my entire business. At the end of the process of migrating all my clients' sites, data, and accounts to this new machine, I needed to switch my .IT domains over from old to new. These .IT domains registered with GoDaddy, and I went into their control panel and updated the IPs, and it looked like it worked as expected, and so I went to bed after a very, very long day.

I woke up the next morning to a bombardment of phone calls from folks asking why their sites were down. (I have a monitoring service, but it didn't peep because it was still monitoring the old server!)

Glancing at various online tools, I learned that the DNS transfer had not, in fact, taken place, and so to the rest of the internet, it appeared as though my entire little firm and all my clients had disappeared without a trace.

I figured that, as tired as I'd been, I must have messed up and put in the wrong IP addresses. So, I logged into GoDaddy and checked. No, the IPs were correct.

Thus began what became a SIX WEEK run of every-two-days communications with GoDaddy's reps, trying to get something VERY simple accomplished. And each time I called, I was reassured after hours on the phone, that THIS TIME, they saw what happened, and THIS TIME, things really would be fixed in 24-48 hours. And EACH time, it wasn't. I wish I had compiled the hilarious string of different excuses GoDaddy's reps offered me as the reason this very simple thing couldn't be accomplished; some of them were real doozies.

(For the uninitiated, I waited as long as I did because the process of transferring a domain away from a registrar can take days, or in extreme cases, even longer.)

By the end of the first week, I'd lost thousands of dollars' worth of business, and had migrated my remaining clients to nameservers on one of my old .com domains, leaving my own domains as the only ones still "down". But obviously, I still wanted to get my primary business identity back online, and felt trapped into working through GoDaddy's preposterously undertrained CSRs to make it happen. But after six weeks, and THOUSANDS in losses, I finally had nothing left to lose by "risking" even more downtime. So I initiated a transfer away from GoDaddy. Since my usual registrar, NetEarthOne, doesn't handle .IT domains, so I found a firm called Internet.BS (BS is the country code for the Bahamas.)

To my astonishment, the transfer was completed in less than two hours.

To my delight, the DNS push that GoDaddy couldn't accomplish in six weeks was accomplished in less than five minutes. My business was back online at last, but I had already lost a very large percentage of my business to the entire debacle.

As a postscript to the story, GoDaddy later spent HOURS fighting with me over late fees on the single remaining .IT domain that I couldn't transfer away because I'd been too busy trying to get my entire business back online.

You see, GoDaddy abuses the "Redemption Period", a period established as a consumer-friendly policy by ICANN, which manages internet domain names and sets policies for registrars. During the Redemption Period, you can reclaim your expired domain for a nominal extra fee plus your registration costs. GoDaddy abuses it, and turns it into a profit center, by ratcheting up the "nominal fee" to $80-100 on a $10 .com domain, and they will throw your domain into their "Domain Aftermarket" for resale to domain squatters or other registrants if you refuse to or simply cannot pay up.

They showed ZERO remorse, and basically only discounted those late fees because I showed I was committed to calling and tarring them on social media non-stop until they let me re-register the domain at-cost and transfer it away. We literally fought over that $80 for hours; me as a matter of principle, them just out of sheer chutzpah. We finally negotiated it down to a $6 redemption fee plus the cost of registration, and that domain, too, was soon on its way.

So there's the GoDaddy horror story of one small web development firm. I am just now starting to get in position to start growing again. My decision to go with GoDaddy "because they were the industry leader" and "they were the cheapest" turned out to be an incredibly costly decision. And if they'll do that to a guy like me, who had at one time more than 50 domains with GoDaddy, they'll do it to you, too.

But hey, don't take my word for it: Go see for yourself why where are more than 196,000 Google results for "GoDaddy Sucks".