Wait few hours. Some CTO or PR guru will post a message here.
- We are totally revamping our processes. This never happened out of incompetence. Humans make mistakes. We are contacting the client for 1 year free renewal - waiving. Will mail a coupon code. We consider this issue closed.
Likely an inside job. I had a similar experience with AWS where my account was compromised despite the fact that I had all the proper security features enabled. It was later discovered internal contractors were responsible. But up to that point AWS blamed the issue on me with no proof. A call to the AG office in my state got the ball rolling and initiated an investigation that finally got a manager to take the case seriously.
It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
That's what makes this particular story so egregious.
Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.
>It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
It's also literally one of the most criticized and awful registrars in the world, by a large margin. If decades of stories like this don't convince you to go with a more reliable registrar then I have very little sympathy.
This story is not egregious, it's in fact typical of GoDaddy. Every so often we get a HN post with a GoDaddy horror story. You'd think people would have learned by now.
They are the biggest because they undercut all the other registrars and spent millions on Superbowl commercials among other strategies. Size does not automatically equate to competency. Sometimes bigger can mean more mistakes are likely to occur and customer voices may be more likely to be unanswered in the ocean of support issues.
> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well.
That is also at least 10 years old stale matter. Have you ever read people wrongly being locked out from a BIIIIG provider unable to get through to get remedy? Apparently no. I did. I am sure several other people here did too.
Motto: "Eat shit! A trillion flies cannot be wrong!"
You’d be surprised how many enterprises use them. Also their managed hosting support is surprisingly competent. I’m not a fan of their service but some of our clients use them and anytime their servers have had issues support was quick to fix. Way nicer than having to jump in and do it myself. And so far it’s all been local support and not offshore.
Came here to post the exact same comment. They have a history of amateur-hour stuff like this, too, don't they? For me, the brand has always been associated with "bet it all on marketing" rather than technical competence.
"- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong.
- Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect.
- All of the SEO is gone."
but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify the login."
Most of the issues we've seen in the past are due to payment failures, credit card declined, etc., that let the domain goto auction and lose access.
This is all new and from the content of the post looks like due to an employee error in transferring the wrong domain and they don't have a process to address the situation.
Corporates have a huge blind spot and everything with them is just a process and this case the process completely failed.
Unfortunately everytime it's the customer who suffers.
Probably ten years ago with name.com I had a .at domain expire.
I caught it like a day or two later, and successfully renewed it through their site but it did not take.
There was somehow already someone up squatting my domain. I contacted support and they told me there's apparently no renewal window for .at but they could recover it for $140 - oof .. sure. It was nothing super important but would be annoying to lose.
Then it took like a week for them to get back to me, but after that week I got my domain back. I have no idea what gymnastics happened on their side.
CloudFlare since they sell domains at cost and have really good DNS infrastructure with some free protection features. If the TLD isn't supported by them for registration then I'd just use their nameservers.
Or Route53 if you're using AWS since that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of AWS and manage in IaC, and AWS also has robust network/DNS infrastructure.
(I would say GCP if using GCP/Google Workspace, too, but since they split domains off to Squarespace I really don't know what is happening over there anymore as far as domains go.)
So far those 3 have been more than sufficient for all of my domain needs.
Namecheap has had its own host of issues like a few years back breaking hsts and causing tons of sites to break for quite a while and their response was basically oh well. That incident along made me move my domains off to porkbun.
Godaddy is pretty awful in a lot of things. This doesn't even surprise me. But I will say that their broker services have done me well. But I do transfer domains away as soon as possible to dynadot
This is a textbook case for suing for compensation and punitive damages. I hope someone opened an arbitration complaint on day one to get the wheels turning. Maybe they’ll consider reviewing https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint (one can dream).
Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:
1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes.
2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.
This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.
The amount of dark patterns in product management (Domain renewal) UI related to selling additional services and general shadiness from godaddy make it a very poor choice as a registrar. Concur with the other person who has no idea why anyone would choose to use it.
Bob Parsons has done a pretty good job cleaning up his Wikipedia and Google search results over the past decade, so a /sarcasm tag might be needed here for the benefit of people born yesterday
This reminds me of when a friend’s website inexplicably disappeared and was replaced with a redirect to an ad for some GoDaddy ai website builder and support couldn’t explain how that happened other than “the nameservers were changed” despite the fact that the account hadn’t had any logins for over a year.
Oh, please do. Mistakes happen, and the scale of GoDaddy means that even rare mistakes will happen. But they may still be liable for damages, how much is the reputational damage, and the possible lost business? Why wouldn't you go this route?
Another example of a long list of stories where GoDaddy practically destroys decades of business trust for a customer by just ripping their domain away for no reason. What an awful company.
This comments reads sarcastic, but it makes a serious point. GoDaddy has an extremely poor reputation. At some point you must accept that choosing companies like that is your own mistake.
the thing is that it makes sense when you are small, and it's one of the hardest and riskiest things to change, so it's a decision that stays with you.
And to be completely honest, it isn't that bad, you get a phone you can call 24/7. Of course mistakes happen and staff can't always help, but it's more like a 99.9% vs 99.99% quality thing when comparing to other providers like AWS or CloudFlare.
- We are totally revamping our processes. This never happened out of incompetence. Humans make mistakes. We are contacting the client for 1 year free renewal - waiving. Will mail a coupon code. We consider this issue closed.
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
That's what makes this particular story so egregious.
Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.
It's also literally one of the most criticized and awful registrars in the world, by a large margin. If decades of stories like this don't convince you to go with a more reliable registrar then I have very little sympathy.
This story is not egregious, it's in fact typical of GoDaddy. Every so often we get a HN post with a GoDaddy horror story. You'd think people would have learned by now.
Whatever their process is, it's concerning. I wonder how many sign-offs are actually involved, or if it's just a ticket handled and closed by a rep.
That is also at least 10 years old stale matter. Have you ever read people wrongly being locked out from a BIIIIG provider unable to get through to get remedy? Apparently no. I did. I am sure several other people here did too.
Motto: "Eat shit! A trillion flies cannot be wrong!"
If we ask 100 likely buyers family feud style, where would they go buy a domain, GoDaddy likely is going to be the top answer by a wide margin.
They wouldn't know about any bad news/ security incident with the brand either.
"- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong. - Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect. - All of the SEO is gone."
but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify the login."
It is similar like losing phone or sim or even being in a foreign country where you can't access your number but worse.
Personal experience, no relationship to either registrar listed above
This is all new and from the content of the post looks like due to an employee error in transferring the wrong domain and they don't have a process to address the situation.
Corporates have a huge blind spot and everything with them is just a process and this case the process completely failed.
Unfortunately everytime it's the customer who suffers.
I caught it like a day or two later, and successfully renewed it through their site but it did not take.
There was somehow already someone up squatting my domain. I contacted support and they told me there's apparently no renewal window for .at but they could recover it for $140 - oof .. sure. It was nothing super important but would be annoying to lose.
Then it took like a week for them to get back to me, but after that week I got my domain back. I have no idea what gymnastics happened on their side.
As soon as the word is mentioned I tell them the horror stories.
Saving this to the bucket of stories.
Or Route53 if you're using AWS since that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of AWS and manage in IaC, and AWS also has robust network/DNS infrastructure.
(I would say GCP if using GCP/Google Workspace, too, but since they split domains off to Squarespace I really don't know what is happening over there anymore as far as domains go.)
So far those 3 have been more than sufficient for all of my domain needs.
Otherwise, Porkbun or Cloudflare Domains if you're ok using their DNS.
Depends. If it's something really high priority (like main domain for a large corporation) I'd likely be paying CSC 4 digit sums per domain per year.
For stuff a tier below that I'd be looking at companies that are serious about security and happen to do domains as well e.g. Cloudflare, Amazon
Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:
1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes. 2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.
This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.
Oh, please do. Mistakes happen, and the scale of GoDaddy means that even rare mistakes will happen. But they may still be liable for damages, how much is the reputational damage, and the possible lost business? Why wouldn't you go this route?
And yet he uses GoDaddy?
And to be completely honest, it isn't that bad, you get a phone you can call 24/7. Of course mistakes happen and staff can't always help, but it's more like a 99.9% vs 99.99% quality thing when comparing to other providers like AWS or CloudFlare.