Comments on: Go Daddy: King of Cyber Squatting?

By: SharonO

SharonO — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:58:01 +0000

Same thing happened to me! I called GoDaddy to re-register the name two months before it expired. I came away from the conversation thinking I had, and three months later the website started redirecting to a punt site. I called GoDaddy; they said that their records showed I only contracted for the hosting service for another year, not the domain name. Now WHY would I do that? That would be stupid, or at least a rookie mistake, and I’m neither. They say they sent me emails, but there are no emails in my account or in my spam folder. ??? After much hemming and hawwing, the person in tech service I called gave me the phone number of the new owner (though it’s registered Private)…which turns out is a phone number registered to GoDaddy. And they want $480 for my website domain back. No can do – we’re a community activism site, and the crisis is past and no more funds will be raised. And they claim they can’t contact the new owner without a court order! So I can’t even negotiate a lesser price. But it makes me sad that my email is gone…it was registered to the .org account. There ought to be a law against this practice.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:34:15 +0000

I got burned from GoDaddy.com too. My domain expired less than 30 days ago, but my domain was set to auto-renew. Well, somehow it did not auto-renew. I tried to get them to see what went wrong and I got directed to the “Redemption Scam” page. Pfft! No way am I falling for $80 redemption fee for a $11 domain name. So I called them out on it but haven’t heard anything back from them. Here’s the kicker: I also have hosting through GoDaddy for this domain too. So now, my website doesn’t work (no domain name), but I still get email from name@domainname.com. I wonder how long the email will last?

By: Ricks

Ricks — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:27:28 +0000

I just got stung by godaddy.

My girlfriend is musician and uses her .com as her base contact for all emails and also runs a webstore to sell cd’s.

Her father was the one paying for the domain, as she didn’t have a credit card at the time. His card expired, and the emails my gf were receiving wern’t getting checked as she was using her .com address as her main point of contact. It’s a bit silly to not check her other account, but she’s not exactly a computer person.

Anyway, we tried to renew the domain with another company, somewhere closer to home ie;not in the US, as we like to be able to call people when shit hits the fan.

I wasn’t aware I had to “unlock” the domain name before trying to transfer it to a new registrar.

The thing is, I have allready paid the new company for the .com as my search results come up that the domain was available.

We got the denied email from godaddy, it also says that we transferred it back to godaddy, which we didnt, and now we have to wait the 90 days, or be forced to pay the 80 bucks to get it back.

I think there needs to be a special cases claim for these kinds of things.

By: Bradley

Bradley — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:11:09 +0000

Hi, I know this is a little bit late coming to the conversation, but I have some inside experience on this one as I used to work for a large web host. What happened to you wasn’t all GoDaddy’s fault, here’s why.

ICANN, the group responsible for domain names world wide, has a established a set of rules regarding renewal of domain names. Those rules are meant to protect owners of a domain. Some of the rules involve things like locking a domain name so that it can’t be transfered without the expressed consent of the owner, but the one you’re interested in is called the Redemption Period.

The day after you domain name expires, you start the redemption period. For the first 30 days you are allowed to renew your domain name for the standard price, as you mentioned $8. After that thirty days has passed, the domain name enters into redemption. During this time, only the owner is allowed to renew the domain name. However, instead of the $4.95 ICANN charges registrars (in your case, GoDaddy) to register or renew a .com, .net, or .org domain name, ICANN raises the price to $79.00. Registrars normally tack on the cost they normally charge to register a domain name, and in your case, it looks like GoDaddy decided to charge a couple bucks on top of that.

There’s a bright side, however. A domain name is only in redemption for 60 days on top of the original 30. After that time (90 days from expiration), you can register the domain name anywhere you’d like. The down side is that there are unscrupulous companies which watch the redemption list and swoop up any domain names which have recently been released.

Hope this helps.

By: Catherine Healey

Catherine Healey — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:55:12 +0000

Here’s another twist. I was looking at availability for a number of URLs on GoDaddy.com. I didn’t buy my URL and a few days later I found it had been purchased by…. a godaddy employee.

There’s absolutely no reason anyone would by coincidence want this URL. It’s a family name and hard to spell. It doesn’t have any value except that I was looking at it. I know an employee of godaddy bought it because I wrote their support raving about the incredible support this person had given my and I wanted to send their boss a compliment. Sure enough the wrote back on how i could send Chad some kudos. I’ll be writing kudos and commenting in as many godaddy related sites as I can find. I can use a different URL and hopefully Chad will get fired.

For all that have been burned by godaddy, you should tell people about there practices whenever you get a chance. I know my husband has used this technique to hold hardware companies accountable. After trying to work with the company and not getting anywhere, he wrote in well known forum about his experience. He got results pretty quickly.

Does anyone know what forum gets a response from godaddy?