* The purchase of webfaction w/ a promise to migrate sites to a new host. They promised for over a year to do this migration and then 30 days before shutdown told me they could not migrate and to figure it out.
* Domain name sniping. Never ever use godaddy to search to find a domain. They will just steal anything you search for if you don't immediately claim it.
My domains are currently split between the two
Might as well move my stuff over if it means avoiding things like this
NameCheap send out their reminder emails telling you a domain is about to expire in the format: "Your domain <somedomain.com> expires on MM/DD".
Several times I had domains expire or almost expire because, being in Europe I naturally read 'MM/DD' as 'DD/MM' which, under certain circumstances looked like a domain was expiring several weeks in the future, when it was expiring imminently.
I emailed NameCheap customer service on a couple of occasions about this. Pointing out that, for their customers outside the US, their expiration notice emails were liable to be mis-read and I suggested they either use 'DD/MM' when emailing customers in Europe or --even better- just spell out the month name, so there's no possibility of confusion.
The first time I got no response at all. The second time, I got an email back from NameCheap Customer Service saying "We're an American company. We use American date format"
So I thought 'Fuck you then. You'll not be wanting non-American customers, in that case.' and immediately transferred all my domains elsewhere.
I'm currently using gandi.net. Not as cheap as NameCheap but no complaints so far.
Oh. And to address something raised by the OP: there's no way you should have to pay $150 [or anything for that matter] to revive a domain that expired the day before. I'm not sure what the grace period is. But, in the past, I've renewed domains that had expired a week or more previously and never had any problem. Nor have I ever had to pay any 'fine' for doing so.
GoDaddy are shysters. I'm actually surprised someone fitting the HN demographic uses them. I thought their reputation was pretty well known in techy circles and most savvy people actively avoided them.
I'm guessing that's a low level person and they closed it with that.
There's a post here where the CEO wrote how they had about 1000 people in Ukraine being affected by the war.
Found it, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506813
I've stumbled upon them a couple of times before.