I use my own domain to host a simple homepage. I also use it as a custom mail domain. Initially, I bought the domain on godaddy.com when I was getting into the realms of software engineering. I always found the user interface hard to get used to, but it never bothered me enough for me to transfer my domain. Especially because I run the DNS through Cloudlfare and, therefore, I have fairly little contact with the interface of godaddy.
Today Proton (my mail provider of choice) surprised me with a warning that there were problems with the setup of my domain. A quick research revealed that godaddy had cancelled my domain. It showed up in the Redemption Grace Period. This status code indicates that godaddy has asked the registry to delete my domain. After 30 calendar days + 5 days following the end of the redemption period, my domain is purged from the registry database and becomes available for registration.
I immediately contacted the godaddy support hotline. Mainly because of my mail account and the services connected to it. They confirmed the termination. The reason given was that I had failed to respond to an e-mail - that was sent yesterday on a Sunday(!) at 9:51 PM. Then at 0 o'clock my domain was terminated. So I had a breathtaking 2 hours to respond. Which is especially fun because I go to bed at 10pm. :-D
To make matters worse, the mail ended up in the spam folder because Godaddy's reputation seems to be bad and was titled: "Update your privacy settings and personal information.". Even under normal circumstances, I would have ignored this email. How should someone suspect that in a few minutes from now on the own domain is going to be killed.
If I understood the service employee correctly, this mail means that something was wrong with my payment data. And indeed, there was an old credit card on file. However, a PayPal address was also stored there, which still worked. Via this address, I was later even debited the penalty fees that I supposedly had to pay.
After some back and forth with service, I was then given an ultimatum: Either I pay €150 fine, allegedly required by my government to be charged for domains that enter the grace period. Or I lose the domain.
The latter didn't sound very inviting, as I like my domain and also don't feel like switching all accounts to another domain/provider. So I paid the fee.
Godaddy confirmed afterwards that there were no further emails or announcements. The service employee even confirmed by phone that apart from the mail and the subsequent generous transition period of 2 hours, there would have been no further information.
TL:DR If you have a domain with Godaddy, just make sure that the payment information is correct. Otherwise, it might get expensive.
Depending on what you need, https://dnsimple.com seems to have a good reputation, I also see a bunch of people spreading their risk by putting DNS on one big (cloud) provider and all other services on other providers. This means that while Cloudflare does DNS registration now, you might still want to use Cloudflare for your DNS zone and something else for registration. That said, Cloudflare still has a good reputation (for paying customers!).
The idea behind that is the (generally) low fee of DNS registration is easy to monitor/check and maintain, so if all else fails you at least retain your domain name as an identity which is generally the foundation to everything else. While it might suck to lose the contents of a mailbox or a website, if you still retain the DNS registration you can always re-create.
Other service providers that don't structurally screw your DNS over (re-including the ones I mentioned):
- AWS
- Cloudflare
- Leaseweb
- Rackspace
- transip
- OVH
- dnsimple
- GCP (Google)
- EasyDNS
- porkbun
- Microsoft
- Hetzner
- key-systems GmbH (usually via one of their partners)
- Scaleway
If you are in an ITAR area, conflict region or trade sanctioned region, none of this will help tho.
GoDaddy did nothing to help. I've posted about this before, and like to bring it up everytime people mention bad GoDaddy customer service.
I've been using them since 2011 and have not had a single issue.
In fact, they have just kept on progressively getting better!
ycombinator uses gandi.net too.
[Edit] Added 24 hours to short time
[0] https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...
It's been discussed here at HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
Even if I was affected, I'm not sure I'd want to continue relationship with them. Anyway, user of name.com now, so far so good.
(P.S. Might need to say that I support Ukraine in this horrible conflict, I just happen to hold a Russian passport)
I've been playing with cloudflare recently, and just realized they also do domain registration and DNS hosting. I might seriously look at switching to them depending on hassle and potential benefit. But I usually like having dedicated registrar/DNS that is uncoupled from hosting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470266.
As it turns out, Godaddy has a backup payment method option: https://godaddy.com/help/set-a-backup-payment-method-724
Like I said, in all these posts, there's a tendency to victim blame by making convenient assumptions to show the victim must have somehow been at fault. The GP even jumped straight into "if X, then it must be your fault" without even bothering to check with OP if X is true.
Additionally, despite all our insider observations of snafus as software engineers as well as personal experiences as customers, there's a tendency to implicitly assume that all software systems are designed perfectly and the entire chain of people that run them are 100% correct and ethical 100% of the time.
I termed this "the tech just-world hypothesis" because of how often I keep seeing it.
And on that note, Letsencrypt has a helpful list of hosting companies that automate the process for you: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/web-hosting-who-support-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
In the case of your comment, pejorative generalizations about national groups counts as nationalistic flamebait (that is, it has the effect, in the general case, of provoking nationalistic flamewar) whether you intended that or not.
They do it for lots of right reasons, I'm sure, but they also do it based on simple claims. While I thought that's a great way to hurt any site if such a claim is all it takes, I haven't experimented with it, so I don't know if you have to make it a legalese thing, or if they do some automated checks. But once you get a site flagged, it'll probably stay so, unless they have some very good connections to CF.
They will forward any complaints also to the hosting company of the origin, but if you're not in luck, the site will be hosted at a questionable company that has no trouble hosting phishing sites. Hetzner for example did quickly react and requested comments from us under threat of shutting down the server. They were happy with our response and their own checks however.
Still, I agree that they should have a way of de-anonymizing who is behind a site, their business is in protecting against technical attacks, not protecting against the law.
1. Get authorization code for transfer from GoDaddy
2. Put that in the host you want to transfer to (This will start your race against time). I suggest you use cloudflare since the transfer is fast.
3. Go to GoDaddy and approve transfer(GoDaddy hides this option to delay the process intentionally, follow the video to find this option).
4. Your details will become private again if your new host support whois privacy.
Here is a video(starts at 8:18) to do all 3 steps back to back: https://youtu.be/81LtL2ZvD38?t=498
1. Get authorization code for transfer from GoDaddy
2. Put that in the host you want to transfer to (This will start your race against time). I suggest you use cloudflare since the transfer is fast.
3. Go to GoDaddy and approve transfer immediately (GoDaddy hides this option to delay the process intentionally, follow the video to find this option).
4. Your details will become private again if your new host support whois privacy.
Here is a video(starts at 8:18) to do all 3 steps back to back: https://youtu.be/81LtL2ZvD38?t=498
By contrast, this is the email that a MAANG company received recently regarding a site being reported for phishing one of their login sites:
So I guess they are somewhat arbitrary in their phishing actions.
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.
I left GD years ago after this - https://science.time.com/2011/04/04/godaddy-ceo-on-shooting-...
Not only did I hate their interface like you mentioned. Their customer service always sucked too. I moved a lot of TLDs off of there at my old job. Happy to say all the other companies I have used have been above and beyond better than GoDaddy.
Do some research and you'll find some great deals out there. Cloudflare, Hover, NameCheap offer great services IMO. Never had any issues with them.
You can find most of the drama here: https://domainincite.com/tag/web