Tough Times for GoDaddy

GoDaddy is the registrar of several of my domain names. While I do think that their web hosting is crap, so far they have performed well as a registrar.

That being said, it looks like other people are not having the same luck with their services lately. Yesterday Mashable covered the story of a website that was suspended by GoDaddy due to “suspicious activity.”

Browsing around the web I also came across a website called NoDaddy, which is dedicated to report horror stories from users that got damaged by the company. Here is a quote from the homepage:

GoDaddy suspends accounts without due cause. They often even levy an arbitrary “fines” and hold your domain name ransom until you pay it. GoDaddy stores your credit card number when you make a purchase, allowing them to levy “fines” without your consent (example1, example2, example3).

For example, when Nick Berlette exposed a serious security hole in the website of DynaDot.Com, they apparently responded by persuading GoDaddy to shut down his blog rather than fixing their pathetic security [agiorlando.com]. GoDaddy of course complied immediately, and sent him this shutdown notice. Note that GoDaddy used the ransom approach here, saying he had two options: Pay a “$199 non-refundable reactivation fee” and GD will put his web site back up, or “if you choose to transfer the berlettefx.com domain name to another registrar, we first require that you pay a $75 administration fee … to cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the situation caused by your web site.

Well, if nothing else I will be more careful from now on. GoDaddy should do its homework though, having such a bad publicity circulating around must cost big bucks, especially on the age of blogs and social media (NoDaddy was on the Delicious front page today indeed).

What registrar do you use? Have you had any problems with it in the past?

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