Godaddy just stole my domain

[moino06]

I wanted to share a concerning experience we recently had with our domain name on the GoDaddy platform. A few days ago, we purchased a domain for our business for 10$. The transaction went smoothly, and the domain was added to our account.

However, to our astonishment, we later discovered that the domain had been removed from our account and was put back on sale by GoDaddy at an outrageously higher price 2000$.

We had genuine intentions to use the domain for our business endeavors. We followed all the proper procedures, paid the required amount, and were under the impression that the domain was rightfully ours.

It really seems like the domain has been taken away from us to be resold at a much higher price.

We have all the necessary documentation to prove our rightful ownership of the domain (bank statement, screenshots).

At this point, we have reached out to GoDaddy's customer support and are awaiting their response to rectify the situation promptly.

Can we do anything else?

[dchest]

It was probably due to the domain registry realizing they sold a "premium" domain as an ordinary one. Here's Porkbun's explainer: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/191-registry-deletion-of-doma...

[alxmng]

This happened to me. Bought a domain for $10, and it was taken back a week later due to being a mistaken premium domain.

[moino06]

Thanks. Helpful.

[Postosuchus]

Not the same scenario but recently GoDaddy conveniently "forgot" to extract auto-payment for the only domain I still had with them (somewhat exotic .es TLD) and also forgot to warn me about it, letting the domain registration lapse.

I noticed it via the automatic monitoring once the domain stopped resolving and escalated it, at which point GoDaddy graciously offered me to reinstate the domain for $55 lapsed registration fee. After a brief (10 sec) consideration I've made a counteroffer by telling GoDaddy to go fuck themselves and registering a "normal" .com domain with my default registrar. I am very lucky it was a tiny hobby website with no critical audience. Thank you for the lesson, GoDaddy!

[uxjw]

I was surprised to learn last week that GoDaddy waits until the renewal date to renew. I'm used to other registrars renewing 30 days in advance, so you have time to fix any billing issues before the fees to get it back after it expires.

[NoZebra120vClip]

Are you in Spain? Does GoDaddy have a Spanish office?

[dc396]

You may be able to file a complaint with ICANN, see

https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint

Don't expect anything to happen. However, if enough people have the same complaint Godaddy might have their hand informally slapped.

Alternatively, if you have the documentation you say, you could sue them (they are a US-based company after all).

[oliwarner]

Yeah for the hundreds of millions of dollars they take, and supposedly don't take profit from, it's hard to understand how ICANN performs such a poor job of regulating registrars.

[gymbeaux]

There are many domain registrars out there, and most are better than GoDaddy. Try buying the domain from Google Domains or Namecheap, though it sounds like GoDaddy “bought” it and is trying to get you to pay $2000 for it, so you probably can’t get the domain from another registrar. Malicious or not, this is par for the course for GoDaddy.

[orbz]

Sadly Google domains has been sold off to SquareSpace so depending on your thoughts about then you may want to consider elsewhere.

[NicoJuicy]

Cloudflare sells domains at bulk price

[howenterprisey]

Porkbun ride or die.

[JuanPosadas]

Namecheap sent me NFT bullshit in a newsletter, I'd use porkbun or cloudflare if you use cloudflare.

[GauntletWizard]

There's effectively no recourse. You can complain to IANA; Their pile of Godaddy complaints stacks to the ceiling so they can't add more.

About nine months ago one of my clients bought a domain at "auction" run by Godaddy. Their auction terms included a 1 year renewal. Godaddy didn't renew the domain when he received it; Wouldn't have been a big deal but they also didn't allow renewal for a week afterwards "while the transfer took place". He set up automatic renewal and forgot about it.

Then, three months later, the domain came up for renewal. Godaddy failed to process the transaction once, failed to send him a notification e-mail, failed to send a second notification e-mail (The customer support rep confirmed that the e-mail notifications had failed in writing) and he lost the domain. It was promptly scooped up... By Godaddy. He had to buy it from them (rather, their shell company, "dan.com") again, for the same asking price.

It was a shitshow and there's an important lesson here: Never ever ever use godaddy. It's worth your time and money to switch immediately.

[moino06]

Thanks, good to know

[tharakam]

Not related to domains...

By my own experience I know they don't have even basic business ethics.

Several years ago, a quite a large transaction appeared in my credit card bill. Upon checking I found GoDaddy charged for a hosting service I never asked for. Upon calling their support, they were not surprised or asked any question, they just rollbacked the transaction. I'm saying again, no sales person or anyone reached out to me before using my credit card to process the order I never asked for.

I have a few domains and a shared hosting service with them. Their price increases are not justifiable. I'm in the process of packing my stuff.

[austin-cheney]

I had something similar happen a billion years ago.

I used to have this email address [e-mail] and a domain registered through Network Solutions using that email address. This was around the time that Verisign purchased Network Solutions. At some point the email mutated to [e-mail] whether by my error or theirs. At that time ICQ was the premier instant messaging tool because there was no other such thing. Around this point in time ICQ was sold to AOL including all intellectual property. The domain name for ICQ was actually icq.com, but AOL owned all similar domains for trademark reasons.

I could not get my domain free from VeriSign where it went into limbo at time of renewal and I could not get any help from AOL. The problem is that there was an account recovery tool for domain registrations, but it was based entirely upon email associated with a registration and I could not receive any mail at the icq.org domain. I was able to actually reach the person who managed online IP for AOL (as they had contact information in a whois for one of their domains) and still could not get help to resolve this issue out of fear weakening a trademark.

After 9 months of frustration I suggested some nonsense in the #gentoo IRC channel of Open Projects (later Freenode) that contained about 1100 highly active participants. I mentioned that Fort Hood just installed a tremendously huge internet pipeline, huge for that time, and they weren't using that bandwidth just yet. If an insider knew what they were doing they could easily use that bandwidth to DOS Network Solutions and take down a massive chunk of the internet. It was likely easier than it sounds because there was one of the fattest pipes around, with almost no security or monitoring, so you just needed some level of command and control and inside access. Before their purchase by VeriSign, Network Solutions was a government contractor managing most of the DNS registrations, so they still held many of the older DNS registration records. That's how my domain became associated with VeriSign.

The next day a sales rep from VeriSign called me on my landline at my college dorm offering to help resolve my email account issue.

[JoeyBananas]

Over the years, I've noticed GoDaddy has a disproportionately large number of unsatisfied customers compared to other domain registrars.

[Grimblewald]

godaddy are active enemies of the free and open internet. avoid at all costs, using them is voting for a corporate internet.

[jqpabc123]

Sue. If everything you say is true, it sounds like a good case of fraud.

Meanwhile, deal with a different registrar. I moved most of my stuff off GoDaddy years ago.

[teeray]

I wonder if there’s a domain-name equivalent of Lis Pendens [0] that would prevent the sale of the domain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis_pendens

[moino06]

Thanks, a bit lost as to what to do as this was a very important domain for me. Both on a professional and emotional level. Do you think I'd still be able to sue despite the fine print?

[juanse]

Avoid Godaddy at all cost.

[lesserknowndan]

You should check the ‘whois’ information for the domain for the date it was registered. Here is a website to do this: https://www.whois.com/whois/

It can happen that an already registered domain will be apparently available but in reality something the website is querying fails to provide the correct information.

This has happened to me in the past, but checking ‘whois’ revealed the domain had already been registered and was active for a while.

[damnesian]

I was going to ask who you bought the domain through, but I assume GoDaddy.

If not, that's who you need to complain to.

GoDaddy has been known for shady practices for some time now. They are NOT the only registrar out there. People really need to ignore their ads and shop around.

[enescakir]

Do not use Godaddy

https://science.time.com/2011/04/04/godaddy-ceo-on-shooting-...

[pmack]

Write an army of bots to check millions of domain names on godaddy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[sarimkhalid]

There are enough GoDaddy horror stories online for people to stay 6 feet away from them. Quite fascinating its still a thriving business...

[CharlesW]

Namecheap did this to me in January. It's infuriating.

[em-bee]

somehow hearing this about namecheap is even more infuriating. godaddy has a reputation that makes this no surprise, but i get a lot of conflicting feedback about namecheap. i heard good things and bad things about them. in the recent discussions on HN namecheap came off mostly positive, and then suddenly there is your story, confirming what i heard about namecheap earlier. now i don't know what to think about them.

[sergiotapia]

Who would use GoDaddy on purpose? Do you also plan to host your app on Oracle's cloud? Horrible.

Use Porkbun next time.

[moino06]

You're right, godaddy is hostile. Never should have used in the first place.

[unmole]

What's wrong with Oracle Cloud? I've only had a positive experience with them.

[cpach]

May I ask what TLD this was?