GoDaddy is a scam

https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/a562gv/godaddy_is_a_scam/

by k0t0n0 • 8 years ago

281 118 8 years ago

paulpauper2• 8 years ago

I used godaddy in 2010-2011 for domains. no problem with them. ymmv

That doesn't say anything about this individual's suspicion that they create a sense of artificial scarcity and/or bad faith "auctions".

paulpauper2• 8 years ago

how do I delete this. I'm sorry for sharing my experience with godaddy. I was just talking about domain registration. I am suspicious of domain name auctions. There is no way to delete comment.s I would have deleted it as soon as it went to zero but could not.

LinuxBender• 8 years ago

If that was your experience, then don't delete the comment. Doing so promotes echo chambers. If you are concerned about Karma, simply submit some articles to balance it out.

xapata• 8 years ago

sorry for sharing my experience with godaddy

Personal experiences are sometimes useful information. However, yours is somewhat out of date and lacked detail.

kbenson• 8 years ago

I think you often can't if it's got a reply on it. Your best bet is to edit it. My suggestion is to append a note to it instead of completely removing it or changing it, since that alters the record of what really happened, and causes replies to no longer make sense.

Adding something like "Edit: Whoops, was just trying to note X, but it didn't come across right." would be sufficient, but it's up to you. To my knowledge, you have until two hours after posting to edit it, so time's running out...

mpg515• 8 years ago

GoDaddy was my first registrar in like 2004 and leaving them was an extremely difficult process at the time. I believe they made it troublesome on purpose, though I would not also rule out incompetence.

uberswe3• 8 years ago

Nothing new. I used to buy and sell (mostly buy) lots of domains and wrote a review of several registrars in 2014 placing Godaddy at the very last place recommending users to stay away. Here below is what I wrote then:

"Godaddy has improved slightly on their interface since last years review. However they still have large menus that are complicated to navigate through and seem to be using the same bait and switch methods as before. After finally finding a domain that you like you will receive several offers for email, hosting, etc before you can even get to the cart. All prices seem to have an asterisk or two telling you that their super low price is only valid if you pay for 2 years or more. Going from previous experience I feel as if Godaddy wants to lock me in to use their services for as long as possible or to simply get as much money out of me before I leave. Looking around for what Godaddy charges for renewals I found several red flags where users are getting charged “market prices” for their renewals. You can see a forum thread regarding how Godaddy charges way too much for renewals here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1365680). This post here (https://www.authormedia.com/6-reasons-authors-should-avoid-g...) even gives an additional 6 reasons why you should stay away from Godaddy."

https://archives.tenghamn.com/best/domain/registrar/2014/10/...

ConfusedDog• 8 years ago

I think I saw your post long time ago and switched from GoDaddy to Namecheap because of it. Now I'm using Google Domain. Thank you for your contribution!

uberswe3• 8 years ago

Glad to hear it!

ukyrgf3• 8 years ago

The premium renewal thing blew my mind when I first saw it. I couldn't believe they were so bold as to say that one .com is more expensive to renew than another.

two2two• 8 years ago

I've experienced sketchy practices from several domain brokers and hosting services. GoDaddy is just the most widely used amongst my friends and clients--making them a necessary evil in my life--luckily not at my expense.

chad_strategic• 8 years ago

I have known a few people who think they are going to make millions selling domains. They had hundreds of domains, with auto renew. Set it and forget it. That has to got to be 50% of goDaddy revenue.

I moved over to Amazon Route 53. It's not terribly user friendly, but at least it's not GoDaddy.

tomphoolery• 8 years ago

I wasn't a big fan of Amazon's domain name prices, but Route 53 is by far the best DNS I've ever used in my life.

bad_user• 8 years ago

For what is worth I've been using Namecheap.com for domain registration, for several years and have been satisfied. Never had any problems.

Cloudflare is also entering this business and looks promising.

uberswe3• 8 years ago

I definitely agree, NameSilo is a smaller registrar but is my go to place for .com while NameCheap has a wider selection of extensions.

leetbulb• 8 years ago

I'll second this. Namecheap is amazing company! Been using them for domains and DNS (smaller scale stuff) for years.

bitshepherd• 8 years ago

I'm going to have to be the dissenter here.

Namecheap also does domain name front running and tasting, so it's not really any different.

dkonofalski6• 8 years ago

No they don't. At least not in the way that GoDaddy does it... NameCheap does this with domains that have expired and domains that are searched and reserved but fail for some reason. Since part of the service they provide is contingent on covering for people in the event of failures (missed renewals, misspellings, etc.), NameCheap auto-renews domains and reserves variations of others when they're registered. If the user doesn't end up actually renewing the domain, they mark it up and sell it as a premium domain since they now have paid for a domain without a buyer. NameCheap mostly does this as a service for existing customers. GoDaddy, on the other hand, does it explicitly for the revenue they can generate from desperate people who need domains they previously searched for.

jesseb• 8 years ago

I've never experienced this in my 5 or 6 years of using them (not definitively saying it doesn't happen). I frequently search for domains and then come back at a later date to purchase them for the exact price they were originally listed at.

sgtcodfish• 8 years ago

I was happy with Namecheap until they redesigned their website and included a tonne of JS which slowed everything down. Doing something as simple as changing an A record became unbearably sluggish, and I tend to think I have a fairly high tolerance for that kind of thing.

I gave them a few months to see if it was teething problems with the new design but it persisted. Eventually I moved everything to gandi, which has been better in every way as far as I can tell - cheaper (for me), better website, better features out of the box.

sizzle• 8 years ago

Their online chat support is extremely helpful in my experience

ukyrgf3• 8 years ago

I recently got into the first wave of Cloudflare's domain registration, but I have had a pretty good experience with Namecheap over the years. It looks like I can save a few bucks here and there, but my next expiring domain isn't for a few months so hopefully I can read other's experiences by then.

stevewillows• 8 years ago

Namecheap is good. Porkbun.com is worth keeping an eye on. I've got a few domains with them. Excellent support and really competitive pricing. gandi.net is also decent for certain international TLDs.

I check https://tld-list.com regularly for ultra cheap renewals. I have two .party domains that I previously renewed for ten years for about $1/year a while ago.

rajacombinator• 8 years ago

Namecheap is played out now. Porkbun seems to be numero uno at the moment.

timbit42• 8 years ago

Look at NameSilo.com. Their renewals are less expensive and that includes free domain privacy while NameCheap.com charges for domain privacy after the first year. They also have free 2FA and accept BitCoin.

Porkbun.com is a bit less expensive than NameSilo.com and also offers free domain privacy but I haven't tried it.

Another inexpensive one is NameBright.com but no free domain privacy, but some might prefer it if they don't care about domain privacy. I haven't tried this one either.

SSLy• 8 years ago

NameCheap.com charges for domain privacy after the first year.

Didn't they recently stop that?

myrryr• 8 years ago

Man, namesilo has a LOT of dodgy business going on in domains they register, and don't reply to any emails about it.

They are suspect as all hell.

sublupo4• 8 years ago

Namecheap is also scammy. I searched for a random URL (smithstein.co.ru) and it said that while they don't sell co.ru they sell smithstein.com ( https://i.ibb.co/FxmMH81/Screenshot-20181212-133716.png ) . After clicking the button to buy it shows an error ( https://i.ibb.co/2Zbp7hB/Screenshot-20181212-133828.png ) and then when trying to search for smithstein.com I am given the option to make an offer (ie. not buy because someone else owns it)

pgrote• 8 years ago

I have no proof of anything GoDaddy specifically does.

A while back I came across some of my archives that mentioned a BBS name that was popular in the past. Thinking it would be neat to own the domain name of the company that went out of business, I went to GoDaddy and checked. It was available awesome. Got distracted, came back an hour later and it was no longer available, but was at auction.

My first suspicion is nothing nefarious happened. I could have misread available vs auction, but I don't think so. I might have mistyped the domain name, but I don't think so. Something didn't feel right.

A few days later I checked another domain using whois through icaan. No resolution. Available. Pop over to GoDaddy and do the same thing ... check name is available. As a test, I wait an hour and come back to the name at auction.

I cannot explain what happened it except maybe GoDaddy's name check leaks or someone had the exact same name ideas when I had them. Again, this was years ago and am unsure if it still occurs.

Wowfunhappy• 8 years ago

I also have no proof, but I have heard enough other stories like this one that I firmly belief something is going on. Using GoDaddy to check if a domain is available is a good way to make that domain become unavailable.

strict9• 8 years ago

Drop to a bash shell and do this: $ whois example.com

It's what I've always turned to first for availability. Super fast and less chance of a middleman grabbing it because you expressed interest.

dewey2• 8 years ago

Doesn’t give you the price though which is one of the things people are looking for when searching for a domain and if it’s not one of the popular TLDs where you already know a ballpark figure.

simlevesque• 8 years ago

If anyone needs to do the same thing, use this one: https://whois.icann.org

clairity• 8 years ago

unfortunately icann uses google for captcha.

furyg3• 8 years ago

I also had this experience once a few years ago (2011 or 2012). I found it extremely suspicious and spent a few days running a some experiments. I came up with a list of domains and watched what happened after a GoDaddy search: some (but not all) of my domains were suddenly purchased by a GoDaddy organization. Literally all of the ones that were purchased were available again after a few days (I assume this has to do with the grace period).

Since then I don't type any candidate domain into any registrar / online tool unless I'm ready to purchase.

jonhohle• 8 years ago

This is called domain kiting or "tasting"[0]. The founder of Go Daddy decried the idea a decade ago[1]. Of course this was after running their own kiting operation for some time using ad placement via Google Ad Sense for Domains (no content necessary, just a domain name). I know, because I worked on the app that serviced 20M domains and fed metrics back to the team that decided to buy or release. The project was shuttered after some employee abuse (buying the domains for themselves) and shortly before Bob declared the moral high ground.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070707203924/http://www.bobpar...

behringer3• 8 years ago

You should find a registrar that does not engage in this behavior. I use gandi.net. I pay almost twice as much as the cheapest registrars charge but I never have to worry about how they are going to treat me.

Arqu• 8 years ago

This is a known trick of many registrars, but GoDaddy has to be the leader. Happened to me on two occasions as well. Recently it's supposed to be a bit cracked down on as they have strict quotas on how many domains they can reserve without outright buying.

As for my case, it was a couple years ago where they would also host a small site redirecting to the auction. It states that it is owned by some XYZ entity, but if you peel enough layers of the onion scheme you can get to their name.

You can read more about the practice and measures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

PedroBatista• 8 years ago

The same thing happened to me some years ago!

It was a trendy .com domain that was available, naively I didn't grab it right away, 2 days latter I went to purchase it, it was taken..

dkonofalski6• 8 years ago

I can. I used to work at GoDaddy and they have an "Executive Domain Team" that is basically just a fancy word for a group of people that assist domain kiters. If you search for a domain on GoDaddy's whois, they put a hold on it and publish the list to potential domain "investors" (read: kiters) who then have the option of purchasing it out from under you. These are people that literally invest thousands of dollars to buy up domains on the off chance that they can resell them at a profit. Anytime there's a sunrise period on a new domain TLD, these guys go in and buy all the popular and common names wholesale and they have a dedicated person that works at GoDaddy to help them do this.

Anytime you have a question about whether something is a scam or not, just ask yourself where the money is. In this case, it's in GoDaddy making money off of any time a domain name is sold, re-sold, auctioned, or if it changes hands. It's where the majority of their money made comes from, outside of services where people just don't know that better alternatives exist.

joshuatalb• 8 years ago

This sounds exactly like what happened to me. I had a few .london domains in one of the early stages of the TLD launch. Sat there for about 60 days, and then all of a sudden - gone.

GD support were useless and I lost out on a few quality domain names. Never used them again since. In fact, I don’t even think I got my money back!

gmiller123456• 8 years ago

This isn't limited to Godaddy. A friend of mine tried to register a domain name on Network Solutions way back when they were still called that. He typed in his credit card number wrong. By the time he got an e-mail stating the transaction failed, someone else had already registered his domain.

galfarragem• 8 years ago

My impression is that a domain checker works as a password checker: each domain/password inserted gets listed in a database. In case of domains, a simple script is enough to skim them and get the 'gold'. In case of passwords, even if the password was unique, after checking it won't be anymore..

iamnothere• 8 years ago

I seem to remember a time (probably over a decade ago) where Netsol actually admitted this, tried to defend it, then eventually backed down and said that they would stop doing it. I've always used command-line whois to check for available domains since then, never had one snatched up either.

aviv• 8 years ago

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18632988

oceanghost• 8 years ago

Godaddy is for sure a scam.

They once charged me, if memory serves, $75 to resolve a complaint about one of my domains. They wouldn't tell me what the complaint was, who brought it, or how it was resolved. They just charged my card on file $75 for the "service".

I transferred my domains out and never looked back.

mtw• 8 years ago

Godaddy got a domain I searched and did not buy, and generally the user experience is like doing business with a scammer and penny pincher. On the other hand, they found a buyer for one of my domains for $5000. Kinda of a wash.

azhenley• 8 years ago

GoDaddy made me angry earlier this summer when it broke domain forwarding when they added shortlinks. All my URLs instantly broke. Customer support said it was by design.

To fix it, we made NavHere (https://navhere.com/) to be a simple domain forwarding service. Just a few weeks ago, GoDaddy announced they are going to fix their domain forwarding...

jermaustin1• 8 years ago

That said, domain forwarding is still broken on GoDaddy for people who wish to forward domain-a.com/* to domain-b.com/base-path/* and preserve the path.

AdmiralAsshat• 8 years ago

FWIW, GoDaddy isn't the only site I've seen do this. I had the same issue a couple years ago when I tried to use Google Domains to find a domain for my website. At the time I was trying a few and found, to my delight, that nothingofvalue.com was available.

I started the process of purchasing it and then got scared when it came time to list my personal address for ownership. I stopped for about an hour to call my father to see if he would mind if I used his PO Box as the address. When I went back to redo/complete the registration, I was told the domain had been purchased by someone else.

For the next year or two, I checked it periodically, just to see if anyone had actually built a page of it. Nope. Just squatting.

I purchased nothingofvalue.org instead and have had it ever since. I also transferred the domain to Namecheap.

habosa• 8 years ago

I spent two hours one time transferring all my domains (~10) to Google Domains. What a relief to be done with that company. There is not one honest step in the GoDaddy flow, you really have to keep your hand on your wallet.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, no interaction with the domains team though.

Aaargh20318• 8 years ago

How is Google’s support for domains ? I am very hesitant to buy anything from Google that may require support, as an Android developer I’ve heard too many horror stories to trust Google in this area (basically, there is no way to even talk to a human being, you can send an email and get a canned response from a bot. You’re better off talking to a brick wall).

behringer3• 8 years ago

It's exactly what you can imagine. I'd instead recommend gandi.net. It's a few bucks more but they take their motto to heart.

move-on-by• 8 years ago

I really like Google Domains. $12 a year gets you a domain, private registration, transfer lock, DNSSEC, IPv6 support, and Dynamic DNS (using DDclient). Before Google Domains I used GoDaddy - so perhaps I'm just comparing it against a terrible service to start with, but that is a lot of features for a flat low rate.

On the other hand, I don't like Google and I'm in the process of exiting their ecosystem completely. DuckDuckGo, just got my first iPhone ever, switching to ProtonMail, using Firefox, Pi-Hole to block google analytics. Router configured to drop all traffic to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Weirdly, Google Domains will probably be one of the longest holdouts of all the Google products

dna_polymerase• 8 years ago

Unless you make heavy use of Dynamic DNS I can recommend iWantMyName. Have about 10 domains with them and really like them (one-click install of many popular services, generally they don't send you any mails unless it's necessary), on the other hand I do not have much experience with any other registrar.

strayamaaate• 8 years ago

Recently went through the same process. I really like the management interface and tight integration with GSuite.

They don't support all of the latest TLDs though, so be sure to check first if you want to do a complete port away from your current registrar.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

Going to get a little off-topic here, feel free to downvote if you feel it's out of place.

Many HN users presumably saw the public launch of sr.ht a few weeks ago. I've been thinking about directions that it could be expanded in the future, and the use-cases which fit best are both (1) things I need to do to maintain sr.ht anyway, and could make into a service available to users; (2) things which are annoying to do elsewhere. To this end I'm thinking about offering domain registration. Since users pay a monthly/yearly subscription fee for sr.ht, I can just sell domains at wholesale prices and take no margin. Then you get to use the nice UI and API and so on sr.ht offers for doing DNS and domain registration (DNS probably through just pushing zone files to a git repo).

Thoughts?

colemannugent• 8 years ago

While I have no doubt that you of all people could do DNS right, it seems a bit like scope creep IMO. I'm very excited about sr.ht, but also worried that it might be too much to execute all at once.

That being said, DNS records in Git sounds kinda neat. You avoid all the special authentication nonsense of "DynamicDNS" or proprietary APIs by using SSH keys, and you have versioning for rolling back configurations. Also you don't need a special UI that essentially builds zone files as you'd just have your users make their own. You might need some validation of the files before you actually put them into BIND though.

Sir_Cmpwn2• 8 years ago

Well, in terms of scope, this falls under

things I need to do to maintain sr.ht anyway

I already run my own authoritative nameservers and if I automated the maintenance and deployment of that, it'd only be an afternoon of hacking to make available to the public, and a weekend of hacking to add domain registration to it. I don't just work on sr.ht, too, so having a streamlined and integrated domain registration and DNS service would be great for my other projects.

ryanlol6• 8 years ago

That being said, DNS records in Git sounds kinda neat

I think luadns.com does this, https://github.com/luadns/dns

I haven't actually used them so not sure how good their product is.

codyogden• 8 years ago

I use domainr.com for this very reason.

saltyshake2• 8 years ago

I had a very similar experience back in 2007. Searched for the domain, was available (and super unique). Next day ready to buy and it was up for auction.

Nowadays I would only use Google. They have a reputation to worry about if they try and pull over these tactics, unlike Godaddy and similar shady companies.

SQL2219• 8 years ago

I had my suspicions about searching for domains on godaddy. Do a search for a domain, come back in a few days and it was purchased by someone else.

ryeguy_242• 8 years ago

Couldn’t this be considered “front running”?

etjossem• 8 years ago

Ding ding ding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

ryanlol6• 8 years ago

How do you go from this post to "front running"? The guy is talking about a domain auction lasting more than 90 days.

ryeguy_242• 8 years ago

I could be mistaken by the main point was that they are searching for a domain on Godaddy and finds it was purchased and subsequently put up for auctions moments after the search.

taytus2• 8 years ago

I'm just an user, I'm not in the business of buying/selling domains.

Besides their shitty website, I never had a problem with GoDaddy.

I've been a customer of theirs for about 15 years.

Just sharing my experience.

taytus2• 8 years ago

Guys, I really don't mind the downvotes. And I won't ask for clarification either. But I believe sharing someone's experience I believe doesn't deserve a downvote. Anyway, downvote as much as you want :)

dmortin• 8 years ago

Same for me. I have a couple of domains with hosting at them, which get about 20k users per day in total. I've been a customer for 10 years or so and while there were some hiccups sometimes, usually it just works without problems.

Their 1st line support is not the greatest when there is an actual problem, though. Luckily I only had a few problems during the years.

stubish• 8 years ago

I moved over a decade ago purely because of their shitty website. It just made me angry, wading through what could be a satire of all the annoying, shady and deceptive sales tactics that I don't think existed anywhere else at the time. I started paying more elsewhere to avoid the stress, and expected them to die off in the race to the bottom. But there they still are, and they aren't the cheapest and aren't offering anything unique. They are one of the reasons I'm so intolerant of advertising in general, because what I see is marketing driving people to give money to an abusive company, when just about every alternative is a better option. It just seems wrong.

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

15 years, huh? If a video of "hungry villagers" butchering the elephant GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons murdered while wearing neon orange GoDaddy baseball caps doesn't give you a problem with GoDaddy, and you also have no problem with all the dark patterns on their terrible web site and the shady shenanigans so many people are reporting that GoDaddy currently perpetrate on their users, then what would they have to actually do to convince you to switch to a more reputable service?

https://gawker.com/5787676/meet-godaddys-ridiculous-elephant...

herghost• 8 years ago

Their domain privacy service just blackholes any emails sent to it instead of forwarding them on.

Almost cost me a domain due to their scammy set-up - since the domain was listed as "Domains By Proxy" or something similar, GoDaddy argued that it wasn't actually mine (despite selling it to me, and selling the privacy service to me) and the request to transfer couldn't go ahead.

Thankfully Nominet were incredibly helpful (and seemingly well aware of GoDaddy's M.O.) and they managed to sort it for me.

Sadly, I've just checked their site and they list GoDaddy as a registrar to use them looking for a domain, which is a shame.

ryanlol6• 8 years ago

What is godaddy supposed to have done wrong here? OP strangely enough doesn't seem to make any specific claims of wrongdoing.

chengiz• 8 years ago

They registered a domain soon as OP searched for it and jacked up the price, basically.

ryanlol6• 8 years ago

That's not what the OP says though. The OP says the domain was registered the same day he searched it on GoDaddy, he never specifies when this happened.

If you read the guys comments, it almost feels like he's going out of his way to avoid specifying this really important detail. https://www.reddit.com/user/joevenet/comments/

And if this thread is supposed to be about godaddy squatting, why the story about the 90 day auction expiry? To me this definitely reads like a complaint about Godaddy auction processes and not about squatting.

andrewmcwatters• 8 years ago

My understanding of GoDaddy over the last couple of decades is that they weren't always a bad player in the space. They are, supposedly still, the largest registrar. I don't see a future where that can ever stay true, however. I used to use them, but my final straw was their backing of SOPA in an incredibly heated time for Internet legislation which has reverberated into present day.

A lot of their market presence in the past had to do with their marketing, such as the Super Bowl commercials they ran, GoDaddy partner Danica Patrick, and some local philanthropy in Arizona, where their headquarters is.

Eventually, people found better deals with Gandi, Namecheap, and others, and their industry force evolved into one with far less impact.

Now the industry is evolving into one with no overhead with Cloudflare providing domains at-cost as companies provide value-added services which subsidize operating costs for providing domains to customers. This will ultimately put companies we've known in the past to be giants, and to this day are still publicly traded, in dire straits as they find new ways to stay relevant.

GoDaddy provides no high-value value-added services in comparison to other market leaders. So, for most who have moved on, there's no reason to go back. They are a now a middleman for no one other than small agencies or individual customers at best, who arguably do not provide any value for them either.

We'll see what happens to GoDaddys, Namecheaps, and Network Solutions when you can't charge people for domains anymore. What happened to TLS certificates will almost certainly happen to domains, too, albeit with ICANN fees remaining as the last overhead.

ryanlol6• 8 years ago

GoDaddy provides no high-value value-added services in comparison to other market leaders

I don't think there's all that much serious competition for auctions.godaddy.com

EGreg2• 8 years ago

Link to hacker news from... 7 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326790

saltyshake2• 8 years ago

404 ?

EGreg2• 8 years ago

Nopie

mythz• 8 years ago

Moving away from GoDaddy was one of the most rewarding "online service" switches I've made. I used to cringe visiting GoDaddy when renewing domain names where I've had to carefully navigate my way through their Dark UX patterns which feels like I've ventured into the "Dark side of the Web" where you can't trust what you read and everything is designed to upsell scams out of you.

I've moved everything to Google Domains, at $12 /y for .com domains it's only a little more expensive than GoDaddy (with Coupons) but it has a straight-forward simple and minimalist UI where I can get everything I need to get done (e.g. dns config/renewing) quickly and easily.

It's an example of a UX-focused UI built for you by contrast I view GoDaddy's user-hostile UX was designed against your best interests.

zepearl• 8 years ago

I totally agree. I always dreaded the time when I had to renew my SSL cert with GoDaddy. Then, each year, while navigating on their website, I always ended up asking myself if they hired a group of psychos to design their UI.

After a couple of years I finally found Namecheap and never looked back.

ww520• 8 years ago

Godaddy is a scam and a massive domain squatter.

appleiigs2• 8 years ago

Are there any landmines to step on when transferring a domain? Seems like you pay a transfer cost but they extend you by 1 year. Easy as that? I'm ok with a bit of downtime.

tombrossman• 8 years ago

You shoudn't have any downtime. Copy your current DNS records for your transferring domain(s) and input them at the destination Registrar, then initiate the transfer, and done. It is surprisingly easy.

The only edge case to check is if you are using non-standard or less common DNS record types (ALIAS, CAA) then first confirm with the destination Registrar that they support the record types you need.

Or if you want to keep things really simple, switch to a third-party DNS host before transferring and use the same name-server settings.

And yes, paying the target Registrar should extend your registration time. For example, say you bought a domain last year and paid to register it for five years (so four years remain). Now you transfer it to Gandi.net and pay their transfer fee. You used up one year originally, transferred, and it's yours for five years again. Your unused years at the outgoing Registrar 'roll over' to the new one.

appleiigs2• 8 years ago

Thank you.

ModernMech• 8 years ago

I remember I once searched for a domain name on Godaddy, and found that it was available. I waited a couple days before I decided on buying it, but next time I checked it was registered by Godaddy. If you wen to the address, you were directed to a website stating the domain has been "parked for your convenience", and you could buy it from them for now twice as much. I remember feeling so completely cheated I never did business with them again, and certainly never searched for available domains with them.

DonHopkins3• 8 years ago

It's not surprising a company founded by an elephant murderer turned out to be a scam.

https://gawker.com/5787676/meet-godaddys-ridiculous-elephant...

quadyeast• 8 years ago

Totally off topic but I must. Because of the the painful UI to the horrible marketing to the elephant killing paid for by the founder, I celebrate everything anti-Godaddy.

philshem• 8 years ago

Couldn’t we reverse this on them? For example, get a list of available domains and reverse-scrape from various users to trick the algorithm into thinking the domains were valuable?

KitDuncan• 8 years ago

I just sold a domain on GoDaddy two weeks ago. Should I be afraid, that I won't get my money? I thought there was nothing to worry about, since it's such a big company....

ukyrgf3• 8 years ago

A few years ago, I typed in a domain I wanted and was surprised to see a link to Godaddy Auctions saying I could have it "Buy It Now"-style for $80. I've had miserable experiences with Godaddy so I really didn't want to do it, but I wanted the domain and figured they'd jack it up to $5,000 if I hit refresh. A few days went by with no registration details, and all I could find in my account was the receipt. I called them up and was told that somebody else already owns the domain, but, if they don't re-register it when it expires, and they don't re-register it during the 30 day grace period, then I'd have the pleasure of being able to own it. When I told the person that I could have just waited and registered it on my own without spending $80, she said that since it's a 5-letter domain, Godaddy would have put it on the market as a premium domain. Apparently, I got a bargain.

I transferred it out of Godaddy as quick as I could, and one of the first things I did at my current job was convince my boss to start transferring his 400+ domains out of Godaddy. He had no idea that the "premium domains" that they charge him $100/yr to "premium renew" aren't actually anything special, and other registrars don't do that.

ris• 8 years ago

Can anyone be surprised at how worried I was when I learned that webfaction were being bought by GoDaddy?

theartfuldodger• 8 years ago

This was always accepted as a reality within the affiliate marketing communities, we knew never to use godaddy services to search for an available domain unless you purchased it immediately.

I heard many anecdotal stories as consequently I owned the #1 us organic position for "available domain" and primarily referred people to godaddy and namecheap.

edit I see a godaddy insider confirmed the practice

nojvek• 8 years ago

I’m glad Godaddy is getting shamed. I hope they lose a ton of business over this.

brokenmachine• 8 years ago

Probably off-topic, but I've always wondered how malware authors register domains that are generated by Domain Generation Algorithms, without it being trackable back to them.

GoDaddy is a scam

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