Update on GoDaddy Transfer Issues

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer-update/

by PStamatiou • 15 years ago

396 74 15 years ago

community.namecheap.com

iSloth• 15 years ago

Well that explains why my transfer is taking so long...

aaronpk• 15 years ago

Thanks. I noticed this too.

samlev3• 15 years ago

Devil's advocate here: The idea that godaddy appears to be intentionally stalling transfers is pure speculation. Not saying that they're incapable of doing it, but that whole "don't attribute to malice" thing.

Let's not turn this into another ugly internet lynch-mob. Just move your domains, and be done with it. Namecheap (and others) look like they're more than happy to help out all their new customers.

bountie• 15 years ago

What's the motive to make this process painful? Would people really say Oh screw it, I'll just stay with GoDAddy? Ive never transferred a domain before so I don't know what the process or delay is normally like

kennystone• 15 years ago

Most people won't understand it is 'go daddy' hijacking the process and may get frustrated by delays. One guy in this thread thought it was a name cheap problem, for example.

tgrass• 15 years ago

This is standard practice to increase the friction of unsubscribing. How many clicks does it take you to logout of Facebook or Google...and see if your grandmother could even figure out how.

mikeash• 15 years ago

Yes, people would. Obviously, the people who are really adamant about switching away won't be deterred by this, but there will be a lot of people who are less forceful about it who might well just give up if it's too hard.

r00fus• 15 years ago

> Would people really say Oh screw it, I'll just stay with GoDAddy?

Yes, actually they would. Or more likely, they intend to, only have small time slices and take weeks or months longer to leave.

Aggregated across millions of subscribers, and this adds up to big $$$, some of which can pay a high-priced spokesmodel to defray a large amount of the downsides.

tristanperry• 15 years ago

GoDaddy have breached ICANN regulations before (e.g. after updating contact information, 'resetting' the 60 day no-transfer-out rule).

I'm not surprised in the slightest that they're doing it again.

Caged• 15 years ago

If this is indeed against ICANN policy, they're still in breach of this rule. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/602885/godaddy.png

cperciva• 15 years ago

after updating contact information, 'resetting' the 60 day no-transfer-out rule

I feel dirty saying this, but I'm with GoDaddy on this one. It might be a violation of ICANN regulations, but it's also a really important step for protecting against domain hijacking.

untog• 15 years ago

I was extremely surprised at the tone of the blog post, given that it doesn't really confirm much:

"we suspect that this competitor is thwarting efforts"

"GoDaddy appears to be"

Suspect, appears to be... none of these are exactly definitive terms.

ohashi4• 15 years ago

In the domain industry, that's par for the course. You can almost never get 'proof' of what they are doing. You can just see patterns and changes. You can hypothesize based on trying something again and again, manipulating the inputs and seeing what changes. Sounds a bit like a science experiment? Often seems that way. There's a ton of NDAs going to all sorts of people and companies to do different stuff. The inner workings of a lot of stuff is never legally allowed to be talked about publicly. So you end up with this type of hypothesis.

The actual transfer process can be nearly instant given the EPP code and the registrar's permission. What happens in between is somewhat fuzzy and I am not sure there are clear rules on how each company handles it. The longest I've seen (that I recall) is 7 days, but I could be wrong.

chc2• 15 years ago

What do you expect? "Our spies among GoDaddy's top executives have discovered…"? "Our team of highly trained accredited psychics has been informed by the spirits that…"?

NameCheap is no more capable of knowing GoDaddy's inner workings than we are. They can only tell us what they're seeing and draw logical conclusions from those things.

newobj2• 15 years ago

There's a fine line between devil's advocate and astro turfer.

jerf• 15 years ago

I have nothing to do with any domain name company or interest, beyond being a consumer (as many here) of a company not related to any in the story. I endorse samlev's caution. Given past history with GoDaddy, I'm willing to believe they're not being above board, but I'd like more evidence before I join the lynch mob.

Let's be a bit less in a hurry to sling around accusations of astroturfing, OK?

samlev3• 15 years ago

Well. You got me. I'm a big corporate shill for GoDaddy. I've been sent here to turn popular opinion back in their favour.

Good going, detective, now that you've outed me, I'll lose my job, and who will feed all of my 58 children?

Seriously, though, I have no connection with GoDaddy, I'm just very sceptical of the "GoDaddy will attempt to repair their reputation by actively making life harder for people who already don't like them" idea.

Sure, they may well be playing games to attempt to make it too hard for people to leave, but I think that it's much more likely that they have rate-limiters, and anti-spam/fraud protection working against mass migrations away from their service. If that's the case, I can't see them being in any particular hurry to fix the problem (or to even see it as a problem), but that's not the same thing as actively slowing down the process.

They have nothing really to gain by being malicious at this point, and plenty to lose (internet lynch mobs being easy to rile, as they are). Let's just put the pitchforks down for a little bit until we're certain that GoDaddy is really deliberately throwing spanners in the works.

Once you're certain of that, then by all means, go hog wild with your iNoose and your PitchFork 2.0. Until then, keep an eye on it, but let's not jump to stupid/hasty conclusions.

ruggeri• 15 years ago

^^ This is why I call it a lynch mob.

compay2• 15 years ago

A bunch of my transfers appear to have been delayed because Namecheap themselves have not generated the initial authorization email to begin the tranfer process. The ones for which they did generate the email (about 1/4 of my transfers) went through fine with no delays from Godaddy. Not sure what's going on (I sent an email to support about 4 hours ago but have no response yet), but so far I'm a little underwhelmed by their service.

PStamatiou• 15 years ago

That authorization email is affected by what's discussed in this blog post -- they can't send it until they get all the domain info.

compay2• 15 years ago

I see. Well, I'll give them some more time before forming an opinion I guess.

spolsky• 15 years ago

If I were a registrar, I would have rate-limiters on domain info downloads to prevent harvesting by spammers. And those rate-limiters would be set so as not to interfere with normal demand, but might be tripped if, say, everyone tried to transfer out their domains all at once.

Just sayin.' Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by reasonable engineering heuristics...

JS_startup• 15 years ago

Some definitive, unbiased proof of this needs to be seen before I can join the lynch mob. I have no doubt that GoDaddy is desperate and/or inept enough to do something like this but I also can't take their competitor's word for it.

seanp2k24• 15 years ago

Same. I hate hate hate GoDaddy, but Namecheap assuming malice in this case might blow up in their faces, and honesty, just for speculating (with a pretty sure-sounding tone) that GoDaddy is doing this on purpose, I hope it DOES blow up in their faces. This is really just dirty business.

Move to name.com instead because they don't practice this type of distasteful PR.

ohashi4• 15 years ago

What if they are telling the truth?

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

I hear that name.com forces a wildcard DNS entry if you use their DNS servers so that any unregistered subdomain points to a "domain parked" or similar squatter-esque page. This is completely awful and should be enough to bring a lot of heat to name.com directly. Definitely much, much worse than misassuming bad intentions.

mythz• 15 years ago

They do provide some details about the abnormalities:

"Specifically, GoDaddy appears to be returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap, delaying the transfer process. This practice is against ICANN rules."

Sami_Lehtinen• 15 years ago

Yup, same issue here. Transfer has been hanging over 24 hours now. Edit: Transfer in Process - Acquiring Current Whois for Transfer Verification

switz• 15 years ago

I've been waiting for nearly 3 days now.

msumpter• 15 years ago

I wonder if GoDaddy's WHOIS server is just applying rate limiting. I suspect their transfers are spiking after the SOPA aftermath. Namecheap's servers might have been sending a fairly consistent level of WHOIS queries that would not be anomalous but after the coupon and lots of press about Namecheap that threshold might have been exceeded several times over.

Now GoDaddy should have cleared up the WHOIS throttles by now. But I can understand there being a temporary issue with mass transfers like this.

g3orge• 15 years ago

did you know that EA games and Sony also support SOPA?

soult4• 15 years ago

Are you really surprised? Both EA and Sony are known for installing rootkits on their customer's computers.

jarin• 15 years ago

I also ran into a problem with GoDaddy when trying to transfer a domain name that was protected by Domains by Proxy. I first got a notification that I needed to enter into a new agreement, so I did. Then I got a notification that I needed to cancel my private registration, so I did. Then I got this:

    "The transfer of MYDOMAIN.ME from Go Daddy to another 
    registrar could not be completed for the following
    reason(s):

    Express written objection to the transfer from the 
    Transfer Contact. (e.g. - email, fax, paper document or
    other processes by which the Transfer Contact has
    expressly and voluntarily objected through opt-in
    means)."

So it looks like they're auto-rejecting domain transfers if you're using Domains by Proxy?

mattvot• 15 years ago

Yeh, This has been the case for a while. It is because they cannot verify the owner, as the whois info is hidden behind DBP.

I've been trying to cancel my DBP subscriptions, to return my details to whois and transfer the domain. They don't make it easy.

I lost my account details, and am trying to retrieve my account. I filled in their form and attached my drivers license scan ... got an email today saying they need a scan of some ID :/

soult4• 15 years ago

They are locking you in. Either you turn off whois privacy, making your name forever connectable to the domain thanks to such databases as whois.sc, or you stay at GoDaddy. Forever.

chexov• 15 years ago

Same happend to me. I had to login to DBP (same username and password as GD), cancel the protection, than ask my new registrar (Gandi) to restart the transfer. It seems to have worked, at least now I am in the 'waiting period' for the transfer to finalize.

gregholmberg2• 15 years ago

I transferred two domains away from GoDaddy that were protected by Domains by Proxy. They did require that the WHOIS guard be dropped, even though both registrars offered a WHOIS-protecting service.

It did feel like GoDaddy was moving the goalposts.

Since I had no deadline and no feeling of urgency, I just allowed the entire process to play out naturally. There were periods when I was busier elsewhere and didn't press the issue for a month or two at a time, but I spent the better part of sixteen months getting both transfers completed.

Update: I bought a standard membership to DomainTools to see if the info ever leaked. It looks like the patient approach paid off, and that the exposed WHOIS info was not crawled during the transfers. Taking the time to make sure both ends of the transfer were prepared was worth the effort, but I think it's probably luck that kept the info from being picked up.

soult4• 15 years ago

Domaintools may be the best-known whois database, but it isn't the only one and not all of them are as easy to check against.

aeden• 15 years ago

Personally I think this should be considered a violation of their agreement with ICANN. There is nothing wrong with providing privacy protection on Whois data, but they should not be rejecting transfers nor should they be blocking legitimate email delivery.

cobrabyte• 15 years ago

This happened to me, as well. It took me forever to disable the Domains by Proxy stuff. I must have had 35 different DBP accounts that held all my domains. There's no simple way to get the login information for the DBP accounts, either. It was a 4-step process for each of those 35 accounts.

And, here I was thinking I was the one doing the punishing. GoDaddy put me in my place.

Aloisius• 15 years ago

I moved all my domains from GoDaddy and one of them had trouble doing the whois information. I did it myself and it in fact did look different from my others. It could have just been the difference between a .org and a .com, but I entered in the epp auth code with the transfers and it helped it along.

freejack2• 15 years ago

NC is an enom reseller, so I'd guess that all of enom would be affected as well. Nothing on the eNom status page, so not sure... http://www.enom.com/registrynews.asp

gregholmberg2• 15 years ago

Does eNom own NameCheap?

  http://davezan.com/does-enom-own-namecheap.html

No, it seems they don't, but the article provides details on a longstanding partnership.

laironald• 15 years ago

I bet namecheap's investors are smiling right about now.

overshard• 15 years ago

I finally was able to get my domains transferred to Namecheap today. It's one of those "I never liked GoDaddy anyways" kind of things and the entire SOPA ordeal finally pushed me to it.

j_camarena• 15 years ago

I use godaddy to buy .com.mx and .mx domains .. PLEASE, start selling this domains.

I really hate to give money to godaddy .. i feel like a dollar for them is a dollar for killing-elephants-for-joy safari.

johnpowell• 15 years ago

I just got the e-mail from GoDaddy to ask if I wanted to allow or decline the transfer. I'm glad that got resolved. That was my one to test that I was doing things correctly before I moved about 20 other domains off GoDaddy.

pbreit• 15 years ago

This doesn't strike me as one of the classier communications. Does it resonate well with other people?

spauka• 15 years ago

GoDaddy has responded to the allegations from namecheap at TechChrunch, saying that the blocks were part of standard practice to limit the volume of Whois queries from a single IP, which is apparently common practice, unless the registrar is notified that there may be a large number of queries. [1]

If this is indeed true, then it seems namecheap are trying to score cheap PR points, although they have responded saying they attempted to reach out to GoDaddy.[2]

I'm inclined to believe that namecheap did try to reach them, although I'm not sure that they are above trying to slam more bad press onto GoDaddy....

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/26/godaddy-responds-to-nameche...

[2] http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...

smackfu• 15 years ago

I wouldn't exactly be calling my employees in over Christmas to make it easier for customers to leave.

smcnally• 15 years ago

If the (alleged) issue is that GoDaddy is throttling WHOIS lookups, does using [http://help.godaddy.com/article/3681](GoDaddys Export Lists tool) and including WHOIS info help? Or are the "real-time" lookups required by a new registrar?

colmmacc• 15 years ago

Just to add data to the discussion;

I kicked off migration of my only 3 GoDaddy domains to namecheap last night. One .net, one .com and one .cc domain. None had any kind of whois protection or anonymisation.

The .net and .com migrations went very quickly and smoothly. Within two hours I had the confirmation e-mails from both namecheap and GoDaddy, and within 4 hours the migration was complete.

The .cc domain took a little longer, as when I started the move with namecheap it didn't seem to want an EPP code for a .cc domain, but then later changed its mind and asked me to enter one. I entered the code within 2 hours, and 8 hours later the migration was complete.

GoDaddy's goodbye was actually pretty professional;

  ===================================================================
   SORRY TO SEE YOU GO. WE'LL ALWAYS WELCOME YOU BACK.
  ===================================================================

  Dear Colm MacCarthaigh,

  We're sorry you transferred your domain name(s) away from GoDaddy.com. 
  We are committed to providing quality services and products and hope
  that we met your needs.

  If you feel your transfer was in error, or if you have changed your 
  mind, please contact our 24/7 sales department at (480) 505-8877. 
  They'll assist you in transferring your domain name(s) back to us.* 
  Keep in mind that we continue to offer low prices and $7.49 transfer 
  rates on some domains.

  Sincerely,
  Go Daddy

  P.S. Visit GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/default.aspx?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc=gdbba1365) 
  and SAVE 15%* off your order of $50 or more. Just use source code
  gdbba1365 when you check out to get your special savings. Start 
  shopping now at GoDaddy.com or order by phone at (480) 505-8821.


  *Please note that ICANN's Transfer Policy may prevent you from 
  transferring your domain name within 60-days of a transfer.

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  *Not applicable to ICANN fees, taxes, shipping and   handling, sale 
  priced domains and transfers, bulk domains   and transfers, premium
  domains, Sunrise/Landrush domain   registrations and pre-registrations,
  memberships or   maintenance plans, additional disk space and bandwidth
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  reflected in your   shopping cart - cannot be used in conjunction
  with any other offer, discount or promotion, or in connection with
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  discounted products purchased with special offer discounts will renew 
  at the then-current renewal list price.

  Copyright (C) 2011 Go Daddy All rights reserved.

Update on GoDaddy Transfer Issues

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