GoDaddy Ripoff

There’s no courteous way to describe this. GoDaddy’s domain cancellation and recovery policies are just a plain rip off.

We had a client who died, leaving several domains that had been registered through GoDaddy. They were still active, paid for in advance, but were forwarding to a GoDaddy notice page. We cancelled the domains, expecting they would, within a few weeks, become freely available for anyone to register.

Some time later our client’s widow decided she would like to have those domains. When we tried to register them for her, the domain record showed them unavailable, with GoDaddy still the controlling registrar. I contacted GoDaddy, and they responded that we could recover the domains. Great. EXCEPT that they demanded an additional $80 each (and there are 5) to do so. Eighty dollars IN ADDITION to the new registry fee. Since these domains had not expired–they were still within the payment period–how complicated could it be to reinstate them?

Here is the mail from GoDaddy:

Dear Sir/Madam,Thank you for contacting Online Support. Thank you for verifying the account. When a domain is canceled by the customer, we will hold it for a short grace period. After which, it will return to the registry. We can still redeem the domains from the registry, but there will be an $80.00 fee per domain, since they were canceled 12/2009. We apologize for any inconvenience. You can recover expired top-level domains (TLDs) during the grace period and the Registry Redemption period. You may be required to pay a fee for the domain recovery.

C’mon. This is nonsense. Hijacking domains for an undefined “short grace period” (which has now stretched over 2 months) is cruddy business practice. We’ve had no experience like this with other registrars. Have any of you? If so, please comment.

Comments

3 thoughts on “GoDaddy Ripoff

  • Same here.I was patiently waiting for a domain name I wanted to expire, then I talked myself into waiting for the 42-day ‘redemption period’ to expire.GoDaddy are still holding it in ‘redemption period’ status for 10 weeks and counting.Of course they know I have interest in the domain, since I regularly check the WHOIS database. It’s obvious they just want me to place a BackOrder bid with them or use their Domain Buy Service: Just $69.99 per domain name + commission ($10)!That’s yours $79.99 :)It’s a rip-off and I will let them rot with this domain as I am the ONLY one interested. I will just change my TLD and simply give my money to a different registar.

    • Yeah, as hosts they’re not so hot either. We had another client with a so-called business hosting account, who wanted to accept payments through his authorize.net account. Shouldn’t have been a big deal, but GoDaddy wouldn’t allow the secure connection. We had to host the payment form on another account. Odd.Well, I guess we get what we pay for when we register domains from a cheap registrar . . ?

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