Just search for GoDaddy stories on old Slashdot. I've known since I had my own computer that GoDaddy=NoDaddy.
It's funny, the only time I can recall a programmer describing something as sexist (towards women) in the early/mid 2000's was somebody describing GoDaddy's booth at a convention. That really stuck with me for some reason, lol.
Likely an inside job. I had a similar experience with AWS where my account was compromised despite the fact that I had all the proper security features enabled. It was later discovered internal contractors were responsible. But up to that point AWS blamed the issue on me with no proof. A call to the AG office in my state got the ball rolling and initiated an investigation that finally got a manager to take the case seriously.
The explanation is at the end of the article: another GoDaddy customer asked for the transfer of a similar-looking domain name, and they transferred the wrong domain.
And then flat out lied that they received "the correct" documentation justifying the transfer when they hadn't received any documentation, and denied the appeal.
Frankly the whole thing is inexplicable. The best explanation is fraudulent business practices to save 60 seconds of looking for the documentation.
With all the publicity GoDaddy has received over the last 10 years or so, I wonder why anybody reasonable would deal with them any more. Maybe the prices are irresistibly low, IDK.
I was done with them the day I knew their founder and CEO bribed corrupt African governments to go kill elephants, pose for pictures and share them with family and friends. I hunt and fish, but there’s something particularly evil about spending a fortune to abuse broken systems in poor nations to go after one of the most social species on earth, which are also known for having a strong awareness of death.
You moved from the worst registrar to the second worst registrar. Cloudflare will call you up one day demanding an immediate payment of $150k and holding your domains hostage if you don't comply.
Cloudflare isn’t anywhere near being the second worst registrar. I’ve never had anything remotely similar to this occur, and I’ve had hundreds of domains with Cloudflare for years.
Whatever was really happening in that incident it seems clear that it was not a simple matter of having registered some domains with Cloudflare and then getting a shakedown for $100k+ because of that.
If anyone else chooses to read the post then I suggest skimming the comments (that are mostly hidden by default) as well.
The point isnt the apologists that pop up whereever CF gets mentioned, the point is that they more or less have a built reputation for deceptive loss leader marketing.
Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.
Yeah, thats FUD. Cloudflare hasnt called anybody demanding huge sums of cash and holding your domains hostage. As a registrar they're fine, dont play scammy scum upsell games (because they have a real business model that isnt just registration skim).
If you read farther down, it’s obviously an inside job in the incompetent, not malicious, sense. Their employee did not do anything remotely resembling following procedures, misread an email to an outrageous degree, and transferred the wrong domain.
As I read it I couldn't help but envision this being a simple case of LLM-automated support going wrong. The mistakenly transferred domain was in the e-mail that asked for a transfer.
I don’t think you read the article. GoDaddy transferred the domain to someone in a local chapter of the same organization. When that person realized what happened, they called the original owner and got everything fixed. There’s no way this is an “inside job” of any kind.
That doesn't make any sense. The entire reason it was undone is because the recipient told GoDaddy support that they transferred the wrong domain to her. So how could this have been an inside job?
but why? why would an insider put the wrong domain into a strangers account that has no interest in using the domain and went out of her way to give it back to the rightful owners?
If I had to make a guess: the incorrect domain was transferred by mistake. Remember, the person who the domain was transferred to was trying to recover a domain. The employees went out of their way to avoid giving the domain back to the rightful owners because the individuals involved did not realize it was a mistake since the vast majority claims they receive about improperly transferred domains are people trying to hijack domains. Either their policies don't acknowledge exceptions, or employees were just trying to cover their ass in case the author was someone trying to hijack a domain.
I certainly don't blame the author being upset and venting. I don't blame them for pointing out that there are problems with the dispute resolution process process. That said, I think they should also realize the registrar also has its own set of challenges to face. In this case, one of those challenges is to protect their customers from having their domain hijacked by a bad actor. The author's behavior most likely had those bad actor vibes, even if it was unintentional.
"- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong.
- Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect.
- All of the SEO is gone."
but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify the login."
Same reason I dislike SMS based 2FA, or worse SMS/email based 1FA codes.
You dont truly own your cell number or domain. Meanwhile passkeys are certainly hardware I own, likewise my TOTP codes are stored and calculated locally.
exactly, few years ago I was thinking to bind all on domain email, thinking when I own it, I can host anywhere and seemed best option. After thinking it through, had to stick to a gmail, again. Due to the possible catastrophy scenario!
Luckily in EU, they still hardly depend on presencs validation, therefore all these sorts of errors can be resolved in couple of hours.
Also huge opportunity for scams etc if this ever was a targeted takeover type thing. Emails and other stuff go to the same domain, and an impostor could just keep answering correspondence like nothing had happened
And even worse, if I wanted to take over npmjs.com tomorrow and godaddy would kinda... just hand it over (?!?!?!) then i could probably become a crypto billionaire overnight
Register your domain as a trademark. It costs a few hundred dollars, and can be done online. This gives you stronger rights with ICANN, against anybody who illicitly acquired the domain, against typosquatters, the registrar, and the courts. You can send intimidating lawyer letters, and quickly escalate from the registrar's support department to lawyer-to-lawyer phone calls.
"You get what you pay for" has been true ever since capitalism was invented. Whether it be the "get a registered trademark" route or the "pay more for a competent domain registrar" route, you pay either way.
Registering a trademark won't prevent screwups such as the original posting here. What it will do is help you apply pain to the registrar until they fix the problem.
It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
That's what makes this particular story so egregious.
Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.
>It's literally the largest registrar in the world, by a large margin.
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
It's also literally one of the most criticized and awful registrars in the world, by a large margin. If decades of stories like this don't convince you to go with a more reliable registrar then I have very little sympathy.
This story is not egregious, it's in fact typical of GoDaddy. Every so often we get a HN post with a GoDaddy horror story. You'd think people would have learned by now.
They are the biggest because they undercut all the other registrars and spent millions on Superbowl commercials among other strategies. Size does not automatically equate to competency. Sometimes bigger can mean more mistakes are likely to occur and customer voices may be more likely to be unanswered in the ocean of support issues.
How many stereotypical male tech nerds flocked to GoDaddy after hiring Danika as "spokes" model. Did she ever speak? Glorified booth babe is more like it. After that, every non-tech dude would remember those commercials. Of course they are popular, of course for the wrong reasons. It goes to show exactly how well advertising campaigns work.
Sortof? [0]. All the commercials I saw [1] were just meant to get guys to visit their site so the speaking was just for fun. The later fake body-building commercials [2] were unusual.
Porkbun. Their prices are very reasonable and their support team is consistently responsive and helpful. Honestly, even if their pricing was higher I would still choose to use them because it's clear their goal is to maintain a useful product, not infinite growth andendshittification
Interestingly, Cloudflare (don't shoot me for mentioning the name, HN!) identify Porkbun as "GoDaddy-Porkbun" but I don't know the relationship.
Edit: "Top Level Design [Porkbun owners] was the domain name registry for several top-level domains including .wiki, .ink and .design, until the company sold these domains to GoDaddy Registry in April 2023" --Wikipedia
IIRC, when I used it for my employer .com was $100/domain year, registry lock for eligible tlds was $1000/domain year (I forget if that included the domain), and there was a minimum annual spend that I don't remember, but might have been $10k-$30k. They have new ownership since then, so I dunno.
The only issue we had was when we wanted to change our nameservers and our authorized contact for registry lock didn't answer the phone for the verification call, so we had to postpone the change for the next day. But that's what is supposed to happen, so no big deal.
Better than networksolutions changing our nameservers when one of their support agents got phished.
> They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
In my experience the sentence is only correct this way: "They're more likely to have established processes for all sorts of cases"
They have lots of clients. They have big opportunities to streamline support (which is a cost center). ... do you see where it leads? Read the OP, if not!
> When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well.
That is also at least 10 years old stale matter. Have you ever read people wrongly being locked out from a BIIIIG provider unable to get through to get remedy? Apparently no. I did. I am sure several other people here did too.
Motto: "Eat shit! A trillion flies cannot be wrong!"
You’d be surprised how many enterprises use them. Also their managed hosting support is surprisingly competent. I’m not a fan of their service but some of our clients use them and anytime their servers have had issues support was quick to fix. Way nicer than having to jump in and do it myself. And so far it’s all been local support and not offshore.
Came here to post the exact same comment. They have a history of amateur-hour stuff like this, too, don't they? For me, the brand has always been associated with "bet it all on marketing" rather than technical competence.
The primary reason I used to prefer GoDaddy is you could call them 24/7 and talk to a human who could fix it. Historically I have preferred companies with phone support over submit-a-ticket-and-wait.
Well, I don't understand why he did not complain to ICANN? This would be the second step after customer support failed. Last step is a lawsuit. GoDaddy is opening itself up there to liability big time.
[Assuming that the poster gives true statements, but I have no reason do doubt this]
People get tied to their registrar by using their DNS or other services. It's a mistake, but it's extremely common.
So if you have someone using GoDaddy, and everything is working, how do you sell them on the idea of migrating DNS or hosting or email if they've never had an issue?
It does sound snarky, maybe GoDaddy was the cheaper option at one point and they stuck with it. I get that.
I use some square space for a lot of stuff, but it's largely because Google Domains sold out and the price is "fine." Sure, I could use something else, but this works, the cost is correct, and - I can't stress this enough - it already freaking works. I also use a python as a service tool I point at frequently. Their customer service is great, so I doubt this would ever happen there? But yeah, I'm not manually configuring a server somewhere most of the time.
Is it the "best" possible tool for the job? Not really, but it works well enough for the stuff I use and my workflows are already rock solid to deploy code to prod, etc. Is it because it's impossible for me to spin up a VPS or I'm too stupid to figure out Hetzner? Probably. But no, I've done it before, I could do it again, but that would take me X hours that I'm not getting paid for to migrate for limited utility, possible customer interruptions, and stress. I might need to migrate in a year or so, but until then, I'm not going to bother.
I reckon that's a similar sort of thing that happened here and depending on what they're doing business-wise, Lee could be insanely competent IT person and was just unlucky because the hammer he reached out for with GoDaddy actually turned out to be a foot gun that took years to fire.
It happens, it's not ideal, but it happens - I'm just glad they got it figured out and I'm glad that these sorts of events percolate up in the hn zeitgeist, because I definitely know who I won't be turning to in the future. Like, I kind of already knew GoDaddy was trash? I used them something like 10 years ago to spool up a website for a friend of mine. The whole experience was garbage then and I said, "never again" - but also that was kind of at the beginning of me even learning about how this stuff works? But I could totally see a scenario where I get snared into a product ecosystem and the opportunity cost of switching out of it outweighs staying put until it blows up in my face.
Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.
A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.
Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.
Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.
CloudFlare since they sell domains at cost and have really good DNS infrastructure with some free protection features. If the TLD isn't supported by them for registration then I'd just use their nameservers.
Or Route53 if you're using AWS since that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of AWS and manage in IaC, and AWS also has robust network/DNS infrastructure.
(I would say GCP if using GCP/Google Workspace, too, but since they split domains off to Squarespace I really don't know what is happening over there anymore as far as domains go.)
So far those 3 have been more than sufficient for all of my domain needs.
Domain registration and all other services should be separate. You don't want DNS, web hosting, mail hosting, etc. ToS applied to your registrar account because it increases the risk of the account getting locked.
I haven't had that experience at all with them before. I also don't put much stock in one off experiences from someone who is admittedly not in a situation that almost anyone else, much less someone registering their domains through GoDaddy currently, would find themselves in (i.e. operating an online casino and engaging in behavior that is very obviously a legal/ToS gray area at best).
They specialize in domains management for businesses who consider their domain to be _very_ important. Think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia... (all of those are listed as clients on the wiki page)
As in "pay a lot of money", and we'll dedicate someone to your domain who makes sure that "giving a domain to a stranger without any documents" will _never_ happen.
a number of the largest companies that used to be 'clients' of markmonitor have now basically become their own domain registrars and have a direct relationship with ICANN. Amazon for instance. It's curious that google was one and has offloaded it to squarespace.
Namecheap has had its own host of issues like a few years back breaking hsts and causing tons of sites to break for quite a while and their response was basically oh well. That incident along made me move my domains off to porkbun.
GoDaddy is a valid domain registrar. The customer had dual MFA set up. The customer did all the right things.
I’ve never heard of Godaddy making this kind of egregious mistake before. I’ve heard of some doozies, sure, but nothing like this.
Don’t blame the victim. “It’s their fault they got robbed, they left their door unlocked” is not a valid response to a situation like that or like this. The robber still stole, and godaddy still broke their own rules, rules that customers pay to have enforced.
When you find yourself victim-blaming, you will find yourself on the wrong side.
Maybe you havent, but I and others certainly have heard of this kind of "mistake" aplenty from them. They're infamously bad for this kind of nonsense let alone their other more predatory practices such as frontrunning domain registrations.
Accidentally migrating the wrong domain name is incompetence. Doing so without any of the required documentation is negligent. This is bad on multiple levels
If your system relies on DNS, there's no decentralization; you just change whose hands your fate rests in.
Email, Mastodon, Matrix and XMPP are not decentralized. You just exchange reliance on Google / Microsoft / Proton / Fastmail for reliance on Godaddy / Namecheap / Porkbun (in addition to Let's Encrypt, ICAN and the registration authority).
I’ve made a lot of really good decisions in my life, I think, such as: deciding to have kids, deciding to move to another place I wanted to live, career choices, but by far one of the best of them all was getting all of my domains off of GoDaddy.
Probably ten years ago with name.com I had a .at domain expire.
I caught it like a day or two later, and successfully renewed it through their site but it did not take.
There was somehow already someone up squatting my domain. I contacted support and they told me there's apparently no renewal window for .at but they could recover it for $140 - oof .. sure. It was nothing super important but would be annoying to lose.
Then it took like a week for them to get back to me, but after that week I got my domain back. I have no idea what gymnastics happened on their side.
Most of the issues we've seen in the past are due to payment failures, credit card declined, etc., that let the domain goto auction and lose access.
This is all new and from the content of the post looks like due to an employee error in transferring the wrong domain and they don't have a process to address the situation.
Corporates have a huge blind spot and everything with them is just a process and this case the process completely failed.
Unfortunately everytime it's the customer who suffers.
Not surprised. The bureaucracy, human errors, the defficient attention span to anything, not just tranafers of multidecade domains. But attention to anything. Sometimes I am also puzzled how at company x, and company y, when reaching out customer support it feels aa if they are about to make a mistake and I try to slow them down not to.
GoDaddy is the worst registrar, consider it a liability in any of your setups and switch immediately. I've had similar experiences, save yourself the trouble.
I just got delegated access to work on a partner's domain, via GoDaddy. For years, I have been trying to direct him to use NameCheap instead, as GoDaddy scares me.
Q1: Is NameCheap the correct alternative?
Q2: This person has 50 domains on GoDaddy. How do I convince him to migrate? One new domain at a time? Has anyone else dealt with this?
Twilio once put our entire top level account as a sub-account under a national telecommunications company without any notification. Can’t remember how we found out, and nothing broke, but it was a security nightmare that this was possible.
GoDaddy is completely consumed by ServiceNow bureaucracy. They are unable to operate at any kind of capacity. I was a fan until recently when I met an engineer from GoDaddy that led me to believe they are all incompetent there. I know it’s not the case but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that I no longer want to do business with them at all.
This is actually an old issue of many domain registrars, as well as nameserver-hosting companies. They are extremely vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, because their customer support can unilaterally do whatever you convince them to do. And it turns out that often they don't take any convincing! I have gotten domains transferred and nameservers changed many times over the years with zero documentation. Which means cyber criminals can do it to you too.
Too bad there's nothing we can do about it. It's up to the corporation to decide how they want to deal with this; if they screw you over, there's no consequences to them. You could try to sue them, but that would take years to unravel (if you even win), and meanwhile your online business is shut down.
We could introduce regulatory codes, like a software building code, or an internet infrastructure code, to prevent these kinds of things from happening, with a faster recourse if it does, inspections to ensure it is being done well, and fines if it's not. But that sounds like a lot of work; I'm sure companies have our best interests at heart! Let's keep everything exactly as it is.
Yes I did. I didn't say this was a phishing attack, I said they are vulnerable to them. That and the issue in this article ("mistakes") are caused by the same thing - lack of proper procedure - which is what my comment is about.
npm can give you security warnings about packages. I wonder if there is space for an external dependency warning system for sites. 'WARN: godaddy has elevated security complaints related to service XXX' and the like when you push a PR. Add it as a GH action check and it goes against a public DB of complaints. Sort of a higher level 'do you trust your provider' check.
The core problem tight now is there is very little incentive for companies to fix their support since there is no easy way to advertise how bad it is compared to other companies. There is no natural market for the value of support since consumers don't have an easy/obvious way to compare built into how they do things day to day. An infra scan of services tied to public support metrics could help plug that hole.
Godaddy is pretty awful in a lot of things. This doesn't even surprise me. But I will say that their broker services have done me well. But I do transfer domains away as soon as possible to dynadot
I had a similar problem with Crazy Domains: they accepted forged documentation, turned off two-factor authentication despite multiple emails from me saying never to do so, and me literally being on a call with them as it happened. The domain compromise happened as part of a plan to hijack my OG Twitter username [1].
It took getting my country's NIC and regulator involved before they restored control of my domain back to me.
I've never gotten a formal apology from them, and the incident took so much out of me that I've never gotten around to pursuing them any further.
But fuck Crazy Domains, Dreamscape Networks, and Newfold Digital (fka Endurance International Group).
You are not helpless in these situations. You have a legal right to take action, appearing pro se, so it cost you almost nothing. Our legal system has degenerated into a medieval class system of trial by combat. Corporations can sue you, small corporations and users do not have a symmetric ability. It is like challenging a (dark) knight with armor and a very sharp sword to combat. You will lose. But here is the thing, if people start challenging, it is going to cost them a lot of money to field that knight. Think of this like drone warfare against Russian tanks. Be the drone. If GoDaddy has to field a lawyer for stuff like this, they will have the financial motivation to provide support.
While you could use small claims court, you have to be careful about your ability to appeal and to obtain evidence. In this case you are clearly aggrieved and AI should be able to help you draft a cease-and-desist letter.
Oh, and I have to include a disclaimer that this is not legal advise, that you should pay lots of money to get advice, etc or some dark knight will show up at MY door.
Do not be helpless. You have the right to take legal action. Knowing how to file a case pro se is a useful skill that every citizen should have. (Oops, that is not legal advice either!)
This is a textbook case for suing for compensation and punitive damages. I hope someone opened an arbitration complaint on day one to get the wheels turning. Maybe they’ll consider reviewing https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint (one can dream).
Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:
1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes.
2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.
This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.
Does Godaddy have a pattern of creating this sort of fuckup and then handling it in ways that uniformly favor Godaddy and deny customers contractual right to seek redress, that a judge might deem worth assigning punitive damages to warn other commodity-middleman businesses to not be like Godaddy?
Has Godaddy demonstrated a pattern of violating Godaddy’s contract with ICANN, whatever those terms may be, with regards to performance of the basic duties of a ‘registrar’ on behalf of domain owners?
I’m not evaluating these things today since I’m not their lawyer, but certainly they’re both valuable questions.
The flagstream.com domain of Lee's employer is still registered to this day at GoDaddy.
After such a story how do you not learn from it and migrate everything immediately?
They might want to perform some due diligence on which company to switch to, and build and test a migration plan before migrating. This incident didn't happen that long ago.
The amount of dark patterns in product management (Domain renewal) UI related to selling additional services and general shadiness from godaddy make it a very poor choice as a registrar. Concur with the other person who has no idea why anyone would choose to use it.
Bob Parsons has done a pretty good job cleaning up his Wikipedia and Google search results over the past decade, so a /sarcasm tag might be needed here for the benefit of people born yesterday
Wait few hours. Some CTO or PR guru will post a message here.
- We are totally revamping our processes. This never happened out of incompetence. Humans make mistakes. We are contacting the client for 1 year free renewal - waiving. Will mail a coupon code. We consider this issue closed.
There's Discworld bit [0] that often comes to mind for me, where the protagonist is reading a press-release by a fantasy version of a communications monopoly:
> The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and “were to be regretted.”
HN is the only real support channel in tech. First level customer service is AI, second level is outsourced idiots who blindly follow a script, the third level is ”Issue has been closed”
That sounds like a nice idea in theory, but: 1/the mistake has been undone, and 2/damages are likely to be minimal. At this point, getting a lawyer involved is going to be a lot of cost without much benefit.
This reminds me of when a friend’s website inexplicably disappeared and was replaced with a redirect to an ad for some GoDaddy ai website builder and support couldn’t explain how that happened other than “the nameservers were changed” despite the fact that the account hadn’t had any logins for over a year.
Oh, please do. Mistakes happen, and the scale of GoDaddy means that even rare mistakes will happen. But they may still be liable for damages, how much is the reputational damage, and the possible lost business? Why wouldn't you go this route?
Another example of a long list of stories where GoDaddy practically destroys decades of business trust for a customer by just ripping their domain away for no reason. What an awful company.
This comments reads sarcastic, but it makes a serious point. GoDaddy has an extremely poor reputation. At some point you must accept that choosing companies like that is your own mistake.
the thing is that it makes sense when you are small, and it's one of the hardest and riskiest things to change, so it's a decision that stays with you.
And to be completely honest, it isn't that bad, you get a phone you can call 24/7. Of course mistakes happen and staff can't always help, but it's more like a 99.9% vs 99.99% quality thing when comparing to other providers like AWS or CloudFlare.
This is at the very least debatable. The site they took down contained multiple videos of animals being tortured and killed. Not all decisions are simple black and white.
Animals die too in a genocide. I don't understand your point here. Namecheap decided they should proactively police Namecheap customers for this, Namecheap should lose all its business as a result. Let Namecheap decide whether the income from Israel exceeds the income from all Namecheap customers.
Jan 2017: [Godaddy has issued at least 8850 SSL certificates without validating anything](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911780)
Jan 2019: [GoDaddy injecting JavaScript into websites and how to stop it](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18894792)
Aug 2022: [Tell HN: Godaddy canceled my domain, gave me 2h to respond, then charged €150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470017)
Dec 2022: [GoDaddy buying domains when they expire to extort their own users](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34153448)
Jul 2023: [Godaddy just stole my domain](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854166)
Jan 2024: [Tell HN: GoDaddy Stole My Domain](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39209087)
It's funny, the only time I can recall a programmer describing something as sexist (towards women) in the early/mid 2000's was somebody describing GoDaddy's booth at a convention. That really stuck with me for some reason, lol.
And then flat out lied that they received "the correct" documentation justifying the transfer when they hadn't received any documentation, and denied the appeal.
Frankly the whole thing is inexplicable. The best explanation is fraudulent business practices to save 60 seconds of looking for the documentation.
We have always hated working with them, and have moved all clients to cloudflare.
[citation very much needed]
If anyone else chooses to read the post then I suggest skimming the comments (that are mostly hidden by default) as well.
Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.
I certainly don't blame the author being upset and venting. I don't blame them for pointing out that there are problems with the dispute resolution process process. That said, I think they should also realize the registrar also has its own set of challenges to face. In this case, one of those challenges is to protect their customers from having their domain hijacked by a bad actor. The author's behavior most likely had those bad actor vibes, even if it was unintentional.
"- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong. - Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect. - All of the SEO is gone."
but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify the login."
You dont truly own your cell number or domain. Meanwhile passkeys are certainly hardware I own, likewise my TOTP codes are stored and calculated locally.
Luckily in EU, they still hardly depend on presencs validation, therefore all these sorts of errors can be resolved in couple of hours.
It is similar like losing phone or sim or even being in a foreign country where you can't access your number but worse.
I’m locked out of my 20 year old wikipedia account because they instituted 2fa without asking and my email on file was no longer valid.
And even worse, if I wanted to take over npmjs.com tomorrow and godaddy would kinda... just hand it over (?!?!?!) then i could probably become a crypto billionaire overnight
ANIMATS®
When you're a business and want something reliable, picking the most popular provider is usually a strategy that works decently well. They're more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases.
That's what makes this particular story so egregious.
Domains are a very funny business. I can't think of anything so crucial to businesses, that at the same time generates so little revenue per customer. Your entire technological infrastructure depends on it, yet it costs $15/yr. Making a single support request can turn you into an unprofitable customer.
It's also literally one of the most criticized and awful registrars in the world, by a large margin. If decades of stories like this don't convince you to go with a more reliable registrar then I have very little sympathy.
This story is not egregious, it's in fact typical of GoDaddy. Every so often we get a HN post with a GoDaddy horror story. You'd think people would have learned by now.
People who base their technical decisions on considerations like that likely deserve the level of service GoDaddy provides :(
Sortof? [0]. All the commercials I saw [1] were just meant to get guys to visit their site so the speaking was just for fun. The later fake body-building commercials [2] were unusual.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1p9X8A2ruk
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o60YmD5_5-Y
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBNxfarlktE
Whatever their process is, it's concerning. I wonder how many sign-offs are actually involved, or if it's just a ticket handled and closed by a rep.
Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.
Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?
Edit: "Top Level Design [Porkbun owners] was the domain name registry for several top-level domains including .wiki, .ink and .design, until the company sold these domains to GoDaddy Registry in April 2023" --Wikipedia
The only issue we had was when we wanted to change our nameservers and our authorized contact for registry lock didn't answer the phone for the verification call, so we had to postpone the change for the next day. But that's what is supposed to happen, so no big deal.
Better than networksolutions changing our nameservers when one of their support agents got phished.
In my experience the sentence is only correct this way: "They're more likely to have established processes for all sorts of cases"
They have lots of clients. They have big opportunities to streamline support (which is a cost center). ... do you see where it leads? Read the OP, if not!
Read the last paragraph in my comment.
That is also at least 10 years old stale matter. Have you ever read people wrongly being locked out from a BIIIIG provider unable to get through to get remedy? Apparently no. I did. I am sure several other people here did too.
Motto: "Eat shit! A trillion flies cannot be wrong!"
If we ask 100 likely buyers family feud style, where would they go buy a domain, GoDaddy likely is going to be the top answer by a wide margin.
They wouldn't know about any bad news/ security incident with the brand either.
> [...] is one of the most competent IT guys I know. The GoDaddy account had [...]
Don't think I've ever heard something good about GoDaddy.
[Assuming that the poster gives true statements, but I have no reason do doubt this]
So if you have someone using GoDaddy, and everything is working, how do you sell them on the idea of migrating DNS or hosting or email if they've never had an issue?
I use some square space for a lot of stuff, but it's largely because Google Domains sold out and the price is "fine." Sure, I could use something else, but this works, the cost is correct, and - I can't stress this enough - it already freaking works. I also use a python as a service tool I point at frequently. Their customer service is great, so I doubt this would ever happen there? But yeah, I'm not manually configuring a server somewhere most of the time.
Is it the "best" possible tool for the job? Not really, but it works well enough for the stuff I use and my workflows are already rock solid to deploy code to prod, etc. Is it because it's impossible for me to spin up a VPS or I'm too stupid to figure out Hetzner? Probably. But no, I've done it before, I could do it again, but that would take me X hours that I'm not getting paid for to migrate for limited utility, possible customer interruptions, and stress. I might need to migrate in a year or so, but until then, I'm not going to bother.
I reckon that's a similar sort of thing that happened here and depending on what they're doing business-wise, Lee could be insanely competent IT person and was just unlucky because the hammer he reached out for with GoDaddy actually turned out to be a foot gun that took years to fire.
It happens, it's not ideal, but it happens - I'm just glad they got it figured out and I'm glad that these sorts of events percolate up in the hn zeitgeist, because I definitely know who I won't be turning to in the future. Like, I kind of already knew GoDaddy was trash? I used them something like 10 years ago to spool up a website for a friend of mine. The whole experience was garbage then and I said, "never again" - but also that was kind of at the beginning of me even learning about how this stuff works? But I could totally see a scenario where I get snared into a product ecosystem and the opportunity cost of switching out of it outweighs staying put until it blows up in my face.
A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.
Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.
Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.
Or Route53 if you're using AWS since that makes it easier to integrate with the rest of AWS and manage in IaC, and AWS also has robust network/DNS infrastructure.
(I would say GCP if using GCP/Google Workspace, too, but since they split domains off to Squarespace I really don't know what is happening over there anymore as far as domains go.)
So far those 3 have been more than sufficient for all of my domain needs.
This is kinda buried but the whole scenario makes a lot more sense with that context.
Otherwise, Porkbun or Cloudflare Domains if you're ok using their DNS.
As in "pay a lot of money", and we'll dedicate someone to your domain who makes sure that "giving a domain to a stranger without any documents" will _never_ happen.
Depends. If it's something really high priority (like main domain for a large corporation) I'd likely be paying CSC 4 digit sums per domain per year.
For stuff a tier below that I'd be looking at companies that are serious about security and happen to do domains as well e.g. Cloudflare, Amazon
GoDaddy is a valid domain registrar. The customer had dual MFA set up. The customer did all the right things.
I’ve never heard of Godaddy making this kind of egregious mistake before. I’ve heard of some doozies, sure, but nothing like this.
Don’t blame the victim. “It’s their fault they got robbed, they left their door unlocked” is not a valid response to a situation like that or like this. The robber still stole, and godaddy still broke their own rules, rules that customers pay to have enforced.
When you find yourself victim-blaming, you will find yourself on the wrong side.
Personal experience, no relationship to either registrar listed above
Email, Mastodon, Matrix and XMPP are not decentralized. You just exchange reliance on Google / Microsoft / Proton / Fastmail for reliance on Godaddy / Namecheap / Porkbun (in addition to Let's Encrypt, ICAN and the registration authority).
As soon as the word is mentioned I tell them the horror stories.
Saving this to the bucket of stories.
I caught it like a day or two later, and successfully renewed it through their site but it did not take.
There was somehow already someone up squatting my domain. I contacted support and they told me there's apparently no renewal window for .at but they could recover it for $140 - oof .. sure. It was nothing super important but would be annoying to lose.
Then it took like a week for them to get back to me, but after that week I got my domain back. I have no idea what gymnastics happened on their side.
This is all new and from the content of the post looks like due to an employee error in transferring the wrong domain and they don't have a process to address the situation.
Corporates have a huge blind spot and everything with them is just a process and this case the process completely failed.
Unfortunately everytime it's the customer who suffers.
Q1: Is NameCheap the correct alternative?
Q2: This person has 50 domains on GoDaddy. How do I convince him to migrate? One new domain at a time? Has anyone else dealt with this?
We agreed on a price.
I sent the money (not cheap).
Weeks went by and then they emailed me to say that the person they thought owned the domain didn't actually own it.
Mind you, this is a domain that was hosted on their service.
The broker started to ignore me, since his job was done.
It took about 4-5 months and a huge amount of harassment at multiple support levels to get my money back.
Net negative for the internet.
Too bad there's nothing we can do about it. It's up to the corporation to decide how they want to deal with this; if they screw you over, there's no consequences to them. You could try to sue them, but that would take years to unravel (if you even win), and meanwhile your online business is shut down.
We could introduce regulatory codes, like a software building code, or an internet infrastructure code, to prevent these kinds of things from happening, with a faster recourse if it does, inspections to ensure it is being done well, and fines if it's not. But that sounds like a lot of work; I'm sure companies have our best interests at heart! Let's keep everything exactly as it is.
Aside from that, Porkbun gets recommended on Reddit and HN pretty often.
The core problem tight now is there is very little incentive for companies to fix their support since there is no easy way to advertise how bad it is compared to other companies. There is no natural market for the value of support since consumers don't have an easy/obvious way to compare built into how they do things day to day. An infra scan of services tied to public support metrics could help plug that hole.
It took getting my country's NIC and regulator involved before they restored control of my domain back to me.
I've never gotten a formal apology from them, and the incident took so much out of me that I've never gotten around to pursuing them any further.
But fuck Crazy Domains, Dreamscape Networks, and Newfold Digital (fka Endurance International Group).
[1] see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47859496
While you could use small claims court, you have to be careful about your ability to appeal and to obtain evidence. In this case you are clearly aggrieved and AI should be able to help you draft a cease-and-desist letter.
Oh, and I have to include a disclaimer that this is not legal advise, that you should pay lots of money to get advice, etc or some dark knight will show up at MY door.
Do not be helpless. You have the right to take legal action. Knowing how to file a case pro se is a useful skill that every citizen should have. (Oops, that is not legal advice either!)
Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g:
1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes. 2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats.
This is not the case, all Icann can do is make decisions over who owns a domain. A civil court would be more appropriate for calculating and ordering compensatory damages.
Has Godaddy demonstrated a pattern of violating Godaddy’s contract with ICANN, whatever those terms may be, with regards to performance of the basic duties of a ‘registrar’ on behalf of domain owners?
I’m not evaluating these things today since I’m not their lawyer, but certainly they’re both valuable questions.
- We are totally revamping our processes. This never happened out of incompetence. Humans make mistakes. We are contacting the client for 1 year free renewal - waiving. Will mail a coupon code. We consider this issue closed.
> The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and “were to be regretted.”
[0] Going Postal (2004) by Terry Pratchett
That sounds like a nice idea in theory, but: 1/the mistake has been undone, and 2/damages are likely to be minimal. At this point, getting a lawyer involved is going to be a lot of cost without much benefit.
and they burrow their stupid certificates into your computer, you can thank microsoft for that one I guess
Oh, please do. Mistakes happen, and the scale of GoDaddy means that even rare mistakes will happen. But they may still be liable for damages, how much is the reputational damage, and the possible lost business? Why wouldn't you go this route?
And yet he uses GoDaddy?
And to be completely honest, it isn't that bad, you get a phone you can call 24/7. Of course mistakes happen and staff can't always help, but it's more like a 99.9% vs 99.99% quality thing when comparing to other providers like AWS or CloudFlare.