Wow – I Almost Stuck My Foot In My Mouth!

I was reading a story over at Domainnamewire.com where GoDaddy took back a domain because there was an invalid email registered showing on Whois for the owner of FamilyAlbum.com. Predictably, the story goes that after GoDaddy sent an email to the invalid address asking for a corrected email, it bounced and after 10 days, they either took the domain back or deleted it and a person who had backordered the domain received it.

Now, let me disclose up front that GoDaddy hosts all of my active domains and I have personally never had anything but positive experiences with them.

However, I’m only one person, and there are a lot of folks who are using the article above to share various GoDaddy horror stories and even though I have not shared any of these “bad” experiences, after reading the story from Domainnamewire.com it was enough for me to consider moving all of my domains away from them – As far as I’m concerned this is “sacred ground” type stuff. The ethics of your domain hosting service must be above reproach!

Myth and Motivation

But then, I thought… the internet is full of folks who have alternative motivations and there are plenty of “myth” emails and stories out there. So, I thought I would check up on this story with the folks at GoDaddy. I called their New Domain Sales Department and told the representative that I was thinking about transferring a domain over to have them host it (which is true, by the way… I have a parked domain with another company which I am either going to auction off or transfer to a different hosting company).

I did not tell them that they already hosted a lot of my other domains. I told them that I was very concerned about the article that I had just read, but that I had heard good things about them and their prices were extremely attractive, so I wanted to get more information about this story.

The GoDaddy representative put me on hold after I described the situation to him and about 3 minutes later he returned after speaking with his supervisor. Apparently, the supervisor had been a trainer at the time this situation occurred 1 – 2 years ago. The article referred to above shows a letter which appears to be from GoDaddy Domain Services and puts the date 12/19/2006 on the incident. I do not know if these are the same or different situations, as I do not know the sources of the other article.

What Happened According To GoDaddy

The GoDaddy representative relayed the following to me:

The party who had the domain backordered had met the owner of the domain previously and had found out that the email was invalid and that the owner was going to be out of town for a couple of weeks. So, they placed a back order and sent a complaint that the email was invalid to GoDaddy. GoDaddy then sent an email AND called the phone number they had on file for the owner where they left him a voicemail. When he did not respond in 10 days, per ICANN rules and regulations they were required to delete the account.

When the account became available, the person who had placed the backorder received the domain.

Upon the original owner’s return from his trip, he received the voicemail and contacted GoDaddy who advised him to contact the other party to see if they would release the domain back, which the new owner did not agree to do. What followed was a dispute between GoDaddy, ICANN, the original owner and the guy who backordered the domain.

Anything Official?

I asked if the rep knew of an official statement that had been issued by GoDaddy that I could look at which would summarize the issue, but he said that if there was one, he did not know where it would be.

I checked Bob Parson’s blog and didn’t find anything there, but to be honest, I did not crawl back through every post for the past 3 years.

The representative also pointed me to the following link which describes their Platinum package which is designed to prevent this type of thing from occurring. If you hover your mouse of the green question marks next to Expiration Protection and Deadbolt Transfer Protection, you will see that for $24.99 a domain can be protected for up to a year from a malicious transfer.

In my opinion, if you have a major domain name an additional $24.99 is well worth the protection the GoDaddy Platinum package provides.

MY OPINION - Follow The Money

Consider the modern Las Vegas casino, as romantic as it may seem to blame the house’s ability to win because they cheat, (and even though it may make it easier to explain the loss of money to your wife) it does not make any financial sense to the casino to risk their entire operation so they can win a couple of extra blackjack hands.

The same goes for GoDaddy. Why would they risk their entire customer base and violate ICANN regulations for the sake of taking back a single domain, or for that matter 1,000 domains? There is no way, in my opinion, that GoDaddy would promote or condone this type of action. Sure, mistakes can happen, but as far as this being some sort of conspiracy, not so much…

In fact, it appears that they have designed specific systems and processes to prevent this type of issue from happening. If they did allow these sorts of transfers to occur they would be out of business in a heartbeat – and there is no risk/reward that would justify these sorts of actions.

Now, I do not know the folks at Domainnamewire.com - in fact, the tone of their articles seem to be fair, but, they do have hosting links all over their site, so if they scare people away from GoDaddy, who really gains?