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godaddy, nodaddy, slowdaddy - some facts you might need

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic (by 2 people)   Your rating: 1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic

Ranked #4947 in Tech & Geek, #111746 overall

Rated G. (Control what you see)

Who are Go Daddy?

Go Daddy is an Internet and company, which also sells e-business related software and services.

Go Daddy was founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons Go Daddy has gathered a large number of critics and enemies on line and off. It is suggested by many (as you will find out) that Go Daddy may not be the best place to obtain online services (such as hosting or domain names) and might furthermore not be the best place to work. For example Bob Parsons is alleged to fire people becuase he is a bad mood (by "Whistleblowers" at nodaddy.com). However, under Bob Parsons Go Daddy has become the largest registrar in total registered. The Go Daddy Group, which includes Wild West Domains (its resale brand) as well as Blue Razor (its bulk domain brand), is currently the largest registrar in the world.

Go Daddy was also recently sued by Web.com for patent infringement. Unusually there was no outcry from the geek community. This may have been connected to some or all of the facts you will learn on this page.

Because of the somewhat anonymous level of such pages I will try my best to provide evidences for each point I make. This first section uses text from the wikipedia article eated so heavily I have no idea how to attrubite it but here is the link: Go Daddy.

No Daddy 

Biggest Critic

On January 24, 2007, Go Daddy deactivated the domain of computer security site, Seclists.org, taking 250,000 pages of security content offline. The shutdown resulted from a complaint from MySpace to Go Daddy regarding usernames and passwords posted a week earlier to the full-disclosure mailing list and archived on the Seclists.org site as well as many other websites. Seclists.org administrator Gordon Lyon, who goes by the handle "Fyodor", provided logs to CNET News.com showing Go Daddy de-activated the domain 52 seconds after leaving him a voicemail, and he had to go to great lengths to get the site reactivated. Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones stated that Go Daddy's terms of service "reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever." Lyon has since set up a Web site critical of Go Daddy's handling of the complaint against SecLists, at NoDaddy.com, which was donated to him by a former customer of the registrar. [SOURCE]

This made the news in a big way. As a result of this the domain nodaddy.com was offered for free and a new site was created detailing what the users feel is wrong with Go Daddy. It is alledged that Go Daddy management are "very scared" of the site.

The newest forum entries are listed here.

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FamilyAlbum.com 

Suspicious Resales

In early 2007, Go Daddy canceled the domain registration for FamilyAlbum.com, claiming that the owner of the domain did not keep his e-mail address on file with Go Daddy and in the whois database up-to-date. Although ICANN policy allows a registrar to delete a domain registration for inaccurate information in the whois database, the registrant had a correct phone number and postal address. Furthermore, GoDaddy did not delete the domain name and instead sold the registration to another GoDaddy customer. There is debate in the internet community as to whether Go Daddy took the correct action. (says wikipedia)

The site that broke the story, however, suggests that there might be a very seedy side to things. "I just heard from GoDaddy that the cost the new owner paid for the domain was $18.99. This is the price of a backorder, not a regular registration. Perhaps this is how it worked: Person tries e-mailing domain owner with Whois information and e-mail bounces. Person backorders domain and then sends complaint to GoDaddy. GoDaddy tries to contact only via e-mail, which bounces. Domain is cancelled and given to person with backorder." domainnamewire.com

From this we can work out that the Go Daddy system can probably be abused to obtain valuable domain names so long as you can find fault with the whois listing. The process would be find good domains with whois faults use the back ordering service on them and then you and three of four friends bombard Go Daddy with complaints. When Go Daddy take the domain away from the current owner you automatically get hold of it.

If you are especially evil you could put up a basic article site and then put the domain up for auction. The chances are the true owners will want to purchase it back and might pay a lot of money for it.

Ideally Go Daddy should have checks in place to ensure that such conflict of interest hijacking attempts do not happen but (unless things have changed) this is not the case.

Shutdown of Chinese dissidents' sites 

another case of no fact checking?

In 2007, several websites critical of the human rights abuses in People's Republic of China were shut down by Go Daddy, possibly under the pressure of the PRC government. Go Daddy denied any political involvement in the shutdown. (wikipedia)

Reporters Without Borders asked why "Reporters Without Borders today called on US web hosting provider Go Daddy to explain why it suddenly withdrew hosting for several Chinese sites specialising in human rights in China. According to a report on the news website Boxun , around 10 Chinese human rights sites were suspended without explanation on 17 August." [LINK]

Go Daddy claimed the sites were "used to attack other servers". However the question that remains unanswered (as far as I can tell) is did Go Daddy make any effort to confirm these abuse complaints? The debate remains largely unsatisfied (to my mind).

Does this mean that all one would need to do to shut down a competitor hosted by Go Daddy is to get a few friends to make (false) complaints about their site?

How safe is Go Daddy for freedom of speech?

Dot UK Losses 

Go Daddy Shift Business Plans

At the beginning of July 2007 Go Daddy chose to stop supporting .uk domain names. According to sources inside Nominet Go Daddy were never members of Nominet and secured the UK based domain names via a third party. It seems that they no longer do business with that third party and on 17th of July 2007 the nomain names were moved to a German based company.

However this change has led to domains expiring while being reported as renewed. A page entitled Godaddy Dot UK Emergency has been posted to a server without any other apparent content simply to highlight this issue.

Unless Go Daddy can correct this issue they will have cost many people their domains. All that to focus on the more profitable dot coms.

Blog Posts about Go Daddy 

What have people been saying

Because of the ever changing nature of the world I felt it only fair to give voice to the general public on the subject of Go Daddy.
SMBs May Benefit from Microsoft-GoDaddy Deal
It was only natural that we expanded our offerings to include mobile and group e-mail plans with Mic...
GoDaddy.com Donates $10K to Open Source Web Development Project
Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com Founder and CEO commented, ?OpenSSH and the work of the OpenBSD project v...
Wow, does GoDaddy SUCK or what!
... ?customer first? activities of Zappos and Amazon. But it's painfully obvious that this blo...
GoDaddy Web Hosting Firm, Debuts Portable Hosted Microsoft ...
GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder Bob Parsons remarked, ?We have many customers who currently use Micros...
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Do you have anything else to add? What is your opinion? Share it here if you would like to (must be logged in, no html).

LordMatt

It should be. You would ned o tat he transfe t namecheap and then follow the instructions (which will be conviluted somewhat and require a lot of emails being sent to you be automated systems).

Posted July 30, 2008
archetekt

Is it possible to switch a domain name from godaddy to namecheap?

Posted May 04, 2008

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LordMatt

About LordMatt

My name is Matt. I am also known as Lord Matt which is due to a long joke that probably is not funny enough to share anymore. I own my own business and I blog at lordmatt.co.uk and have some interesting stuff going down, baby... yeah or maybe I just loo-ove the attention.

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