GoDaddy being pricks - any advice?

[JMorton6]

Hey guys, I was planning on switching 2 of my domains away from GoDaddy and didn't renew them, and then when SOPA got shelved (for now), I completely forgot about them. They ended up expiring a few weeks ago, and GoDaddy is trying to charge me $80/domain re-activation fee, plus the normal domain fee on top. It's really dumb, because if you go to the domain it says you can buy it from GoDaddy for $11, so basically anyone else can buy it for $11 but I have to pay 10 times that amount (including the domain fee). I'm really tired of their crap - can I just have NameCheap renew them for me, instead of renewing with GoDaddy and then transferring? NameCheap's search says they're not available though, so I don't know what to do. Suggestions pls?

P.S. Also, is NameCheap the best place to go, and do they have free private registration like 1and1?

Update: Haha, what a bunch of crooks. I just clicked the Buy It Now link and bought it to my own account (the same one it expired under) for 11 bucks. And this after the phone rep swore to me that there is nothing they can do unless someone pays the huge renewal fee, blah blah. Man, fuck GoDaddy.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Ain't there a section for this on this site?

 

[JMorton6]

Ain't there a section for this on this site?

Sorry, I just don't wanna wait 10 hours for a reply like I did the last time I tried that. On the smaller forums, there's often no reply at all, or it takes many hours or days. Not feasible - I need to fix this right now.

 

[mikeymikec]

It sounds like extortion to me, plain and simple. One course of action is to take it to (I can't remember who) the organisation that is meant to regulate certain elements of the Internet (is it ICANN?).

Another course is to get a friend to register it and arrange transfer back to you.

 

[slayer202]

It's expired. As a courtesy they are still holding it for you in case of a mistake or whatever, but they are going to charge you more for obvious reasons. Pay up or take your chances that no one else will try to register it. Can you find out if you can definitely get it for the $11, or will you be fighting against other people once the domain is actually up for grabs?

 

[mikeymikec]

I would agree with slayer202 if there was some additional service that the user had explicitly paid for that's kind of like an overdraft limit.

 

[JMorton6]

It's expired. As a courtesy they are still holding it for you in case of a mistake or whatever, but they are going to charge you more for obvious reasons. Pay up or take your chances that no one else will try to register it. Can you find out if you can definitely get it for the $11, or will you be fighting against other people once the domain is actually up for grabs?

The $11 just says Buy It Now, so it sounds like I would just own it. However, that's only on the 1st domain. The 2nd just says domain expired and has no buy link.

 

[cronos]

The worst thing you can do if you want to switch registrar is to let the domain name expires. All you needed to do is transfer it while it's still registered. You will not have to pay any extra, transfer fees in most well known registrar usually included a year of free registration, and you won't lose any time (the free year registration will extend your current subscription from the original expiration date, regardless of when you transferred it).

If it's only a few weeks then it's in the waiting period. Nobody else can get it except for you, but you will have to pay the reactivation fee which will vary depending on the registrar.

As slayer202 mentioned, you can gamble by letting it completely expire after 60 days (double check the exact timing to be really sure) and then register it somewhere else, hoping that nobody else grabbed it first. There's also always a risk that GoDaddy themselves (or even some other registrar) registered this domain if they think that it's valuable enough, with the intention of selling it for much more money later.

If this domain name is valuable to you, and there's even a slight chance anyone else would be interested in it, I would just pay GoDaddy for reactivation and save myself a headache.

Edit: Forgot to add: Namecheap is very reliable and they do have private registration. They call it WhoisGuard.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Godaddy has never seen a penny from me, and never will. From the CEO poaching elephants and now their support for SOPA (they deny it now, but I'm sure they still support it) I say screw that company. They wont lure me in no matter how many chicks they put on their home page.

Does not surprise me they would have BS like this when it comes to renewing an expired domain.

If the domains are not really popular, you could take the chance and let them expire then just register them again. Though it will be like 90 days before that, by the time they go to auction and that whole process ends. So depends how critical they are for you and if you can afford to lose them.

I always renew my domains for at least 1 year ahead. Basically any domains that expire in 2012, I renew them till at least 2013. The more important domains get renewed for 10 years.

I'm with DomainIT, they're not that widely known, but the service is great. They were very helpful when I was trying to abandon the sinking ship of It's Your Domain when they got bought out.

 

[JMorton6]

Haha, what a bunch of crooks. I just clicked the Buy It Now link and bought it to my own account (the same one it expired under) for 11 bucks. And this after the phone rep swore to me that there is nothing they can do unless someone pays the huge renewal fee, blah blah. Man, fuck GoDaddy.

 

[Red Squirrel]

lol there you go, that's awesome. Now transfer that out as soon as you can. You probably have to wait 30 days or something.

 

[JMorton6]

lol there you go, that's awesome. Now transfer that out as soon as you can. You probably have to wait 30 days or something.

Is NameCheap the best, or is there something better?

 

[MotionMan]

Has anyone used hover.com? I hear about them on my TWiT podcasts.

(My brother-in-law handles all our domains and they are at networksolutions.com.)

MotionMan

 

[slayer202]

How did I not know that transfers added a year of registry? Gonna move my shit off godaddy ASAP

 

[Red Squirrel]

Has anyone used hover.com? I hear about them on my TWiT podcasts.

(My brother-in-law handles all our domains and they are at networksolutions.com.)

MotionMan

Stay away from them. That's why I moved from Its Your Domain. They got bought by Hover and their interface is TERRIBLE to work with. It might be ok if you have like 1 domain, but if you have more, it's a royal pain to manage multiple domains.

They are also very sketchy. When I finally managed to transfer my domains out of them, they started charging me per month for "services". Basically the fact that the domains were still part of the account costed me money. I started getting all these transactions on my credit card and I was like WTF so I contacted them, and basically their reason was that because I still had an account. I had to tell them to delete the account completely.

I hear namecheap is pretty good. I'm currently with Domainit and they're pretty good too.

Best bet is check webhostingtalk.com domain section and you should be able to get a general idea of people's experiences.

 

[dwell]

GoDaddy is a terrible operation. 50 zillion options at checkout, none of which anyone needs. The site itself is barely SFW with half naked photos of Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels all over the site (not that I mind, but heck, it's a registrar not a pics site).

 

[QueBert]

An extra fee to renew an expired domain isn't just Godaddy. Unless things have changed, which I doubt. This is a rule that's in place for all companies that register domain. It was started to keep domain squatters from swooping on a domain when a person/company slips and forgets to register it. You could go with Network Solutions, which I believe charge $150 for this same thing. I use to host with Network Solutions and had to pay this same thing when I forgot to renew my domain on time.

Do you expect Godaddy to eat the fee and let you renew the domain for regular price? Now I'm not exactly sure what their cost is here, but I know it's something. I haven't seen a domain place that doesn't charge, and from poking around last year $100 is the going rate. So $80 seems like a decent deal all things considered.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Network Solutions is insane expensive too. I'm surprised they're actually still in business. I guess it helps they were one of the first around. When I worked at the help desk we managed customer domain registrations and were slowly migrating domains to enom as they were all over the place. The Network Solutions ones gave us the biggest grief. They refused to transfer them without paying some ridiculous fee.

 

[Texashiker]

GoDaddy being pricks - any advice?

Mistake 1 - using godaddy

Mistake 2 - staying with godaddy

Mistake 3 - letting your domains expire

If you want your domain names, bite the bullet and pay what godaddy wants. Once you have the domain names renewed, transfer them to namecheap.

 

[SNC]

Hey guys, I was planning on switching 2 of my domains away from GoDaddy and didn't renew them, and then when SOPA got shelved (for now), I completely forgot about them. They ended up expiring a few weeks ago, and GoDaddy is trying to charge me $80/domain re-activation fee, plus the normal domain fee on top. It's really dumb, because if you go to the domain it says you can buy it from GoDaddy for $11, so basically anyone else can buy it for $11 but I have to pay 10 times that amount (including the domain fee). I'm really tired of their crap - can I just have NameCheap renew them for me, instead of renewing with GoDaddy and then transferring? NameCheap's search says they're not available though, so I don't know what to do. Suggestions pls?

P.S. Also, is NameCheap the best place to go, and do they have free private registration like 1and1?

Update: Haha, what a bunch of crooks. I just clicked the Buy It Now link and bought it to my own account (the same one it expired under) for 11 bucks. And this after the phone rep swore to me that there is nothing they can do unless someone pays the huge renewal fee, blah blah. Man, fuck GoDaddy.

I have been doing domains for 14 years and I am really having a hard time not calling BS on this. When a domain goes over the expiration date the registrar normally will hold it for X number of days. To assist those who are to lazy to remember the renewal date. And for a fee they will return the domain to you, if you don't pay the holding fee, they release it to the masses. And anyone can register it. I have had to do this several times for a number of clients, and each time there is a fee from all the registrars I've dealt with. Would you prefer they hold it for 3 weeks or 3 years before releasing it to the wild? You want them to do it for free? With millions of domain names renewing every day, who pays for the people to keep track of deadbeats? Or would you prefer that on the day it expires it goes to back to available for anyone to purchase? There has never been a case where I was able to, as not the original domain owner, purchase a domain being held. You might have some real complaints against the practices of Go-daddy, but to claim that they are the only one that does this and that you were able to purchase a held domain is stretching the truth just a bit too much.

 

[SandEagle]

register.com has always treated me well. look into them.

 

[Miramonti]

I have been doing domains for 14 years and I am really having a hard time not calling BS on this. When a domain goes over the expiration date the registrar normally will hold it for X number of days. To assist those who are to lazy to remember the renewal date. And for a fee they will return the domain to you, if you don't pay the holding fee, they release it to the masses. And anyone can register it. I have had to do this several times for a number of clients, and each time there is a fee from all the registrars I've dealt with. Would you prefer they hold it for 3 weeks or 3 years before releasing it to the wild? You want them to do it for free? With millions of domain names renewing every day, who pays for the people to keep track of deadbeats? Or would you prefer that on the day it expires it goes to back to available for anyone to purchase? There has never been a case where I was able to, as not the original domain owner, purchase a domain being held. You might have some real complaints against the practices of Go-daddy, but to claim that they are the only one that does this and that you were able to purchase a held domain is stretching the truth just a bit too much.

I don't think his story is as involved as you make it...he never said no one else does this, nor that it is a held domain. Just that his account and rep says it is one price to "reactivate" the domain, while the domain search is showing it not held and for sale to anyone. Perhaps it was held but a loophole allowed it to be purchased for cheap because it was the account it was held for, but either case, sounds very scammy to me (something not too distant from their reputation.)

 

[Red Squirrel]

Make sure you always renew for at least a few years. I have domains that expire in like 2018. By 2015 I'll probably renew them again. Better safe than sorry. It's not like it's a lot of money. It's basically coffee/pop for a few days.