GoDaddy is broken
I manage quite a few domain names, half a dozen or so of which I own, some for Idiosyncrasy Hosting, others for various clients. I use GoDaddy for all of them, simply because I think it’s easiest (but that may change; Yahoo is looking really tempting!)
Over the years, I’ve slowly built up this collection of domains. I used to pay with Dad’s credit card, then my own bank card, then a PayPal card, and most recently via direct debit from my PayPal account. So there are a variety of different payment methods attached to different domains.
One of the websites I run, MACA, had its domain purchased back in the winter of 2004. Yesterday, Dad came up looking worried: “MACA is down; the domain expired.” What? I had it set to auto-renew each year. A check of the site revealed that it was indeed expired and showing a GoDaddy park page. Fuming, I pulled up the GoDaddy account page. It showed that Auto-renew was indeed on. I had received no e-mail from GoDaddy about anything being amiss. I didn’t know what to think! Then I realized that it was probably using my old PayPal card, which expired; the new one had a new number. I found the Billing information and switched everything to direct PayPal debit… no nasty surprises when sethkinast.com, which was on the same card, comes up for renewal!
Broken:
- As soon as the expiration date on my card passed, GoDaddy should have seen that there were still domains attached to it and e-mailed, saying “Hey, your card is invalid. Give us a new one.”
- GoDaddy should have sent an e-mail for each domain attached to the card, warning that Auto-renew wouldn’t work since the payment method was invalid.
- GoDaddy should have automatically turned Auto-renew off, or flagged that it was broken, to help me figure out why the domain didn’t renew if I had ignored the e-mails.
- GoDaddy probably should have seen that I obviously wanted the domains to be renewed, and so should have tried another payment option out of the ones in my account.
Losing that domain name would have been an unbelievably costly mistake. MACA has handbooks, business cards, posters… all with the domain name. Of course the real problem here is all the domain squatters out there that troll for expired names and grab them so that the rightful owners have to buy them back.
Thankfully it didn’t come to that.