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GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

asifali.me

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#21
post #8

godaddy really blows. they seriously do make things a lot harder for the customer so that they are -forced- to stay with godaddy. And their retarded overhyped ads don't help either; why are they putting up trash ads at ridiculous rates?

Any company with the resources GoDaddy has, if it had good management, would have an order of magnitude better user interface. Instead, these assholes burn their cash on advertising and an army of customer service reps who get paid to stonewall over a simple issue for half an hour. I can't believe anybody still does business with GoDaddy, especially HN regulars who read a story like this every month.

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#22
post #3

Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by avarice. This is just like Goldman Sachs, deliberately confusing the customer and then making money off that confusion. When GoDaddy did this to me I let the (somewhat unimportant, fortunately) domain lapse and bought it back with Hover.

Thank you for that advice. I will remember that...I will be moving my domains to Hover or namecheap soon.

Looks like you have many domains. My unsolicited advise - do not keep them all in one place and NameCheap is not the only better one. I am from India and use BigRock(Indian) and Name.com. No problems till now. Choose at least 2-3 and distribute. Keep a track. I am sure you have made calendar entries to track their renewals &c, or maybe there's some automated service for that(would love to know, if there's one).

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#23
post #16
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Godaddy would fight the chargeback. It's not like CC companies always side with customers -- the company gets a chance to make an argument. What most likely would happen is Godaddy would point to some line in the ToS and then point to you agreeing to it.

I believe you are correct. I tried to do a chargeback once because the company refused to believe me, and there was no way into my account where my credit card was stored and they would keep charging it year after year. And they wouldn't just delete my card from their records. I tried a Chargeback, but the credit card denied it after the "big" company argued it. So, I ended up changing he number of my credit card, an…

I had a similar experience with a monthly recurring billing, and the helpful lady at the credit card company suggested getting my credit card reissued with a new number (effectively by marking it as lost / stolen).

Unfortunately pre-authorised recurring payments are not interrupted by this method. They will continue to show up on your statement against the old card number until you either pursued them to stop, or cancel your credit card entirely.

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#24
post #6

I had the same thing happen - I tried to turn off auto-renew by deleting my payment details and somehow managed (through godaddy's misleading interface) to cancel all of my domains effective immediately. I lost something like 30 domains in the process and support refused to re-instate them for anything less than something like $3000. This is old news, but you shouldn't be giving these guys your money.

Wow..never realized that this actually happens. How come no one has dragged them to court on this? Deleting credit card != waiving off the service that has been paid in advance for the next year(s).

If I recall correctly (although this was a couple years ago, my memory has faded) I think when you deleted a card it took you to a list of domains to configure for auto renew and it wasn't clear if you were canceling auto-renew (now that you had no billing info) or if you were canceling the domains entirely. For added confusion, clicking a button when anything was checked didn't do anything immediately (because of some background DB batching) and so as a normal user you would assume that things weren't sticking and you would click another button to see if it worked... by the time the UI refreshed, you had killed all your domains.

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#25
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you are correct. I tried to do a chargeback once because the company refused to believe me, and there was no way into my account where my credit card was stored and they would keep charging it year after year. And they wouldn't just delete my card from their records. I tried a Chargeback, but the credit card denied it after the "big" company argued it. So, I ended up changing he number of my credit card, an…

I had a similar experience with a monthly recurring billing, and the helpful lady at the credit card company suggested getting my credit card reissued with a new number (effectively by marking it as lost / stolen). Unfortunately pre-authorised recurring payments are not interrupted by this method. They will continue to show up on your statement against the old card number until you either pursued them to stop, or can…

"pre-authorised recurring payments are not interrupted by this method. "

That depends on the nature of the authorization. The easiest way is to just terminate the card

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#26
I'm sorry to be callous, but at this point I feel little pity for someone still buying domains through GoDaddy. It is a terrible company with terrible policies, terrible management, and a horribly misogynistic marketing team. Why are you continuing to pay them rent on your domains?

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#27
I've used everyone from 1and1, GoDaddy, NetworkSolutions, and eNom as registrars. Most of these guys have cluttered slow interfaces which are painful to use.

I've most recently become a fan of Hover.com ( https://hover.com/hH8tN94H ). NameCheap.com, Name.com, and Gandi.net are also decent alternatives.

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#29
Last weekend my domain was up for auto-renewal with GoDaddy but my credit card had expired so they switched the domain over to a GoDaddy landing page. I wasn't exactly pleased to see my blog replaced with ads. Fortunately there's an ICANN renewal grace period, so I didn't lose the domain and was able to switch it over to Namecheap.

Re: GoDaddy deletes my domains and charges me to restore them

#30

I'm sorry to be callous, but at this point I feel little pity for someone still buying domains through GoDaddy. It is a terrible company with terrible policies, terrible management, and a horribly misogynistic marketing team. Why are you continuing to pay them rent on your domains?

You're not being callous at all. There are some companies that are known to frequently mistreat customers and have harmful policies. Any halfway savvy user (which OP appears to be) should know this and it's unfortunate when they get burned. It's even more unfortunate when a less technically literate person gets screwed by GoDaddy.

Having said this, I'm super happy OP wrote this. We should not forget that yesterday's GoDaddy is the same as today's GoDaddy. I really feel for OP, and I know how it's easy to feel as though bad stuff only happens to other people, but my hope is that posts like this will continue and the beast will starve.

I suspect that GoDaddy will begin to employ the same tactics Nigerian scammers do in order to weed out the savvy customers with blogs, and will try to ensnare technically illiterate people with credit cards.

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