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Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

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Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#121

Post by technoluvvo »

betteryet wrote: post #84

This just happened to me today with Epik, another old-timey registrar. Added a .com to their shopping cart yesterday, then went to pay for it this morning — no need, it's been registered during the night to someone in Japan. Not a super great domain either, just a brand extension for our company. Feels like either they or some other party are looking at the stream of purchase intent to do this. Awful practice.

Well at least you didn't automatically assume the worst. Epik has more care and support for their customers - and more ethics and common sense - than the rest of them combined in my experience. Sounds like bad timing, but you would have a higher chance of falling victim to malware and a keyboard sniffer than seeing their team go out of their way to thwart your registrations. They would be more likely to go and convince the new buyer in Japan to give it to you for free, then figure out a way to make you both happier in life. Just saying.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#122

Post by ksec »

krn wrote: post #100

After doing a lot of research, I would recommend Dynadot as the best domain registrar at the moment. My main criteria were: fair prices without any coupon codes, no-upselling, free whois privacy as standard, most ccTLDs supported, REST API for everything, and at least 15-20 years of history. I would normally prefer a European company, but Dynadot has been the registrar of wikileaks.org since 2006.

Thank You. Never heard of them until today.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#123

Post by thiht »

bleepblorp wrote: post #20

Some TLD registries have policies to prevent registrars from front-running their clients by squat-registering their domain searches. But, if you're working in a TLD where Freedom is more important than actual free markets, do your domain checks against the root servers yourself with dig +trace .

For most non-ccTLDs, that's regulated directly by the ICANN. It's pretty easy to file an ICANN complaint, FWIW.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#124

Post by aerovistae »

mdorazio wrote: post #33

I had this happen as well in the past when researching domain names for a new product. Pro Tip: Stay the hell away from GoDaddy for everything. I've had the unfortunate task of managing a server hosted with them and it's been consistently awful (ex. I literally cannot upgrade PHP because the VPS doesn't support it and there is no upgrade path without spinning up an entirely new VPS on a different, and of course more…

Recommendations for superior alternatives? I'm an indifferent GoDaddy user but would be happy to switch to something else since I've never liked them as a company.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#125

Post by xoa »

tomhoward wrote: post #24

This sucks and I feel for you. But the sad fact is that domain registrars have been doing this ever since domain names became big business in the 90s. As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a terminal window to see if a domain is available. It's included with macOS, Windows (?), Linux or any other OS anyone's likely to use. [Edit: a reply says it's not included in Windows. It seems you can download i…

I also wanted say "consider whois", but with a few more caveats. First, obviously the whois server you use matters. There is nothing magical about whois that stops GoDaddy from doing the same thing if you query whois.godaddy.com, you still need to talk to someone less likely to engage in this like going directly to InterNIC's, whois.internic.net (still I think under the US DOC, which whatever other flaws it has isn't really scrounging for change there).

>But I always feel much safer using whois in a terminal

Also as a minor FWIW, there are plenty of simple GUI's (often built-in) on whois as well so someone can just use one of those if they prefer. macOS for example still has some of the old useful utilities included for free including in this case Network Utility, though for whatever reason Apple moved them out of /Applications/Utilities and into /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications (that's also where a pile of other useful ones went).

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#127

Post by CrociDB »

bityard wrote: post #96
roosgit wrote: post #56

I never experienced this, but I did wait too long to buy a domain. After I checked if the domain was available(it was), I started building the website. A month later the domain was bought by someone who eventually made the same thing I wanted to make. My current process for checking if a domain is available is pretty basic. I first check it in the browser. If Firefox can't find it, then I use the `whois` command. If…

I have a habit of collecting interesting yet vaguely generic domain names and holding onto them for future projects. (Which I almost never get around to.)

so do I. the other day I renewed a domain I got 5 years ago and I didn't even remember what I planned.

Re: Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com

#129

Post by lucasmullens »

Is there a way for us to waste GoDaddy's money by searching for domain names that we don't actually want? If they waste enough, they'll have to stop this practice.

They're probably not buying every domain that's searched, but if you appear likely to buy the domain by having an existing account, only searching for a single domain that's based on an english word, and getting most of the way through the checkout flow, that might trick them into buying a garbage domain name.

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