The flagstream.com domain of Lee's employer is still registered to this day at GoDaddy.
After such a story how do you not learn from it and migrate everything immediately?
GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
91–100 of 263 posts
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#92He mentions these 3: "- Every email address that exists out in the world is now wrong. - Every piece of marketing material is now incorrect. - All of the SEO is gone." but it seems to miss even the biggest one, which is that you are effectively locked out of any online business accounts, your bank, your crm, anything that says "we noticed an unusual login, please enter the code we just sent to your email to verify th…
Yep. Binding 2FA flows to email is risky business for a lot of reasons, but registrar incompetence might be the spookiest thing of all.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#93This is a textbook case for suing for compensation and punitive damages. I hope someone opened an arbitration complaint on day one to get the wheels turning. Maybe they’ll consider reviewing https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint (one can dream).
punitive seems like a huge stretch, damages sure. Icann Arbitration seems like the wrong channel, those are typically used for when someone correctly technically registered the domain name, but there's a dispute from the non-owner, e.g: 1- Trademark holder registers trademark.com, malicious actor registers trademark-web.com and phishes. 2- trademark.com expires, and someone registers trademark.com and domainsquats. T…
Does Godaddy have a pattern of creating this sort of fuckup and then handling it in ways that uniformly favor Godaddy and deny customers contractual right to seek redress, that a judge might deem worth assigning punitive damages to warn other commodity-middleman businesses to not be like Godaddy?
Has Godaddy demonstrated a pattern of violating Godaddy’s contract with ICANN, whatever those terms may be, with regards to performance of the basic duties of a ‘registrar’ on behalf of domain owners?
I’m not evaluating these things today since I’m not their lawyer, but certainly they’re both valuable questions.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> more likely to have established processes that work for all sorts of cases Whatever their process is, it's concerning. I wonder how many sign-offs are actually involved, or if it's just a ticket handled and closed by a rep. Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026.
>Either way, GoDaddy is not the first choice for a new domain in 2026. Off the top of your head, what would be a decent one?
Porkbun. Their prices are very reasonable and their support team is consistently responsive and helpful. Honestly, even if their pricing was higher I would still choose to use them because it's clear their goal is to maintain a useful product, not infinite growth andendshittification
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#95Godaddy is pretty awful in a lot of things. This doesn't even surprise me. But I will say that their broker services have done me well. But I do transfer domains away as soon as possible to dynadot
Do you host with dynadot? From their website it seems like it's mostly domain registration?
I'm a big fan of keeping your hosting provider separate from your domain registrar. You are only ~50% as screwed when one of them screws up
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#96This is actually an old issue of many domain registrars, as well as nameserver-hosting companies. They are extremely vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, because their customer support can unilaterally do whatever you convince them to do. And it turns out that often they don't take any convincing! I have gotten domains transferred and nameservers changed many times over the years with zero documentation. Which means cyber criminals can do it to you too.
Too bad there's nothing we can do about it. It's up to the corporation to decide how they want to deal with this; if they screw you over, there's no consequences to them. You could try to sue them, but that would take years to unravel (if you even win), and meanwhile your online business is shut down.
We could introduce regulatory codes, like a software building code, or an internet infrastructure code, to prevent these kinds of things from happening, with a faster recourse if it does, inspections to ensure it is being done well, and fines if it's not. But that sounds like a lot of work; I'm sure companies have our best interests at heart! Let's keep everything exactly as it is.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then slow rolled support. And then flat out lied that they received "the correct" documentation justifying the transfer when they hadn't received any documentation, and denied the appeal. Frankly the whole thing is inexplicable. The best explanation is fraudulent business practices to save 60 seconds of looking for the documentation.
With all the publicity GoDaddy has received over the last 10 years or so, I wonder why anybody reasonable would deal with them any more. Maybe the prices are irresistibly low, IDK.
they are not inexplicably low -- any rational person sees that any low prices are one year intro deals that revert to excessive after the first year.
We have always hated working with them, and have moved all clients to cloudflare.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is extremely critical, MarkMonitor. Otherwise, Porkbun or Cloudflare Domains if you're ok using their DNS.
What's good about MarkMonitor? All I see is Gartner-friendly buzzwords and AI generated "business people".
They specialize in domains management for businesses who consider their domain to be _very_ important. Think Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Wikipedia... (all of those are listed as clients on the wiki page)
As in "pay a lot of money", and we'll dedicate someone to your domain who makes sure that "giving a domain to a stranger without any documents" will _never_ happen.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#99Likely an inside job. I had a similar experience with AWS where my account was compromised despite the fact that I had all the proper security features enabled. It was later discovered internal contractors were responsible. But up to that point AWS blamed the issue on me with no proof. A call to the AG office in my state got the ball rolling and initiated an investigation that finally got a manager to take the case s…
If you read farther down, it’s obviously an inside job in the incompetent, not malicious, sense. Their employee did not do anything remotely resembling following procedures, misread an email to an outrageous degree, and transferred the wrong domain .
As I read it I couldn't help but envision this being a simple case of LLM-automated support going wrong. The mistakenly transferred domain was in the e-mail that asked for a transfer.
Re: GoDaddy gave a domain to a stranger without any documentation
#100At the risk of sounding snarky; Last Saturday afternoon one of his client’s domains vanished from his GoDaddy account. Lee is one of the most competent IT guys I know. 'Competent' and 'client's domains [hosted on] GoDaddy' don't go together.
Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.
A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.
Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.
Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.