guess godaddy decided for me: 1 days old Created on 2020-09-16 by GoDaddy.com, LLC
just a warning if you have a special name do not use godaddy to check if its available
currently discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901.
I cannot speak to GoDaddy's practices. However, I can say that for Namecheap, this is not something we would ever even consider doing.
In my experience though, lookups are more complex than most think. We are querying so many different sources to give you availability status, some of which are less reliable than others. For example, with smaller TLDs like .ai or .is, lookups may be less reliable than a well-oiled machine like Verisign, which operates the .com and .net TLDs, among others. As a result, sometimes with a less reliable registry, there can be false positives, resulting in the registrar showing a domain as "available" when it is actually registered.
In addition to registry connection reliability, there are also many different aftermarket sources that registrars often pull from. You know when you see a Premium domain (registered and usually higher priced) in search? That could be coming from any number of 3rd party aftermarket platforms, which also can have varying reliability and/or stale listings.
Lastly, you have to consider that some registrars handle the "drop window" differently than others. If a domain deletes and is removed from the zone, ergo, becoming available again, some registrars have a buffer period before they show it as available again.
It does not appear that Felons.io had ever been registered before, which makes this case pretty strange.
I have never had issues with them stealing domains after searches or any other problems w/ my account.
There has been (at least in the Bay Area) a large increase in text spam. They all have a very similar format, e.g. pretending you missed a delivery, and try to get you to click on a link, usually a .info domain.
They are all hosted on Alibaba Cloud, but they are registered in bulk via Namecheap. Your legal and abuse team says they have no obligation to prevent such registrations, but to instead take it up with the FTC or the hosting, both of which do nothing either.
Here's a recent article about the problem with bulk registrations and spam: https://www.spamhaus.org/news/article/795/weaponizing-domain...
edit: I highly recommend reading the article for more context on why bulk domain registration is problematic. Note the DOJ filed a temporary restraining order again Namecheap, and the office of the NY AG also contacted them due to their role in spam and scams.
To address some of the questions and comments below:
> A registrar is simple: request a domain, they check you match the requirement for said domain rules, take your money and register the domain for you. Very simple, very stupid, very non-opiniated.
Where do you draw the line on this? How do you feel about registering hate speech in a domain name, or someone else's trademark? Clearly there needs to be some level of regulation.
> do they have any obligation to investigate the purouse people want to use the domains for
Do domain hosts have any obligation to investigate what people are hosting? Does Google have an obligation to remove results from search? There are clearly multiple parties to hosting content on the web, and it's a shared responsibility to keep folks doing the right thing
> Are you asking Namecheap to take unilateral action against domain registrations with no due process?
No - what makes you think that's what I was asking?
If the problem is with mobile provider spam filtering and where the sites are hosted, that is where the abuse issue should be dealt with, with continued complaints to regulatory bodies (ie, the FTC and the FCC).
Namecheap never resolved it or even responded back beyond the precanned message.
Don't know if it applies in this particular case though. Clearly the government didn't think so.
And if they’re aware that the car will be imminently used for a terrorist attack, does that change the equation?
Same for namecheap. They cannot be the judge of what is spam and not. they should not be asked to gatekeep for the justice system
Namecheap does have a duty when they are informed with reasonable evidence to not be an accessory to a crime. Prior to being informed, Namecheap is in the clear. Once they're given clear evidence (and in my case it was blatantly obvious because it was a crappy scam) then they do have a duty to act.
It's the difference between Ford selling a car which happens to be used in a bank robbery, and Ford knowingly selling a fleet of armored vans after being told that their client is a known bank robber.
If you should be upset with anyone, it's your local police who didn't escalate the case further.
A registrar is simple: request a domain, they check you match the requirement for said domain rules, take your money and register the domain for you. Very simple, very stupid, very non-opiniated.
If registrars start deciding who is worthy of domains, what arbitrary set of rules they want you to follow on top of the real ones, what set of laws they act as judge for ... Things would go wrong insanely quickly.
If the price of that is that they let abusers through too then fine, they're not the justice department either way and if they apply the judicial decision once those abusers are caught, that's all we should ask from them.
The trouble with regulating speech is that the regulators have become a type of autocratic judge presiding over the decision.
The only cure to allow regulation AND autocracy would require some level of distribution of power. We've seen councils of industry leaders before, and this may be a good chance for an enterprising NPOer (NPOneur? NPOinator?).
In the US, all kinds of speech is "awful but lawful", including hate speech. I don't think registrars should be policing legal speech.
If there's trademark infringement going on, there are legal processes to which the injured parties can avail themselves.
If there's more serious criminality afoot, law enforcement should generally lead.
I don't like the idea of unpopular but legal speech being scrubbed from the public internet because people object loudly to it. I think domain registrars (and other infrastructure vendors) are qualitatively different than social media properties, etc, in this regard.
Interface : just give me the records. I don't want to buy more stuff. Somehow namecheap lets me but the same extras like email, without badgering me. Godaddy is just ads ads ads and interfaces to sell stuff to people who aren't tech savvy.
Squatting: this definitely happens with godaddy, like the OP says. Never use them, it's a disgusting practice.
I use namecheap for dozens of domains. I only used godaddy once because I couldn't get the tld on namecheap.
Interesting... I'd love to get a .as domain, but Namecheap don't offer that. Does GoDaddy have more TLDs or where would you suggest to look for obscure TLDs?
I finally tried Namecheap after 10 years of 1and1 for my personal site, and various free DDNS services for my home router. Namecheap is easy, and has guides for just about everything you’d want to do. Now my routers public IP has an easy FQDN, which cost me less than $20 for 3 years and I can update with a cURL one-liner to Namecheap’s API.
Will one of those updates be the ability to export domains & expiration dates, from the dashboard?
If so, then say so; otherwise your response feels, well, dodgy. If not, why are you mentioning them in response to offmycloud's issue?
Past that, we appreciate your time here.
disclosure: I'm a 15 year Namecheap customer
But I still get some weird error messages, empty red alert boxes that doesnt say anything, and general burps time to time when trying to navigate their GUI. At least GoDaddy GUI is much more intuitive but yet they try to sell more - an obvious goal of any for-profit company.
I eventually routed most of my domains to dynadot that has much more safe chat and is US based only. No Easter European have access to my names, contacts, credit card info etc - God only knows what they can do with that info knowing an average salary in countries like Ukraine is $200 per month.
Sometimes when I read these comments like "Namecheap is the best domain provider ever" I chuckle a little - every company has an outstanding record until you test them in times when rubber truly hits the road. 99% of domain users never had any issues because ownership of domain is pretty straightforward business. So these folks than never have a problem are the last one you should be listening to when you pick a domain provider.
Just my 2c.
Edit: I don't have a dog in this race, I don't work for any domain provider and my business is entirely unrelated so I have no business in badmouthing namecheap other than personally having crappy experience with them. But I am sure for every me there is 100 people who got no issues, so that's that.
(No affiliation, just a happy user)
It's been so bad for a few years that I've actually wondered if it's a sign of decline at the company... if you want very specific complaints about the UI I am happy to elaborate.
I use Gandi too and am very satisfied
The Namecheap interface and usability was very pleasing. I actually searched first on Godaddy before settling for Namecheap on all the domains.
Not least, but I got a lower price on Namecheap on all of them and yeah much lesser cross selling attempt which is nice for the DIY types :-)
GoDaddy doesn't even sound like a professional service to me. The name itself wreaks of technical incompetence. I want round-the-clock network infra experts managing my domains, not some random dude's daddy.
(Of course xxx and yyy are placeholders here.)
Edit: xxx.yyy.name comes from the .name registry, just like xxx.co.uk comes from the .uk registry.
Your xxx.yyy.name is a subdomain of yyy.name and thus beholden to it. Unless it's something like a .co.uk domain, which with you mentioning .name isn't the case.
Whom do you pay for xxx.yyy.name?
Look, you can register one yourself: https://imgur.com/tIESzRr
You're surely familiar with domains like foo.co.uk? You don't have to own co.uk to own or transfer foo.co.uk, even though it's the uk registry, not the co.uk registry.
Of course, ".name" might not work in the expected way, but it seems a likely explanation for the issue you report.
Sounds like the tech support agent and supervisor got it basically right.
I'm sure they could if they wanted to. Gandi will happily do it for $15/year. I can only assume they've decided it's not worth their time to do so.
Just wondering if I should be aware of something...
If I do move, Namecheap it will be, given this discussion.
Steady as she goes right now, but I know where to go should things change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
Algolia will have more.
Usually all dictionary words, domains below 3chars, domains below 4chars, etc.
And do you have a better way of going about flagging these sites other than the “abuse” email that shows when doing a WhoIs lookup?
The reasons I transferred to Google Domains are:
* I found the interface easier to use: fewer clicks to DNS, email, etc.
* The features are easily visible
* Auto-verification in GCP
I understand, of course, if you can't deal with or prioritize any of these. Hope the feedback helps.
Definitely would recommend. Haven't used Godaddy myself, but i've heard horror stories from others
Been using you for 15 years now, really happy. Even though I wish the website were faster :)
We're working really hard to make the site faster. While there are still areas where there's room for improvement, we're regularly deploying performance updates (e.g. search, and most recently the cart).
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wikipedia-is-leaving-go-daddy-...
Your understanding is incorrect.
There are no issues with registering a domain via Namecheap when your users are in India (or anywhere else).
Once you've registered a domain, you can use any nameservers that you like -- regardless of their geographical location. You could use the free DNS service Namecheap includes with your domain registration, nameservers from the provider of your choice in India, or something like AWS Route 53, Cloudflare, or Google DNS, which all use anycast and have DNS servers around the globe (I don't know which of them, if any, have servers specifically in India, however).
A registrar takes your money & coordinates with TLD owner to add your domain to the master phone book. In about x time, minutes to hours to few days, all servers over the world has your domain's dns information. Most of the time registrar's job is done, & now hosting provider as well as dns servers come in picture.
Now, when a user types your domain, his internet provider or dns address server looks up the relevant ip & or ask around. Closest/fastest/reliable records are then used. Your registrar usually do not control or operate these servers, but Google 8.8.4.4, Cloud flare 1.1.1.1, your ISP & such operate these.
The geographic closeness to hosting servers is preferred, but I think geographic closeness to register doesn't matter much.
I'm a very satisfied Namecheap customer :-)
I just miss .SE domains, I have quite a few of them and would really like to move them over to Namecheap. Keep up the great service, it’s really unique among registrars to be user friendly, cheap, well documented and without bloat and ads. Love it!
Only problem in the company settings is multiple users but other than that no issues.
Is there a way to migrate a bunch of domain names from Godaddy to Namecheap ? We own about 200 domain names and I would like nothing more than to drop Godaddy for Namecheap, but I cannot justify the manpower (basically just me) required to migrate domains one by one.
Thanks.
Any chance Namecheap can provide catch-all mailboxes?
I don't care to have 10 different mailboxes, I was stuck with GoDaddy and now with Wild West Domains just because the have "catch-all", so I can register to services with different email addresses (e.g. paypal55@mydomain.com, ebay44@mydomain.com) so I can also track who got hacked/sold my email ;)
If you do provide it, since I don't see "catch-all" on your three email options (Starter-Pro-Ultimate). If you do offer it, can you please consider adding it to the key specs?
Just wanted to add my opinion to the thread and thank you guys for a very good service.
Also, will Namecheap ever add a second factor method that isn’t SMS? Security aside, logging in just feels clunky.
Always had great service, including quick resolution when I tried to register .id shortly after they allowed international registration (and encountered a few speedbumps).
Thanks for the good work!
I found Dynadot prices very competitive, Namecheap is not shoving ads but dns management is not easy, & is expensive. Hexonet offers way more tlds, have robust search, & retains domains in cart for months if you are not ready. Dynadot record manager is better. Hexonet is expensive.
Godaddy used to be my choice in around 2012-2016, but not any more.
Shameless plug, one of my total three blog posts is about my journey of Domains https://davinder.net/my-journey-with-domains/
I was gonna use google's new domain product since I'm a huge Google fanboy, but it ended up being 10x pricier in some cases and the interface isn't as powerful (maybe for the better, but ymmv).
Net renewal is again $11/15 at Dyna/Namecheap. Transfers are same, $11.
.in renewals are $7/$12, transfers same $7.
I mostly prefers renewals because of inertia of moving nameservers and or other DNS records. I sometime transfer between namecheap and Dynadot. Most of my purchases are multi year.
*All prices rounded roughly to nearest dollar.
+1 for having same experience at Google, living in Google verse 24/7, but google.domains is expensive.
I renewed a .com for an additional 9 years. When the order processed, it turns out domains can only be extended out to a maximum of 10 years, and this domain was still a few years away from expiry.
The order didn't go through and I wasn't charged.
The next day I got an email from NameCheap saying that they had manually charged me $80ish, renewed the domain for 3 years, and put the rest in the NameCheap wallet. None of which I asked for.
I went back and forth a couple times with support saying they would cancel my domain if I wanted the money refunded, when all I wanted was for this transaction I didn't ask for to be undone.
After they "made an exception" I transferred everything to PorkBun, which works just as nicely.
Some drawbacks of NC are some support need sharpen their skills and response more quickly, but in overall, I am really happy with everything namecheap did, and would love advise anyone try it.
To be honest, my initial reaction was "I've been godaddy'd" since the messages don't indicate anything different.
Namecheap is abused to prop up the largest SMS phishing scam in Australia and they do not care to enforce their TOS to stop it.
This is a skilled in-house team that is working hard on these cases. We absolutely do enforce our ToS but we do not takedown domains without due diligence.
In the light of this thread, I've shared my experience with domain names search and how to perform it securely without worrying that someone will grab your name https://stanbright.com/domain-name-search/
And then I remembered I had transferred them to namecheap a year ago. You guys are the best.
A few days later I was contacted by Hover support saying they were unable to acquire it. I'm now in the process of transferring everything to Namecheap.
There are less expensive options than both GoDaddy and Namecheap that do not have any of these issues. The renewal rate for a .com domain is $17.99/year at GoDaddy, $8.88/year at Namecheap, $8.56/year at Porkbun, and $8.03/year at Cloudflare.
Seems a bit strange that someone would be willing to hand over their Name, Address and payment for a domain, but not willing to show up not behind a VPN.
It's inconvenient to turn off a VPN just to use Namecheap. Although Namecheap already has my information, if I have more than one browser tab open and need to do something on another site while interacting with Namecheap, I would be exposed to an unprotected connection with not only Namecheap but also the other site. This is unacceptable considering that other registrars don't have anti-VPN restrictions.
As a result of Namecheap not doing their due diligence as a registrar my domain got deleted and picked up by SEDO.
To be honest most providers suck. Another common scam these guys run is skinning you for renewals, its just messed up that sometimes i have to pay double to triple the price of buying the domain for renewals.
Many many years ago, when YC was newish - I read a blog post featuring Drew. He registered the first Dropbox domain (getdropbox.com I think) on Namecheap. That's when I decided to give Namecheap a try, and I'm so glad I did.
Haven't been disappointed since. Thank you!
On the flip side, when I hear GoDaddy used in any sentence - The hairs on the back of my neck stand up :(
I've been less happy with Namecheap's abuse responses, unfortunately. I quit trying to report NC registered domains (or NC hosting), that were being used for clearly malicious activity.
Also Louis Rossman mentioned you in his latest video. That's what brought me here.
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
To make it more clear, if you need a domain which is registered in godaddy and has privacy protection enabled, please do not pay money to godaddy to broker a deal on behalf of you with the existing domain owner. They take huge sum of money, do nothing and stop responding. It's like giving your hard earned money for free to these godaddy scammers. One of the worst registrars and I don't want to open another can of worms with their really really bad service (hosting, emailing and all such services!)
Source - https://baremetrics.com/blog/scored-baremetrics-dot-com
If it was a ccTLD (2 characters on the TLD), they could also be sanctioned, depending on the rules of the extension.
The sanction can range from a (huge) fee, to a revocation of their accreditation, so it's not nothing.
And if GoDaddy reaches out to that customer on behalf of another customer, they don't reveal any private information. Each customer only sees their own interaction with GoDaddy. They don't see each others' info.
Charging for this is really shady, but not contacting the domain owner when requested is a registrar agreement violation.
Note that it's also the responsibility of the registrar to ensure that contact information of their registrants are correct.
I said yes and their process was extremely fast in the transfer and getting paid.
I use Google Domains now for my stuff.
Thanks for the heads up! Any recommendations for alternative methods for accomplishing this?
He had server access because I trusted him. He wasn't supposed to have access to my domain account, and I didn't share my credentials.
I had another friend on the account because I was paying for his domain and wanted to let him administer DNS. They conspired together and were able to leverage this access and the lack of account ACLs to transfer everything away.
This was well over a decade ago.
They never invested in StrategyWiki, so it never realized the vision I had for the site. I had started to pay contributors and invest in content to bootstrap.
This guy came from the MediaWiki purge of video game guides and felt like he owned and deserved the site, despite the fact that I had created most of the original content. He was ten years older, well paid, and threatened me with a lawsuit. I was a college kid and couldn't do anything.
I learned a hard lesson. It's stuck with me.
It seems like they are still violating your copyright, so you might be able to go that avenue if the SoL keeps refreshing as they keep violating it (not sure though).
GoDaddy has terminated accounts on copyright grounds before, and you could also file a civil suit if you think you could withstand the cost / pain of it now.
(That said, sometimes it's better to just walk away)
This happened back in 2008? SoL has definitely lapsed.
I think it's better to just walk away. It hurt a lot at the time, but that pain has largely healed. Thinking about it doesn't cause me pain or regret anymore, just... I feel sorry for them? It doesn't change what I accomplished then. I'm still proud of what I built, and I know it could have been better with me steering it.
Since then, I've continued to build really cool stuff and not let these folks hold me back. My projects have been bigger and have impacted more people. I'm at peace, and I've got a lot to look forward to.
Good for you! That's the healthy path.
Seems pretty clear that although they had server credentials, they were never given any account credentials, but they were able to get into the account and transfer ownership anyway.
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 it free here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/whoi...]
I guess ICANN's lookup tool (https://lookup.icann.org/) is probably more trustworthy than commercially operated ones; it would be a terrible look for them to engage in this practice.
But I always feel much safer using whois in a terminal than any website that can see what I'm searching for.
Is it? I don't think it is included on Windows --- it is available on sysinternal, sure, but not included. (Unless something has changed from when I stopped using Windows)
>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).
A month or so ago, I discovered .wang was a TLD, and I immediately brought it up with friends, and we spent some time happily and goofily brainstorming. I'm not sure about the exact count, but after dozens of queries, whois started returning errors for too many requests.
I thought I saw a complaint about them domain frontrunning once, but it surprised me and I didn't see any hard evidence, and it doesn't seem like them.
But I'll still always feel safer using whois in the terminal. I've been online too long to trust anyone on matters like this.
Besides, whois is right here in my terminal, so it's quicker anyway.
PS: Use gandi.net, both for search and registration.
I'm not saying they didn't do it, but I base my opinions on facts, not speculation or "they've been doing it for years".
I'm just not seeing any evidence in the WHOIS record that GoDaddy registered that domain--it could have been one of their customers.
Lots of instances of it, I won't bother listing all of it here as I'm on a phone.
Their interface is very clean, their business model is no-nonsense, and I dig the managed DNSSEC.
Also, namecheap’s beast mode if you want to check hundreds of domains at once.
There's a reason my personal domain is nothingofvalue.org instead of .com. Because when I went to register the .com originally and backed out at the last minute to give myself time to setup a PO Box (didn't like the ICANN publicly displaying my mailing address), I came back two days later and noticed that someone had registered the .com domain.
You could be right that it's Google, but I doubt they would risk a scandal to make a few bucks like that.
> You could be right that it's Google, but I doubt they would risk a scandal to make a few bucks like that.
I think this HN thread has shown that it seems to be something of an open secret among domain registrars, so I'm not sure it would necessarily be a "scandal", particular given how hard it would be for me to prove it.
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
Respectfully, I stated an objective fact and nothing more, backed by an evidentiary link. As the other reply and yours seemed to have missed the context to which I was replying, "This is really bizarre behavior for HN" which was being contested by my reply - in hindsight I should have quoted it to be blatantly obvious to speed readers.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
(As a bonus - securities regulators can easily request business records, and will raid offices if they need to - it could be argued a more energetic approach like this in the tech space would not be a bad thing and I would expect travel in this direction as economies continue to rely on further on IT and if companies pull stunts like this it will be deserved).
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
Domain name registration is quite broken and should probably be quasi-regulated in a way TLS certificate registration is.
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 expensive, plan). The constant upsells on garbage are basically predatory at this point, too.
It's been so problem-free that I couldn't even remember the provider's name -- I had to WHOIS my domain to figure out who was hosting it.
I like Porkbun quite a bit but sometimes Namecheap is cheaper or it’s easier to just add to that account.
I think I can proudly say I’ve never used GoDaddy as a registrar, but I’ve been with some bad ones over the last 20 years so I can’t claim full moral high ground either.
But Ted's comment implies you can register .is through Namecheap. I wonder how/if they get around the Icelandic NS host problem.
DNS service for my .is domain is handled by AWS Route 53.
I believe Namecheap offloads some of the info for .is back to ISNIC. The only reason I don’t do it under Namecheap is that I’ve had the ISNIC account for 11 years and it’s easy enough to get my annual email reminding me to renew, but I was able to get my friend’s registered through her Namecheap account without issue at the end of last year.
GoDaddy are just bad in every conceivable way.
For those that don't know me, I work for Fabulous.com. I can confirm Fabulous has never and will never engage in activities as described by the OP.
If anyone has any questions, needs assistance with anything relating to Fabulous, feel free to reach out. My email is mike@fabulous.com.
You get free email forwarding (even wildcard), free domain privacy, free website forwarding (with ssl), Google infrastructure behind all of that and the authoritative DNS they offer.
Cloudflare also offers a registrar service and its good.
Any idea if the '£10/year' is every year? Or does it go up after the first year?
Also, I found it weird that they promote a .app and .dev TLD as 'More Secure'.
GD was good when I was brainstorming ideas and wanted to buy domains for peace of mind just for $1.99 or some other big promo discount. But is goes to $22+ the next year, while the normal price is $12. Google.Domains offers flat $12 + lots of value in email forwarding et al. I used to add domains as aliases to my old free GSuite subscription just for emails, which was highly inconvenient. Also redirects from e.g. .org/.info/.net to .com is small but handy thing.
Last time I registered 3 domains with GD 3 months ago there was no promo give-away prices for the first year. Registered with them by inertia. But without almost free prices to "reserve" a domain dealing with GD makes no more sense.
One good thing about GD is that domain transferring from them to Google takes couple of clicks and is pretty fast. I did not have to leave my PC during the process - couple of page refreshes.
Biggest problem is that the site doesn’t work well in ios on iPhone so I use mobile chrome.
https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/
If you use Google Domains, you risk losing access to the domains if Google suspends or terminates your Google account for some reason unrelated to the domains.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826368
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109809
Google Domains charges $12.00/year for .com renewals, compared to $8.56/year at Porkbun and $8.03/year at Cloudflare. With Google's reputation for poor support, most domain owners simply have no good reason to use Google Domains.
And you can expect that they're not going to turn _into_ a scammy registar at any point since, well, it's AWS.
Looking their site they have an intro deal going now to host for a year for $2/month
I use gandi.net because every domain includes email hosting. And France privacy laws.
https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit
"No Bullshit is our philosophy"
"Above all, "no bullshit" is our golden rule—to treat
our users how we want to be treated. It's a promise
to respect your rights and to level with you about our
shortcomings."Same. I like to see it myself and look for it each time I visit.
I consider it a canary. When that go÷s away, time to evaluate things again.
I'm a big fan. I've never had any issue at all, and their DNS hosting seems incredibly robust (I'm not qualified to really analyze it - there's a reason I don't do my own DNS).
Can’t comment on its customer service, because in 23 years I've never had anything go wrong.
I work for Directnic. I can confirm Directnic has never and will never engage in activities as described by the OP.
If you (or anyone) has any questions, needs assistance with anything relating to Directnic, feel free to reach out. My email is mrobertson@dnc.io.
They email me once a year that stuff is about to expire, I renew it.
I've never had to interact with them otherwise about anything, which in this case means they're clearly doing something right.
Then they'll search for technical people to implement their idea. So being hosted there is not necessarily connected with the people actually doing the work.
I think you may be used to cases where the startup idea generator and implementer is the same person. But it's not always that way.
Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.
Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.
brian1999@yahoo.com
I'd be interested to know what percentage of 21 year olds know what yahoo is (they would have sold Tumblr right around them being 18 years old).
Bonus laughter if it's something massively inappropriate. Some e-mail stems from the last position search (this is at a college, granted it is an entry level position, but it's still a college): cuntcrasher, c00rslight, bigswag420, trideltaFcups, and my personal favorite, milfhunter9inch.
These are supposed to be professional people. This is real life. This is real. I can't wake up.
I used to work with a guy whose first + middle initials and last name resulted in an official corporate email of "xlwang", no lie.
Only you can save Corbin Untcrasher and Tyrone Ridel-Tafcups from crushing student loan debt.
1: I didn't make up the terminology, I'm just using it because it exists...
I'm technically competent but have one domain on GoDaddy for a startup I'm handling.
See, the domain we wanted was after market, and the purchase deal was done through a service that requires GD as the registrar.
So, after $12000 for the domain, we have to wait before we can transfer into our AWS.
I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying to avoid.
I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders.
Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating domain ownership to AWS gives us almost no benefits. I guess having more consolidated billing would be nice, but until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar. Then again, I don't know if I'd care to interview someone who makes such large decisions based on small details with no context.
Everything always depends... But the initial team tends to turn into the top management team, and a company managed by people that can do its main work is completely different from one managed by people that can't. It's reasonable for somebody to want to avoid it.
GoDaddy are on my shitlist after the elephant killing incident, their predatory business practices and low quality tooling. And don't ever forget to renew your domain or GoDaddy will squat it.
I would absolutely yellow flag a tech company for using GoDaddy.
I was not aware of the elephant killing incident, have not experienced their poor tooling (because I have not used them) and was not aware that GoDaddy squats expired domains.
Does this lack of knowledge yellow flag me as a competent person?
Domain registration often happens in a hurry. After a brainstorm that revealed an aha! In that moment, the only thing that matters is grabbing that domain while it's still available. Someone hurriedly registers the thing, with knowledge that it can always be moved later.
If you want to judge a company based on the early inception of the domain, often before deeply technical/experienced folks get involved, that's obviously your prerogative. But I think you'd be unnecessarily filtering out great opportunities in the process.
Oh, and didn't Google Domains use GoDaddy and others behind the scenes for awhile?
Obviously it's not a 100% sign. Just a heuristic. One of many, I'd assume. But I can't fault someone for using one when the cost of a false positive so far outweighs the cost of a false negative.
> until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
> would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company
You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective.
There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godaddy remnants. The flawed DB schema fragments from two refactorings ago which stubbornly survive. The fact that the site goes down for 30 seconds every time someone ships a change to production. The fact that shipping frequently is discouraged because of this. The overly aggressive cache invalidation strategy which causes 30% more DB load. The fact that no one is monitoring the DB load. The API endpoints with 4,000ms of latency. The fact that this will never be fixed because you are way too deep in bed with a poorly chosen framework and ORM.
All of these things can be justified from a business perspective as "not worth the effort to fix". Customers aren't leaving, revenue isn't dipping. It's fine. Just focus on the sprint.
But on every engineer's internal balance scale of "should I stay or should I go", all of these things get noticed. Each one adds a pebble to the "leave" side of the scale. For your talented engineers, two pebbles.
Don't let too many pebbles pile up.
Edit: It is also exactly this kind of thinking that keeps people in bad situations. Nobody wins when anyone thinks like that, except of course the people in the exploiting position in the first place.
You are touching on an important point, which I did not state: that there are no companies with zero pebbles on the scale.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is to avoid a pile of pebbles large enough that engineers feel hopeless / "why do I bother" / "this place is a joke anyway". Good people don't stick around long for that.
But the main point was that thinking that a technical blemish has "zero cost" is a trap. The cost is not zero. The cost is having one more pebble on the scale.
I.e. "technically incompetent"?
yes, a startup registered through Route 53 is a better sign of competency on staff or in their network
but propping up domains wherever you want and changing the cname whenever you want doesn't tell you anything
I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap).
But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)
That's a mixed signal. I can really help my technically incompetent clients.
All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude.
And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better.
You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc.
GoDaddy's hosting is unfit for any purpose.
They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now.
All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.
That's because all domains transferred to CloudFlare are required to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. It's just a different business model.
Yet now it turns out not only is this established practice, there is even a Wikipedia entry on it.
"It's only paranoia if they're not really after you!"
I do not enter <name_I_want>.<tld> into any registrar until I am actually attempting to buy it from that registrar.
In one company I was at, we needed an offsite FTP server. The admin set one up on GoDaddy. I asked him wtf he was doing, and he just shrugged and said, "eh, they're easy." Shortly after joining another company, my boss, the CTO, was complaining about some huge problem he had with GoDaddy on a legacy platform. I asked why in the world did he ever use them in the first place, and he just said, "I know, I know."
* Be the good guy, and establish a customer base. Provide low prices, good customer service, etc. Lose money on the razor-thin margins.
* Once you've got a ton of customers, turn evil, and milk your customer-base for all they've got. Engage in every nasty sleazeball tactic.
I've seen this cycle many times, starting with Network Solutions.
People use GoDaddy because they were the good alternative for a while.
I think their business plan is rather: Lure in general population customers via mainstream media advertising, and don't really care about anything else (including their reputation with tech people). No one in tech that I know would touch them with a ten-foot pool. Most of the non-tech people I know are running to GoDaddy when they have to register a domain for their business/project, because they are almost the only ones doing widespread advertising.
Since then, I've gone through 2 more registrars which went down the same path. I'm gradually migrating to AWS since I'm hoping they have the same incentive structure to f- me over in a few years. The way I figure, if my DNS provider is also providing cloud servers, etc. they'll have more incentive to keep me as a customer.
They've also been implicated with a few stories around blocking DNS services for certain whole countries, voiding domains without any proper court order, etc.
But, if you're working in a TLD where Freedom<tm> is more important than actual free markets, do your domain checks against the root servers yourself with dig +trace.
In recent years IANA has run a whois server that provides referrals to the appropriate registry, so in most cases a whois client can start by querying whois.iana.org and follow whois: or refer: lines to the right whois server without leaking too much information. (whois is still cleartext and a very crappy poorly-defined protocol...)
FreeBSD's whois mostly works by following referrals with heuristics for filling in the ghen that doesn't work; Debian's whois mostly uses a built-in database of whois servers and heuristics for finding them.
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 there is no match for "example.com" then I decide if I want to buy it, before starting to build anything. If I do decide to get it, I go to Hover.com do a final check and press "Add to cart".
These days, for me it's better to spend $15 on a domain that might not get used, than to regret not buying it.
Hover.com is my goto. Good pricing, super easy to use, free DNS (which I use for non-production stuff), and built in email services if you want and don't want to bother setting that up separately.
For years, I've gone to ICANN directly to check domain name availability: https://lookup.icann.org/
> “GoDaddy never has and never will register domain names based on customer searches. This is an unethical and predatory practice that runs counter to our mission of helping people bring their ideas to life online with the best possible domain name.”
It sounds like the culprits' big sin was pocketing the money instead of letting the company pocket the money.
Another GoDaddy sucks story, which happened to me several times before I dropped them. Good luck canceling an SSL certificate - they will still treat it as a valid SSL very that needs to get re-cert’ed every year and they’ll charge you full price, $79, up to 3 months ahead of its expiration! I’m 100% positive I canceled an SSL very and ensured it was removed from my Renewals and of course, they still charged for a renewal.
It’s a certain kind of justice when a squatter gets squatted.
And they registered it for two years.
They ranted about how it's done totally anonymous and had to do all the communication.
They transferred the domain to us revealing the seller's WHOIS information (email, phone, name, address).
Ended up being someone literally walking distance from me in Washington, DC. So that's some crazy sketch dangerous behavior... I couldn't imagine what would happen if they sold to a really pissed off client. People are crazy over their company and personal names. Like hello incoming pissed off dude who just forked over multiple $xx,xxx to a squatter and now has their address.
Then I couldn't replace the WHOIS information because you needed the seller to confirm via their WHOIS email (GoDaddy support could not understand this / or I suck at explaining).
I almost just called the seller up, but instead finally found out GoDaddy allows you to bypass the WHOIS process with the email of your GoDaddy account.
Disaster. Don't really buy domains anymore but probably Cloudflare or bust at this point.
This thread is a good indicator of how/why they keep doing it though. Every time I start to think people have finally caught on an realized how GoDaddy treats customers and potential customers, I see a new case of someone seemingly unaware of their vast history of stuff like this.
We think it is easy to disseminate information on the internet, but in the end it is really hard to really get anything into true general awareness.
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.
I’ve also heard good things about Gandi.net but I haven’t tried them myself.
But its ownership has changed multiple times over two decades, and the company is now owned by a private equity firm. The most recent reviews have been far from great[1].
I would recommend INWX (Germany) as the best European alternative to Dynadot.
They are a major registrar with many millions of domains registered through them.
I had some domains registered through Gandi in the past, but they're prices are kinda high, and their web interface isn't that great.
When we acquire a new domain, I just file it in the appropriate folder and all my templates are automatically applied.
Free privacy and DNS is a nice extra. Reduces spam and overhead.
Even some "basic" stuff like the difference between registrar and registries is widely unknown to the public.
It's a shame really, because knowing how it works is extremely empowering. Knowing where and how to escalate complaints (registrar -> registry -> ICANN if not a ccTLD) for instance is just mandatory.
Another issue that I remember was that they provided a free SSL cert that I did not want. They then charged me for renewal the following year. All it took was a phone call to get the charge reversed, but it was a phone call that I should not have been forced to make.
They proclaim themselves sui generis authority in charge of domain names, domain registries and domain name regsitrars on the internet (there is not and never was any legal basis for such "authority"), they turn domain names into a "business", they make up arbitrary rules that line their own pockets (initial gTLD application will cost $185,000), they allow registrars to do things like front-running, etc., etc.
Why things do not change: When a user gets screwed by front-running, the user calls for a boycott of GoDaddy instead of questioning the entire ICANN-administered system itself. The protection of ICANN's racket relies on security through obscurity.
Front-running is a very old practice amongst ICANN-approved domain name registrars.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/agp-status-report-2009...
The question is whether they are still enforcing the policy.
Never again.
IIRC, after Godaddy blew up with their Superbowl commercial they've been ratcheting up the scam factor in every way possible. Just avoid them completely.
I've always feared that registrars would do that, so I've never really trusted them. The way I do it is to check only once I'm ready to buy. Of course the first thing I look for is always taken on .com, but nowadays with so many top level domains is feasible to find something good.
GoDaddy is the SourceForge of hosting. I'll never trust them again, and I don't think anyone should. Not only do they still pull the shenanigans of registering domains you search for, but I've had terrible experiences in the past where they just decided to shut down my hosted sites for no good reason. I once woke up to discover that my web forum was shut down, and I got an email from them telling me that they decided that I had used a nulled/cracked version of paid software, which simply wasn't the case. No matter how much evidence I provided, they didn't change their minds and took days to get back to me. I took my business elsewhere, obviously.
Even for the average person, there are tons of better options than GoDaddy nowadays. If you need a website for your business, just use Wix or Squarespace or the like. GoDaddy is shady, even though they've tried to rectify their image.
Trick is to NOT include the domain extension, in your case just search for "felons" and dont add to cart anything at all unless you're ready to pay for it immediately. These sites naturally got behaviour analytics behind them that they lever up against their customers for a higher ask price for their domains. If you behave in a way they can precisely predict your real wants, well that is exactly what happens.
Edit: some guy from Namecheap just commented claiming they dont do this. That is possible imo, maybe its all just coincidence and we're all conspiracy theorists, but eitherway err on the side of cautious if you want og domain names, lol.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
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.
fuckgodaddy.com Fuckgodaddyhard.com Fuckgodaddyreallyhard.com Fuckgodaddyproper.com Fuckgodaddyproperly.com
Now, gandi:
All available except for fuckgodaddy.com
edit:
Maybe profanity triggered something?
reamgodaddyproperly.com
Unavailable on godaddy, available on gandi.
Finally, I searched on some of the same, arguably in poor taste names, using gandi instead of godaddy, and all were available to register.
Was hoping godaddy would squat on one of these. Got denied.
Tried a rando domain too:
biggodaddybomotoys.com. nope
Nothing containing "godaddy" appears registerable at godaddy. Pity.
Make of it what you will.
Still, it a lousy practice.
this godadday practice story keeps showing up every now and then everywhere reddit or HN etc.
Some people say it's great, they 'secure' your domain than hijacking.. blah blah. nonetheless it's a creepy behavior.. in the past such discussion i guess it only cost them few cents to register it for a month period etc.. not sure exactly, some peeps had suggested to make a bot to search tons of them.. but I think it doesn't cost them much... somehow....
GoDaddy a few years ago broke their domain forwarding, which prompted us to build our own forwarding service, NavHere, which we are shutting down and is also on the HN front page:
Shutting down NavHere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24505232
I have stopped using Godaddy for a while now because I had suspected that was happening. I wasn't 100% sure, but when I would spend hours looking for a domain name and searching through hundreds of names, I noticed a few of them with the least amount of characters and words they might consider more "premium" were taken. The few I noticed were some of the top choices I was considering using.
I do suspect they have some sort of algorithm where they take domains you might consider buying, but I can't prove it.
I've stopped searching on there for a while now and just stick with Namecheap. Never have any problems with Namecheap and their customer service was pretty good/fast when I got locked out of my account 1 time.
Now days I'm pretty paranoid about searching for domains on any domain site...
Now I only use the Internic DNS lookup when I want to search.
GoDaddy's most infamous ads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7yFCqOAb9Y
GoDaddy CEO Kills Elephant
Went to easydns.com and been quite happy with them!
Turns out they had keystroke-logged me as I filled out the form. They got name, address, credit-card #, domain name.
I was peppered with website "designer", "logo", "SEO" spam for years afterwards.
A 6 letter word that can be well branded and is immediately memorable? I would be more shocked if it were actually avl
"Sorry, f___yougodaddyforstealingthesesearches.com is unavailable"
Twitter was very early at the time (this was late 2007 or early 2008) but I happened to have a follower who worked at NetSol who released the domain name so I could get it.
Scammy industry.
I usually trust Namecheap not to do this (porkbun too), but this is why I’ve become accustomed to doing incognito domain searches or searches via the command line and whois to try to curb this sort of stuff.
[edit] spelling
BTW, I now remembered that this isn't even the main reason why GD sucks. IIRC perhaps the main reason is that their support is susceptible to all kinds of social attacks and transfer domains left and right. Basically, account security is rendered poof by support people who don't care. So probably don't want to use GD if you like to at least keep your purchases after paying.
But, what godaddy does with the domain they registered? Do they try to sell it to you for an exorbitant price? What's their deal?
I would think that Attorney Generals love clear cut cases that affect a vocal and voting portion of their constituencies.
Second, what are the better alternatives? I use Namecheap and so far have been happy with them. Proud to say that a domain name I was researching months ago is still not registered.
Whenever a company does something sufficiently offensive, they earn a lifetime boycott from me.
It's an especially easy commitment to make in crowded marketplaces (laptops & mobile phone manufacturers, DNS registries, fast food chains, etc).
[0] http://godaddyboycott.org/ and https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16320149
Some good domain names I found were suddenly not available and were up for auction on GoDaddy.
After a couple of times, I have completely ditched them for search.
Namecheap is good. Also use Google Domains for checking now.
I hope they go down in flames. Their whole business was built on misogyny and preying on ignorance. Their products are rough to work with, and their service hasn’t been kind to me. Super Bowl ads and loss leaders have worked to hook a lot of people into the type of subpar website ownership experience that gave rise to social networks in the first place.
anyone has better options to try new domain names?
I just did a quick interview with their founder, judge for yourself - https://www.raddadshow.com/episode/anthony-eden
They really run the company for the sake of providing the best service, even if that doesn’t make them the biggest or richest.
I was trying to decide between abtesting.ai and abtest.ai (both were free while checking). Luckily I decided to go with abtesting.ai and got the domain right away. A week after that I decided that it may be a good idea to buy abtest.ai anyway so someone else wouldn't try to impersonate our company. However, when I checked again the domain was already sold...
It's possible that the registry incorrectly showed it as available due to its redemption/expired state.
This would only create false negatives, correct?
Feels like either they or some other party are looking at the stream of purchase intent to do this. Awful practice.
I had this back in the days, or should I say back in the years, when I was still awake staying late at night to have a decent ADSL speed.
Searched a domain name for a project, it was free. Searched the day after, it wasn't. I was naive enough to think that other people had the same idea at the same time! When it happened the following days, I got it. And immediately told everyone around me.
If I find a domain candidate I think we might want and its available, I buy it as soon as humanly possible (I.e. Route53 tab on the other half of my monitor). ~$12 is not a big deal if we end up never using it. I'll just go through and uncheck the auto-renew option.
I know this is statistically possible as just coincidence and bad luck, and I thought about it that time and concluded they must have just nabbed it (wrote an angry message to support that went nowhere).
So I created a simple shell script from which I do all my domain availability searches now. It is also way faster than using any web based searches.
I found the explanation provided here by GoDaddy itself....inadequate at best.
https://www.godaddy.com/community/Domain-Aftermarket/Is-Goda...
Ever since I've been using whois in terminal for domain name lookups.
Domain Name: FELONS.IO Registry Domain ID: D503300001186478247-LRMS Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com Updated Date: 2020-09-16T21:06:29Z Creation Date: 2020-09-16T10:42:26Z
Yep, created 2 days ago.
For example, if you want to see if DogHeaven.com is available, search for "ogheave".
initially i wanted to move 1 domain ... i ended up moving ALL my domains and my company domains .. and advised others to move their domains.
I think you meant Gandi.net?
I definitely agree with the sentiment, Gandi has not done this to me in the past -- I've looked up short domains weeks before purchase -- and in general provide an outstanding service.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070829115722/http://www.nodadd...
Always check for individual domains via the whois command, and if you need to do searches across a few TLDs use https://njal.la
That is when I learned my lesson to use a ‘trusted’ registrar for searching.
Everyone can search for a variety of domains that we are not actually interested in, and waste their money if they frontrun us.
I did get a very similar situation,
I searched one domain, and about a month later, when I searched again, it is registered.
I did not check how long the domain age was, but I felt so disappointed that time.
internet.bs inwx.net
gandi.net has a terrible interface. But free Email hosting included. If you need email hosting only, try swiss based infomaniak.com
man page: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=whois
source code: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/usr.bin/whois...
whois godaddy.com
whois superuselessdomainforeveryone.com
look for "No match for domain" at the end
Is this actually causing other problems? Probably.
"The company’s original name was called “Jomax Technologies,” named after an old dirt road Parsons used to drive by on the way to work. Two years after founding the company, Parsons wanted to change the name to something more fun and memorable.
An employee suggested the name Big Daddy, but the domain name was already taken. The reason? The movie “Big Daddy,” starring Adam Sandler. Parsons suggested GoDaddy to the team. Luckily, the .com was available and the name has stuck for just about two decades."
for name searches (no affiliation)
We show results quickly because we check if your search is in the zone file. We keep a copy of the zone file in memory, and check searches against that. Some names are "unconfigured" for a variety of reasons, and do not appear in the zone file. So this means we might show a name as available, but when you go to register it, it's gone. This sometimes leads people to believe that we've registered it for ourselves. If you check the WHOIS record, you'll usually find that it's been registered for years before you searched for it.
The only major registrar that I know of that did this was Network Solutions. They did it for a few days in 2008 before getting trashed in the press:
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/01/network-soluti...
More recently, when we show a name as available, we'll check again with VeriSign (who runs the .com registry) to make sure. And if it's not available, we'll switch the color from green to red -- a good example is eager.com. It's not in the zone, but not available to register.
whois felons.io
They got caught and said sorry. That was about it.
More bad news: it's not just GoDaddy.
How's this not an FTC violation?
(not affiliated, just mindblown)
wait for godaddy to buy them!
e.g. I just searched for greatfelons.io
tl;dr never attribute to malice that which is bound to happen because statistics
Front running domains used to be a widespread practice but I thought it was abolished at some point before all the new TLDs were added.
It's just not true and is also pretty close to liable.
It's understandable OP mightn't understand domain front running and how Go Daddy will NOT be doing that.
But Go Daddy has addressed front running before and also this specific incident [π]
Is everyone here mentally ill?
No one able to even talk about how this might have come from a side channel so we all actually learn something rather than whatever this is?
[edit] And wow, the account claiming this, was created to post this. No other comments. Not even on this thread. We don't even know if they are 12 and also searched for the domain on another site but forgot. This is what we are basing this liable on?
[π] https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d... https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/1306731693710204928
In this case, I don't see any evidence of front-running. It's more likely that it's a coincidence that someone registered the domain name a day after you searched for it. In fact, I personally would consider that to be more of a 'premium' domain, so it's logical that someone simply also searched for it and bought it.
Personally, when I search for domains, and it's available, I usually just register it and don't wait. I only wait and not register it right then and there if I'm OK with not getting it.
You might want to disclose your affiliation on these kinds of topics, especially when you're arguing the company's side.
There are DNS related articles by "Bill Hartzer", but they seem more to be calling out places for doing shady crap. Including GoDaddy (for front running?). eg:
https://www.billhartzer.com/domain-names/godaddy-caught-regi...
That's just an initial impression anyway. ;)
[1] https://www.godaddy.com/garage/what-is-deep-linking-and-how-...
Good find. :)
I’ve written a ton about domains over the years, and the articles you’re referring to that appeared on the GoDaddy blog were syndicated. They actually picked them up through another source.
No disclosure needed, I’m not affiliated with GoDaddy in any way.