Is Godaddy delaying domain transfer requests? | Hacker News Reader

Is Godaddy delaying domain transfer requests?

skitch.com

209 pointsprateekdayal47 comments

Anthony from DNSimple here. We've definitely seen a lot more of these messages since the SOPA announcement just before Christmas. Prior to that I almost never saw domains stalled because of problems getting at whois data. Whether GoDaddy is doing it on purpose or if they are just overwhelmed with the number of domains that are being transferred out is pure speculation at this point.

In the case of DNSimple, if you get a message like that we are currently recommending that you email us (support@dnsimple.com) and let us know which domains are currently responding with that message and we'll cancel them so you can try them again. It's a brute force way of dealing with it, it's inelegant and may end up causing even more problems for GoDaddy, but we have found that has helped a bit.

To be certain, this is different than the 5 day waiting period that ICANN allows. That only comes into effect after you've submitted the transfer request to the registry, and if you haven't received an email to authorize the transfer request then you aren't at that point yet.

Can you say a little about what it would mean for Whois to be "overwhelmed"? We're used to hearing about sites going down dealing with hundreds or thousands of requests per second, and as much as we'd all like to see GoDaddy collapse into rubble their transfers are probably more on the order of thousands a day.

How plausible is it that they could actually be seeing technical difficulties?

I agree that it seems unlikely that the whois server is having technical difficulties, rather they are probably throttling requests. Consider that spammers use whois servers as a means for harvesting email addresses and therefore they are likely limiting requests from specific IP addresses.

On the other hand, if I were a relatively large registrar I'd figure that I should have a mechanism for getting whitelisted at other major registrars, so I find it hard to believe that this issue should not already be resolved, although clearly it has not.

What incentive does GoDaddy have to provide a whitelist mechanism?

None unless someone can get ICANN to consider their behavior a violation of the ICANN registry/registrar agreement.

Interestingly enough, not long after a number of "blocked" customers (including myself) submitted complaints to ICANN about all this tomfoolery, GoDaddy contacted NameCheap and let them know that the blocking was all taken care of. Also, my stuck transfers suddenly unstuck.

We can all speculate about whether this was malice, incompetence, or just plain old DDOS protection working as designed. Either way, it looks like the squeaky wheel got the grease.

I would imagine that because just as they need to have the ability to transfer out, they also need to transfer in. It would make sense to whitelist in the event that there is an overwhelmingly large amount of transferring in.

3 days ago I transferred ~15 domains. The first half arrived just fine, but the last half is stuck. Those transfers have not shown in GoDaddy's pending transfer page, even after accepting Namecheap's verification emails.

Hm. It is possible that they set the system to start "throttling" the transfers after a certain number. I transferred 6 and saw no problems.

Anyone care to share their transfer numbers and "stuck" experiences?

I transferred 1 domain December 22. It is still with godaddy

Same here, the namecheap status is "Domain awaiting transfer initiation..."

same here I'm stuck with one last domain transfer, the one I'm most interested in transferring actually...

Update from namecheap: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393330

Sudden uptick in requests + the holidays = a multitude of reasons why there might be a delay.

Don't get me wrong, I dislike GoDaddy. But let's not jump the gun on these things.

I just got this from a namecheap customer service chat:

"Please let me explain the transfer mechanism in order to make it more clear. On the first stages of the transfer process our system needs to obtain the full domain contact information from the old registrar. Their system should provide us with the full Whois data on the domain automatically in order for us to start the Verification process and be able to proceed with the transfer initiation. Currently Godaddy blocks our IP addresses and does not provide our system with the full contact information (they are not disclosing the email addresses listed with domains), thus we need to gather this data manually"

I do a whois and get all the information, apparently they don't.

Looking up whois info manually might work if you only have a few domains to process, but not when you have a lot. Not very efficient.

I am having the EXACT same problem. My domains look like this on namecheap http://imgur.com/mtSsd and they said that GoDaddy was blocking them from getting the Whois info as well.

I understand not wanting to jump to conclusions but I trust GoDaddy about as far as I can throw the elephants that their CEO shoots...

But they do a lot more requests. With the amount of transfers they get now, some automatic DDoS protection could kick in.

I've been monitoring the progress of companies transferring away from GoDaddy and have been getting timeouts on Whois requests myself.

I was planning on transferring only half my domains from godaddy this month, but now with this, I'm transferring them all.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." -Hanlon's Razor

When dealing with a profitable company you pretty much have to assume they're smart enough, leaving malice as the most likely explanation.

Especially on the heels of supporting SOPA, a pretty malicious thing to do.

This seems like a good use-case for a distributed whois proxy... I wouldn't mind running a node for a few weeks to help NameCheap get through the backlog, especially if it helps liberates my couple of domains that are currently held hostage...

This sounds like a good idea, although the registrars would need to know that there are additional whois mirrors available and start using them, however there are other issues to consider:

* Registrars would have to trust that the data in the mirror has not been tampered with. I think there is an assumption that a whois server name that is provided through the registry whois server is going to be correct.

* Mirrors would still need to rate limit to cause problems for spammers who are harvesting email addresses, or they'd have to whitelist registrars.

The Whois protocol was a decent idea...15 years ago. What we need now is a better way of verifying domain ownership.

Transfers take forever, it's not a problem with godaddy. I transferred a domain into godaddy before all this SOPA drama and it finally "arrived" yesterday, 7 days later.

edit: seems this is an unrelated issue and before it gets to the transfer stage, my mistake.

4 hours average over the past year, ime.

There is no reason it should take longer. Some of the delay is in the email cross checks with the domain owner. It does not takes a day, let alone days, to move a domain, even when retaining DNS info. Above 4 hours need an explanation.

Most of the transfers we do take place in just a few minutes - a few hours is pretty common. Taking days is generally a boundary case nowadays.

oBDisclaimer - I work for a huge registrar.

Not sure. Only 3 of my 15 transfer requests from Friday have gone through.

This explains it: http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-trans...

Can anyone who's successfully transferred a .COM domain to Namecheap verify which registrar appears on the new WHOIS, Namecheap or eNom? I'm still planning my own move and where to go is a tough move -- I think it's between namecheap and name.com now, and I don't want to move if namecheap is still reselling .COM through eNom.

Interestingly, I looked up all the recent YC-funded companies I could think of and 99% were still at GoDaddy. I was hoping to see some pattern in who they chose to move to, but they haven't moved (yet).

I transferred a .com from GD to Namecheap and whois is now showing:

Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com Contact: support@namecheap.com Visit: http://namecheap.com

Domain name: simplehuckel.com

Registrant Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected ()

   Fax: 
   11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
   Los Angeles, CA 90064
   US

Administrative Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected +1.6613102107 Fax: +1.6613102107 11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200 Los Angeles, CA 90064 US

Technical Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected +1.6613102107 Fax: +1.6613102107 11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200 Los Angeles, CA 90064 US

Thanks. Your domain is owned by ENOM. The "service provided by Namecheap" part is not part of the record at Verisign.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/registry-data.jsp?doma...

I received the same indication from NameCheap's support group. One transfer placed 24 Dec went through - the rest are waiting.

Finally released the domains from GoDaddy by clicking on the domain and doing 'Accept'.

Now, when I do a whois it's showing as registered to eNom (I was xferring to namecheap) and then showing domain not found.

On namecheap's side it's showing as pending - not action required from me.

Anyone seen similar behavior?

I believe Namecheap still resells some TLDs from Enom. What has probably happened is that the name has been released at the registrar, Enom has received the transfer acknowledgement but NameCheap probably has not picked up the completed transfer (there is no notification mechanism so transfer orders have to be polled).

Is this a Namecheap specific issue or more general to eNom who they are a reseller for. Nothing on the enom system status page... http://www.enom.com/registrynews.asp

Enom is definitely having issues getting whois data, although I was under the impression that Namecheap was now accredited and as such would have started communicating directly with the registry for .com and .net at least. Maybe not though.

You're right, Namecheap is an accredited registrar on its own, not a reseller anymore.

http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...

They can be accredited and still resell, which I think they may be doing for some TLDs. For each TLD you want to be a registrar for you have to go through some sort of accreditation process with that TLD, so getting direct access to a large list of TLDs is quite a significant effort. It may just be that they haven't gotten to it yet for all of them.

%% whois namecheap.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net for detailed information.

   Domain Name: NAMECHEAP.COM
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.

...

Now, I'm more inclined to transfer my domains..

Did you go and accept the transfer at GoDaddy? Otherwise it takes a week.

I never got the email to accept. I have done this before and it took just minutes

If he has not received the authorization email then it most likely means that the transfer request has not been submitted to the registry which means that GoDaddy has no knowledge of the transfer yet.

Yes. There is nothing to accept in Godaddy so far. It's been a few hours. Happening to another domain of mine too

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