GoDaddy's Personal Apology to Users | Hacker News Reader

GoDaddy's Personal Apology to Users

cmetlab.authpad.com

8 pointscmetlab13 comments

PayPal seem to be waking up to the fact that their service is almost universally loathed by its users, and I can only hope the ramifications of this incident lead to a similar wakeup call for Go Daddy.

Unfortunately, I doubt it. I suspect their response over the long run will be simply to further muddle the interface to make it as difficult as possible for users to extricate themselves from Go Daddy's services.

An apology without "and you'll now get your next .com for free or xyz discount, because we fucked up"? Just empty words.

Why is it that when people fuck up you'd expect free stuff?

If I order something at a nice restaurant and it isn't to my liking, I'll tell them and they'll fix it. I don't expect my meal comped or discounted.

Likewise, if I buy a pair of shoes and the stitching comes out early, I'll take them back and exchange them, I wouldn't expect them to just toss me another free pair.

So when GoDaddy screws up, I expect them to fix it and do their best to make sure it doesn't happen again. An acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility is great. To say that everyone deserves free stuff from this is IMO pushing it.

Because GoDaddy hasn't invented a viable time machine. In both of your examples, the seller goes back and rights the wrong. In GoDaddy's case, the good they sell is a continuous service, and the lack of service for some period of time may have had some consequence to their customer. Because GoDaddy can't go back and ensure that whatever consequence doesn't occur, the only way they can try to make up for it is by providing a service credit.

To be fair, I think this is slightly different. Customers paid for a service with high uptime, and they didn't get what they paid for. That downtime likely resulted in losses (both monetary, and in terms of reputation) for many of those customers. Sure, Go Daddy don't need to provide anything free, but it probably makes good business sense as a gesture of goodwill.

(Go Daddy are providing a 30% discount on domains to existing customers, but this doesn't sit right with me. The title of a ZDNet piece nails it: "GoDaddy says sorry, now go buy something").

If you have hosted sites, they gave you a free months credit. But if you are using their DNS but your sites are hosted elsewhere they didn't give anything... not even a GoDaddy swimsuit calendar.

What would that look like? The top 1/8th of a model just to the cleavage, and the rest of the image blacked out with "For the unrated version go to godaddy.com"?

Actually, I got the same letter except mine came with a months credit and said it applied to everybody so either this blogger removed that line or it for some reason didn't apply to him (maybe no hosting account or other monthly service).

Here's my email in full:

Dear Toby Sullivan,

We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services.

We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities — and the trust you place in us — very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.

The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem.

At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.

As a result of this disruption, your account will be credited for the value of 1-month of service for each of your active/published sites.* This credit will be available to you for the next 7 days. Please click the button below to redeem your credit.

[Image]

It's an honor to serve you. Thank you for the opportunity to re-earn your business and trust.

As always, please call us 24/7 at 1-480-505-8877 — anytime, for any reason.

Sincerely,

Scott Wagner

CEO

GoDaddy.com

The one month free only applies to hosting. I only use godaddy for dns and recieved the letter without the line about getting credit.

(as a side note, I want to switch away from godaddy but I haven't found a good registrar in europe to transfer to yet, and I only use the domain for remote access to my personal net at the moment so it hasn't really been a high priority. Still, does anyone have any tips?)

That has no use and has no value to be in Hacker Mews. Godaddy extremely sucks and it is known by everybody in HN I guess. They are trying to do something that smart people should not care or even should not even see and spend seconds on it.

I'm looking to switch away from godaddy. Do you know a good registrar in europe that takes privacy issues seriously and isn't too expensive?

HN users seem to love Gandi (http://www.gandi.net - France/US/Canada) and Hover (http://www.hover.com - Canada) very, very much.

(disclaimer: I own exactly zero domains and have no experience with either of these. But both of them were highly praised in older GoDaddy threads in the past)

Edit: Use the code "dansentme" (or use hover.com/dansentme) to get a 10% discount. "dan" is "Dan Benjamin", founder of 5by5 (5by5.tv).

OT: Really glad to see someone using the platform we launched today.

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