Having said this, I'm super happy OP wrote this. We should not forget that yesterday's GoDaddy is the same as today's GoDaddy. I really feel for OP, and I know how it's easy to feel as though bad stuff only happens to other people, but my hope is that posts like this will continue and the beast will starve.
I suspect that GoDaddy will begin to employ the same tactics Nigerian scammers do in order to weed out the savvy customers with blogs, and will try to ensnare technically illiterate people with credit cards.
Since it was going to take a while (couple of days) and since the domain was going to expire in two days..I decided to renew the domain anyway with godaddy.com to try transfer it later.
I hope you never give them a penny ever again and fingers crossed I can toast to GoDaddy losing another customer!
In fact, some of my less tech savy friends have brought domains and even hosting from them.
As a freelancer, I've had only problems with them. From confusing navigation to bad control panel for hosting, they have everything in place to trouble me.
NameCheap is my go to place for domains and they are really great.
I've heard good things about "namecheap."
I also set myself in a mission to 'help' people who need help with setting up their DNS and uses Godaddy to transfer them to Namecheap first before helping out - simply because I wouldn't want to deal with Godaddy horrible UI.
To date I think I've been able to move about 100 domains out of Godaddy.
--
By the way it's a shame since I know some Godaddy Execs and they're very nice, I feel they're like trying to navigate a old ship that won't turn its course no matter how much energy they put in.
The transfer from GoDaddy went smoothly. (The longest part was waiting on GoDaddy.)
The free SSL cert is quite a nice bonus, and their customer service is great.
I'm considering purchasing hosting from them in the near future.
Clickable: https://www.gandi.net
They're the only ones I've come across as of late who offer 10 year registrations other than GoDaddy. That's the only reason I've stayed with them, and now I can be rid of their god awful interface.
The only practical technical difference with Godaddy for my purposes is that they do not support catchall addresses for email forwarding for security reasons, but this is minor.
No problems so dar.
But yeah - don't use GoDaddy. (edited for clarity, I hope)
I would rather somebody be an honest asshole. At least if they can admit they like being misogynistic, there's a chance they might get their act together one day.
But being willing to make the world worse because it lines your pockets? And then saying, "Oh man, it's not me, it's that darned business thing making me do it"? That's a sad rationalization, a total unwillingness to take responsibility for your actions.