Godaddy Holds Domain Hostage!

We have all heard the horror stories. And now $7DollarBooks.com is having a nightmare that it can’t wake up from.

Up until a few weeks ago I was an internet marketer going along minding my own business, literally. I am aware of the issues with Spammers as much as the next guy. I get Spam in my inbox everyday as well. As an internet marketer I perhaps have a more intiment experience with Spammers than some people. It’s an ongoing battle. They send unsolicited email out to unwary people with links back to one of my sales pages hoping to pick up a sale and a couple bucks commission. As soon as I am notified, and I always am, I block the Spammers email address and the visitor is redirected to an ‘Apology Page’. The spammer then creates a new gmail, yahoo or hotmail address and sends out another few thousand spam… and the circle continues. In my opinion the problem is the easy access to email accounts.

A few weeks ago I recieved an email from Godaddy stating they had recieved a complaint from an individual concerning the receipt of Spam. I responded to the email with the full details of the situation and informed Godaddy that I have been working with my web hosting company. I even CC’d the Senior Tech from the Abuse department at my web host.

Godaddy’s response was a standard copy ‘n’ paste regurgitation of their Terms of Service.

Since then, I have replied three times and each time I recieve a ‘next step in the process of hijacking a domain’ type of response. More cut & paste! For a multi million (or billion) dollar company they have not spent to much time of training thier staff on customer service.

Godaddy Attempts to Hold Domain Hostage

Here’s a little Godaddy style copy’n'pasting. This is from the last email I received from Godaddy:

“If you choose to transfer the domain name to another registrar, we first require that you pay a $75 administration fee before your domain name can be transferred. This fee is used to cover the costs of responding to or “cleaning up” the outstanding spam complaints Go Daddy has received regarding your domain name.”

So basically, after paying Godaddy for registering MY domain and having renewed the domain twice thus far, now I would have to pay 10 times the cost of registering a domain in order to transfer it to a new registrar?

Sound like a hostage situation to me.

I would like the opinion of others. Please, Digg this, forward it, blog about it. I think its time that some of the HUGE coorporations in this industry realize that without the customer/user, there would be no business.

Thanks for reading,

Joseph Murray

http://7dollarbooks.com

PS: I highly recommend Namecheap as a good domain registrar.

Tags: Godaddy Holds Domain Hostage

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under $7 Dollar Books Weekly Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.