[HN Gopher] Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com
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Tell HN: Never search for domains on Godaddy.com
searched a few days ago for felons.io, looked for unique names for
simple game didn't know if I wanted it or not 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
Author : wasteme
Score : 1047 points
Date : 2020-09-17 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
| maremmano wrote:
| I use domainr.com often and never had this problem. Just in case
| you need a nice alternative.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I've found Porkbun to be pretty good as well.
| pgrote wrote:
| I guess I am one of the few who thinks GoDaddy is a decent
| service. Yes, they front run, which sucks. Could I move? Sure.
| Moving a large amount of domains with differing end dates is
| painful and expensive.
| roosgit wrote:
| I never experienced this, but I did wait too long to buy a
| domain. After I checked if the domain was available(it was), I
| started building the website. A month later the domain was bought
| by someone who eventually made the same thing I wanted to make.
|
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| I have a habit of collecting interesting yet vaguely generic
| domain names and holding onto them for future projects. (Which
| I almost never get around to.)
| XCSme wrote:
| So does GoDaddy.
| CrociDB wrote:
| so do I. the other day I renewed a domain I got 5 years ago
| and I didn't even remember what I planned.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| Then why did you renew? Domain squatters suck.
| wusel wrote:
| If it's a good domain it would be snatched by someone who
| wants to make a profit flipping domains. The domain
| business is broken.
| Tepix wrote:
| Domains that are blocked by people not using them for
| years are just as bad.
| devenblake wrote:
| Perhaps, but it's easier to deal with a user you can
| contact at [alias]@registrardotcom versus a corporation
| you can contact at spam@corporationdotcom
| freedomben wrote:
| Likewise! My great domain got bought up. Now I register them
| _before_ I start building. I do find it gives me a little
| motivation.
|
| 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.
| james_pm wrote:
| Thanks! Glad you like the interface. We work hard to make it
| simple and also still powerful and easy to use.
| james_pm wrote:
| That's good advice. If you want a domain, spend the $15 and get
| it. I can personally guarantee Hover doesn't do anything with
| domain search data (I'm the PM so I would know :P). GoDaddy
| likely doesn't either and it was probably a coincidence that it
| was registered around the same time.
| bitxbit wrote:
| This should be illegal and they should get sued by the US govt.
| donohoe wrote:
| I had this happen a couple of years back too. At least I think
| this is exactly what happened. It was an obscure'ish name too,
| and it seemed like within 30 minutes it was gone and registered
| by GoDaddy.
|
| 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).
| ffpip wrote:
| Yes. If you search it 2-3 times, they buy it in most cases.
| langitbiru wrote:
| Then I wonder what if someone trolls Godaddy by searching many
| names.
| hsnewman wrote:
| I wonder if they have any logarithms that would attack this
| vulnerability? Someone could write a script to simply search
| several times for 1000's of names and bankrupt godaddy...
| jedberg wrote:
| It doesn't cost them anything to do this. As a registrar they
| can register a domain name for free for seven days.
| nickphx wrote:
| Their domain cost as a registrar is a fraction of retail
| pricing.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| No it's not. GoDaddy has to pay the domain registry
| (verisign, donuts , etc) for the registration plus a small
| fee to ICANN. Domains are typically extremely low margin
| and profit is made up on add-ons.
| mgolawala wrote:
| It might be completely automated, but there could also be an
| algorithm that selects searched domain names and then puts
| them in a "review" shortlist for a human (or a team) to scan
| through and flag for purchase.
| smolder wrote:
| I assume you meant "algorithm", but I wouldn't call it that
| either. Yes, you could try to exploit this to make them
| register a bunch of domains, but it costs them basically
| nothing, and you'd be rate limited/banned for the suspicious
| behavior long before it put a dent in their wallet.
| betteryet wrote:
| This just happened to me today with Epik, another old-timey
| registrar. Added a .com to their shopping cart yesterday, then
| went to pay for it this morning -- no need, it's been registered
| during the night to someone in Japan. Not a super great domain
| either, just a brand extension for our company.
|
| Feels like either they or some other party are looking at the
| stream of purchase intent to do this. Awful practice.
| [deleted]
| technoluvvo wrote:
| Well at least you didn't automatically assume the worst. Epik
| has more care and support for their customers - and more ethics
| and common sense - than the rest of them combined in my
| experience. Sounds like bad timing, but you would have a higher
| chance of falling victim to malware and a keyboard sniffer than
| seeing their team go out of their way to thwart your
| registrations. They would be more likely to go and convince the
| new buyer in Japan to give it to you for free, then figure out
| a way to make you both happier in life. Just saying.
| juped wrote:
| Fortunately, they stole a domain from me well over a decade ago,
| before I really got into domains, so I've known to avoid them.
| henriquez wrote:
| Wow, this is a blast from the past. I know Godaddy got busted
| doing this years ago. I forget whether they were sued or just
| hounded with bad P.R. but I thought they promised to clean up
| their act. I wish I could find the article now, but Google only
| pulls up stuff from the last year or so.
| snapetom wrote:
| If I recall correctly, it was a VP at GoDaddy and some
| underlings that were busted for this. They were personally
| profiting from it. GoDaddy got bad PR, those involved got
| punished (maybe fired?) and people forgot.
|
| It sounds like the culprits' big sin was pocketing the money
| instead of letting the company pocket the money.
| andrewveitch wrote:
| I'm old enough that I always just typed 'Whois' at a Unix prompt.
| aalbertson wrote:
| you know, this explains why I have lost a couple domains in the
| past. What a shady shitty thing to do.
| samaxe wrote:
| Hover has been great for me.
| miroz wrote:
| It happened to me too, while I was trying to find the domain name
| for the new project. It was free and the next day it wasn't.
|
| 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?
| kkotak wrote:
| That's what I'm thinking as well. You'd think that's counter to
| their business model to keep on buying domains.
| echelon wrote:
| Back when I was in college, GoDaddy let my at the time close
| friend break into my account and steal several of my domains,
| including https://strategywiki.org. This was while I was on an
| overseas study and couldn't regularly check in. GoDaddy gave me
| no recourse to dispute.
|
| 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.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| They defrauded you & violated your copyright. If the SoL hasn't
| passed you might want to consider filing a police report. It's
| possible that you could get the current registrar to give it
| back.
|
| 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)
| echelon wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback.
|
| 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.
| DelightOne wrote:
| Good that it didn't kill your drive! Do you still share
| your account details with friends or did that stop?
| cure wrote:
| > I'm at peace, and I've got a lot to look forward to.
|
| Good for you! That's the healthy path.
| smithza wrote:
| Sounds as though they weren't great friends. Sorry to hear of
| this.
| jefftk wrote:
| That sounds really unpleasant! It's not clear to me, though,
| what you're saying GoDaddy did wrong?
| Abimelex wrote:
| Since this seems very common, I would suggest use GoDaddy to
| search for Domains, whenever you are sure, that you never would
| buy it. Let them eat their own dog shit.
| mariust wrote:
| well all corporations rise and fall, guess the direction for
| godaddy - tbh I wonder how they managed for so many years ..
| bleepblorp wrote:
| Some TLD registries have policies to prevent registrars from
| front-running their clients by squat-registering their domain
| searches.
|
| 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_.
| thiht wrote:
| For most non-ccTLDs, that's regulated directly by the ICANN.
| It's pretty easy to file an ICANN complaint, FWIW.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Be warned that a domain can be registered without appearing in
| the DNS.
|
| 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.
| diob wrote:
| Could you flood their logs with nonsense domain searches? Would
| be fun to do a coordinated effort around that.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| This happened to me... in 1998. Network Solutions. Never again.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| Called domain front running
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
| 4cao wrote:
| I was always _expecting_ something like this to be going on, so
| I 'd never use any Web-based availability-checking tools but
| then I also tend to be a bit paranoid at times.
|
| 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!"
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Fucking sexist elephant murderers.
|
| GoDaddy's most infamous ads
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7yFCqOAb9Y
|
| GoDaddy CEO Kills Elephant
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnM5yTW2B3g
| jhgorrell wrote:
| I had been unhappy with godaddy but not gotten around to moving
| - this news got me to move the week the story broke.
|
| Went to easydns.com and been quite happy with them!
| digi59404 wrote:
| So .... how can we use this to our nefarious purposes.... anyone
| want to build an API Tool and random name generator and get
| GoDaddy to register tons of bogus names.
| kaikai wrote:
| It's almost free for them, so there's very little downside for
| them to register thousands of domains. I'd love to see how long
| it took them to block malicious searches, though.
| aleks5678 wrote:
| The godaddy search works while Namecheap is slow
| mcdevilkiller wrote:
| I knew it. I literally knew it. That's the only way they have to
| register so many good domain names that would be difficult to
| automate (plays on words, etc).
| tomhoward wrote:
| This sucks and I feel for you. But the sad fact is that domain
| registrars have been doing this ever since domain names became
| big business in the 90s.
|
| 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.
| pronoiac wrote:
| > As a PSA to everyone, you should only ever use whois in a
| terminal window to see if a domain is available.
|
| 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.
| rozularen wrote:
| Yes, namecheap is also sketchy had some trouble when I tried to
| renew a domain I bought with them then I tried to transfer it
| to Google domains to only have it blocked
| xoa wrote:
| I also wanted say "consider whois", but with a few more
| caveats. First, obviously the whois server you use matters.
| There is nothing magical about whois that stops GoDaddy from
| doing the same thing if you query whois.godaddy.com, you still
| need to talk to someone less likely to engage in this like
| going directly to InterNIC's, whois.internic.net (still I think
| under the US DOC, which whatever other flaws it has isn't
| really scrounging for change there).
|
| > _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).
| andylynch wrote:
| I've started using rdap first for this kind of thing partly
| because it works in browser and also because corporate
| firewalls like to block whois. Having a standardised response
| format is also really nice.
| christophilus wrote:
| Namecheap and Dreamhost are both top notch and would never do
| this.
| innocenat wrote:
| > It's included with macOS, Windows, Linux or any other OS
| anyone's likely to use.
|
| 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)
| mrec wrote:
| Not by default, definitely. Unless you count via WSL, but WSL
| isn't installed by default either.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's not even installed by default _in_ WSL; I had to apt
| install who is literally earlier today.
| josefresco wrote:
| Have any big name registrars committed publicly to refrain from
| "front running"?
| usr1106 wrote:
| Not really familiar with submission rules and customs here, but
| shouldn't that headline be prefixed by "Tell HN:"?
| giarc wrote:
| I agree, I was confused as there was no url following the
| title.
| juandazapata wrote:
| Another data point here. Happened to me ~7 years ago. FWIW, I
| haven't had any issues with Ghandi.net.
| Animats wrote:
| Amusingly, if you query GoDaddy for "godaddy-is-an-ongoing-
| criminal-enterprise.com", they claim it is "unavailable",
| although it's not in "whois" and other registrars say it is
| available. I was curious to see if GoDaddy would actually
| register that domain for themselves. Network Solutions used to do
| that, which was really annoying.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| GoDaddy is likely blocking registration of any domain with the
| string "godaddy" in it, likely for entirely legitimate anti-
| phishing reasons. If someone got e.g. godaddyauth.com (or
| similar) and started phishing with it to try to get people's
| login details, and a WHOIS even revealed GoDaddy as the
| registrar, a lot of people might fall for it. Keep in mind that
| many people don't understand all the distinctions between
| registry, registrar, and registrant, and that WHOIS output
| often gives you details on all 3.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| godaddy-murders-elephants.com is also unavailable on godaddy,
| but is available on other registrars.
| aasasd wrote:
| I've heard of this technique way back in the 00s. Just as I heard
| about GoDaddy being crappy registrar and crappy hoster. Namecheap
| and Gandi essentially rose as alternatives to GoDaddy that don't
| suck. So the surprising things here are that someone still uses
| that scam and that someone still uses GoDaddy.
|
| 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.
| zeppelin_head wrote:
| Something similar happened to me while buying a domain for my
| company abtesting.ai using namecheap.
|
| 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...
| ted0 wrote:
| abtest.ai had expired and was auctioned off by the registry:
| https://auction.whois.ai/auctions/view/2541
|
| It's possible that the registry incorrectly showed it as
| available due to its redemption/expired state.
| zeppelin_head wrote:
| Thanks for that info Ted. Anyway, the timing seems like too
| much coincidence. I didn't want to imply that namecheap was
| at fault here, I don't really know how the domain lookups are
| implemented.
| homarp wrote:
| so can you DOS godday with that ? create a script that take a
| word of the dictionary, add a great and search for it on godaddy
|
| wait for godaddy to buy them!
|
| e.g. I just searched for greatfelons.io
| rtx wrote:
| I hope someone from Godaddy responds to this.
| brk wrote:
| GoDaddy has been a bad actor for as long as I can remember.
|
| 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.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Is there a cost for them to do this? If so, perhaps they would
| like to own every available word in the dictionary with every
| TLD? Sounds like a script kiddie could add a couple million TLDs
| to their operating expenses for the year.
| cairoshikobon wrote:
| First time I noticed this was in 2008. Over a decade later, they
| didn't change :/
| thunfisch wrote:
| GoDaddy is the worst company, ever. I once registered a domain
| there and had to cancel it three times. Two times out of those,
| they silently reverted my cancelation and just kept renewing it
| against my will. I don't care if this was malicious, our just a
| system failure: They refused to acknowledge this and charged me
| anyways.
|
| Never again.
| Marc_Bryan wrote:
| They are a bigtime scammers. Recently was assisting a friend to
| get access to a domain name which was registered in godaddy. They
| scammed him for a couple of hundred dollars for contacting the
| domain owner to get a deal on the domain and eventually nothing
| happened. Not even a mail was sent on behalf the scammed money as
| we found that the domain was owned by another friend and
| eventually got it transferred. He confirmed that he has not
| received any mail from godaddy's domain buy service since the
| contact was under privacy protection. Another scamming method to
| siphon money from people.
|
| 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!)
| thiht wrote:
| If the domain was a a gTLD or new gTLD (more than 2 characters
| on the TLD), they could get sanctioned by the ICANN, if you
| decided to report them.
|
| 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.
| user5994461 wrote:
| I hope you charged back the money.
| theogravity wrote:
| I'm not defending GoDaddy here and agree it's a bad service. I
| do want to add my own anecdote that I had an unused .com domain
| behind privacy protection with them and GoDaddy contacted me
| that someone wanted to buy it off of me.
|
| I said yes and their process was extremely fast in the transfer
| and getting paid.
|
| I use Google Domains now for my stuff.
| m_km wrote:
| FWIW - I remember reading about the founder of Baremetrics
| being able to buy Baremetrics.com via this service. Impressive
| because Baremetrics (which used to be on baremetrics.io) had
| received a $500K funding by the time he wanted to buy the .com
| for his company name. GoDaddy seems to have brokered the deal
| for $616.
|
| Source - https://baremetrics.com/blog/scored-baremetrics-dot-
| com
| skc wrote:
| I must be extremely naive then because I've always assumed this
| is what would happen when you do a namesearch via any of these
| providers.
| GiantSully wrote:
| Will see many domain ADs when you browse websites in the
| following days after search the domain
| twox2 wrote:
| As much as godaddy sucks for just about anything, I would suggest
| not searching for domains unless you are prepared to buy it on
| the spot.
| hughes7370 wrote:
| LOL
| goatherders wrote:
| .io almost always shows AVL on GD and then when added to cart its
| often registered because the search for that one doesn't seem to
| connect properly to the actual registration process for .io
|
| A 6 letter word that can be well branded and is immediately
| memorable? I would be more shocked if it were actually avl
| LeonB wrote:
| This is so much more believable than the idea that GoDaddy have
| chosen to perform front running.
| ekanes wrote:
| 100%. Has happened to me too. SUPER scammy company.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| I've been using hover.com for years. never had a problem.
| TenJack wrote:
| Had this happen as well. Use whois in the console instead: whois
| felons.io
| secondbreakfast wrote:
| I tell everyone who will listen to use DNSimple. The best.
| ckrailo wrote:
| The DNSimple API for updating records makes me super happy.
| Easy to roll your own little DDNS script or to have proper
| domain names set in your Heroku Pipelines builds and test apps.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| I left godaddy for hostgator but it's just as scammy. They gave
| my phone number to local web developers who cold call me! Is that
| normal, or atrocious?
| thedanbob wrote:
| Sounds pretty atrocious to me. Giving away a customer's contact
| info without their express permission is never ok, no matter
| how the company frames it.
| unreal37 wrote:
| It doesn't even have to cost them very much. Nothing or a few
| cents at most.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting
|
| https://icannwiki.org/Domain_Kiting
| awill wrote:
| I've used hover.com for probably 10 years. Pretty great. Simple
| UI, no upselling/spam and they have customer support. I've never
| called, but it's nice knowing it's there. I then use CloudFlare
| for DNS
| Wistar wrote:
| A few years ago I found a desirable domain for a friend. I told
| her in person, pulled it up on hover for the first time right on
| her machine and had it ready to buy and told her to buy it right
| then. She said she wanted to first ask her designer about the
| name. I warned her to tell the designer to not search on the
| domain name. The designer did a search anyway and when my friend
| clicked "buy" fewer than 20 mins later, the status had changed
| from "available" to "taken." The name was taken by Tucows. Either
| the act of searching on hover or the google search spilled the
| beans.
| andylynch wrote:
| This is a scummy move. In the industry I work in, we call this
| front-running and it's a criminal act. If the same laws applied
| here godaddy would be looking at a nine digit fine and jail time
| for whoever thought this is a good idea.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It is called front running in DNS too, and it is perfectly
| legal.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Honestly, I never expected anything else to happen. With all
| these ads, loading bars, extremely high domain prices... of
| course people take all measures to drive prices up. There are
| even worse people (that are probably/hopefully not affiliated
| with Godaddy etc.) that just register interesting domains to
| sell them at some point to someone who actually uses the
| domain.
|
| Domain name registration is quite broken and should probably
| be quasi-regulated in a way TLS certificate registration is.
| bitxbit wrote:
| That gave me a chuckle. I take it you work in finance and a
| subtle form of front running is literally what bulge bracket
| trading desks do day in day out.
| bhartzer wrote:
| But I don't see any proof that GoDaddy is the registrant of
| that domain, they're just the registrar. I don't see any
| evidence of front-running in this case. I see it more as
| coincidence if anything else.
| andylynch wrote:
| It would be easy to test - query for some random domains on
| their site and see what happens. Which seems close to the
| story here.
|
| (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).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Happens way too often to be coincidence and can occur on
| domains nobody else would want. I use GoDaddy and I'm happy
| with their services, but I never search for a domain before I
| buy it.
| scrollaway wrote:
| They've been doing it for years, it's a pretty well known
| thing at this point which is long past the point of needing
| new evidence.
|
| PS: Use gandi.net, both for search and registration.
| bhartzer wrote:
| In this case, felons.io, there is no registrant listed,
| even on who.godaddy.com. So how can you definitively say
| that GoDaddy saw that search from the OP and registered the
| domain?
|
| 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.
| codegeek wrote:
| It happens way too many times with Godaddy so even though
| it is still speculation, but seems very likely now that
| they do this stuff. I have seen this complain from people
| a few times in the past and they all mention GoDaddy.
| [deleted]
| owlninja wrote:
| Can you link some prior evidence? I can believe it but is
| there proof? Could some other data have led another party
| to registering OP's domain idea?
| scrollaway wrote:
| C'mon.. it's one google search away.
| https://gnso.icann.org/mailing-
| lists/archives/registrars/msg...
|
| Lots of instances of it, I won't bother listing all of it
| here as I'm on a phone.
| bhartzer wrote:
| That ICANN thread is about domain transfers. Has nothing
| to do with the topic at hand, which the OP is claiming
| 'front-running' but GoDaddy.
| eloff wrote:
| That link seemingly has nothing to do with the topic at
| hand.
| eloff wrote:
| I want to see the evidence before I believe that. I've seen
| nothing but speculation in this thread.
| warent wrote:
| Agreed. This is really bizarre behavior for HN. This
| thread reads like a paranoid Reddit post, and people who
| are requesting evidence are being downvoted into
| oblivion... Because it's more fashionable to jump on the
| "godaddy is a cartoon supervillain" bandwagon?
| gravitas wrote:
| HN has been talking about GoDaddy front-running domains
| since 2012. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362478
| eloff wrote:
| Talking != proof. Some people at GoDaddy seem to have
| been busted for doing this independently, and were likely
| fired. Is it still happening since then? Nothing here
| would give you a clue.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| Seconding Gandi. I spent the past year transferring my
| domains over (as registrations lapsed with Route53, which
| is a Gandi frontend with fewer features).
|
| Their interface is very clean, their business model is no-
| nonsense, and I dig the managed DNSSEC.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| https://domains.google is the best I found.
|
| Also, namecheap's beast mode if you want to check
| hundreds of domains at once.
| ted0 wrote:
| My team built Beast Mode. Would love any feedback you may
| have.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| It is amazing! API available for the beast mode type
| queries? I wanna build a domain name exploration tool and
| the kick it off to you guys for registration (perhaps
| referral kickback would be nice). Email in my profile.
| _verandaguy wrote:
| They were on my radar when I moved over to Gandi, but I'm
| avoiding using Google whenever possible.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Google Domains did the same thing to me a few years ago.
|
| 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.
| dlubarov wrote:
| Did you type nothingofvalue.com in the URL bar? If so,
| your ISP (assuming you use their DNS) might have sold
| that data to a squatter.
|
| You could be right that it's Google, but I doubt they
| would risk a scandal to make a few bucks like that.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| No, only through Google Domains. And like I said, I got
| decently far along in the process before I stopped, due
| to privacy concerns. That probably flagged it as "of
| interest" to someone who then promptly squatted on it.
|
| > 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.
| mdorazio wrote:
| I had this happen as well in the past when researching domain
| names for a new product.
|
| 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.
| tzfld wrote:
| Gave up Godaddy recently, after 10 years. Overpriced ssl, old
| php version and no sign for upgrades and improvements.
| pkphilip wrote:
| I have had serious issues with Godaddy as well. Absolutely
| horrible performance as well.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Me too. But the worst was that I can only contact them by
| calling them. What?
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| At least you are able to talk to a real person. I've always
| had good experience calling GoDaddy customer service. Many
| other online companies make it a very big hassle if you
| have an issue that's outside the scope of their FAQs.
| cloudwizard wrote:
| Whenever I talk to startups, I check their domain. If they are
| on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.
| mattl wrote:
| What if a non-technical co-founder bought the domain?
| behnamoh wrote:
| Then it probably means the technical people didn't have
| much say in this.
| Biganon wrote:
| This is likely to happen, too. Parent comment is not being
| very wise here.
| mattl wrote:
| I also used GoDaddy to buy libre.fm back in 2009 because
| buying an fm domain was harder than it ought to be. I
| moved it to Gandi when I could, but that's because I have
| most other domains there.
| [deleted]
| rfrey wrote:
| Please have mercy on those of us whose CEOs set up the email
| and Office365 accounts.
| kovacs wrote:
| Absolutely. You sound like someone that could really be of
| benefit to my latest startup. We're doing bigly things. If
| you're interested in finding out more drop me a line...
| gator3827@aol.com
| brlewis wrote:
| I've never had an AOL email but you just inspired me to
| sign up for one.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Wow, samesies!
|
| brian1999@yahoo.com
| ThePadawan wrote:
| > 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).
| samaxe wrote:
| You assume 1999 is their birth year...could be a
| graduation year.
| munk-a wrote:
| Back in the day it was trendy to affix the year you
| signed up for an account to your account name - rather
| than the birth year. It was interesting to see things
| like sandra96@yahoo.com still the primary email address
| when sending someone an email to catch up post uni.
| Loughla wrote:
| God help me, I cannot stop myself from laughing every
| time I see a @yahoo or @aol e-mail address on job
| applications/resumes.
|
| 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.
| qntmfred wrote:
| there's kinda that ironically-lame hipster vibe to using
| aol.com email addresses. they're coming back in style.
| kbenson wrote:
| Just imagine having the OG handle[1] joe@aol.com. That
| person either has some credibility as being around for
| quite a while, or paid quite a bit for it.
|
| 1: I didn't make up the terminology, I'm just using it
| because it exists...
| ars wrote:
| Not necessarily. I used to think that, but it's rather common
| for the person with the idea to just go and buy the domain on
| GoDaddy.
|
| 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.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Yeah, I joined a startup as the first engineer and
| inherited a GoDaddy registration, which the non-technical
| founder had purchased. I may have been technically
| incompetent but the startup's GoDaddy registration had
| nothing to do with it. :-)
| edoceo wrote:
| There is another option here.
|
| 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.
| hangonhn wrote:
| I really dislike GoDaddy but this is not the best signal to
| use. A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent
| early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a
| product. A lot of things about startups are just crap early
| on. People do things that they shouldn't or will have to pay
| for in the long run. Startups accumulate debt in many ways.
| Being on GoDaddy might be one of those. And if the DNS
| resolves just fine, many won't do anything about it except
| pay the yearly fees. More importantly, startups should
| ideally improve as they survive from year to year and not
| using GoDaddy is going to be pretty low on the list of things
| they need to fix.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent
| early on when they're trying to find market fit and make a
| product.
|
| I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying
| to avoid.
| Cyphus wrote:
| It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but
| would be less and less of a factor as the company grows
| and matures.
|
| 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.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Wow. That's funny because that's the exact evolution that
| happened at my current company (GoDaddy points to AWS and
| AWS does the rest) and we're now a unicorn. Being a
| unicorn is not a reflection of engineering quality
| though. That said, the earlier engineers were pretty bad
| (So bad that someone at one point terminated every line
| in Python with a semicolon. Those engineers are nearly
| all gone now) and I like to think that the current groups
| are decent engineers. But I don't see us ever going back
| and transferring the domain somewhere else.
| r00fus wrote:
| Being a unicorn isn't a reflection of leadership quality
| either. Again, a particular litmus test that has a
| quality threshold may work for some and not others, it's
| still valid for consideration.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > It would be worth avoiding at that initial stage, but
| would be less and less of a factor as the company grows
| and matures.
|
| 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.
| prh8 wrote:
| Frequently it's the non-technical idea person who grabbed a
| domain before finding technical people to work with.
| driverdan wrote:
| I downvoted you because I've known many technically competent
| people, including startup founders, who have used GoDaddy.
| Many people don't realize how terrible they are.
| ci5er wrote:
| Google domains sometimes dumps you onto GoDaddy. Which is/was
| unexpected and unwelcome. Sometimes you have to buy a domain
| and that's the way through.
|
| 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.)
| vmception wrote:
| /r/gatekeeping is that way
|
| 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
| jjeaff wrote:
| And a lot of the time, the non-technical founder will have
| already registered the name and transferring can be a pain
| so it is sometimes delayed.
| jansan wrote:
| _> If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically
| incompetent._
|
| Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.
| tyingq wrote:
| One exception is domains picked up from a GoDaddy auction.
| I believe you have to pay for a year, which you might not
| want to waste. Or even a transfer takes a while to
| complete.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals
| you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a
| new registrar.
|
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| You're right. I think my memory was domains where you
| wanted to prepay for "privacy", so the ownership didnt
| show during the xfer after the auction.
| wenc wrote:
| Godaddy spammed me so much and so often that I transferred my
| domain to porkbun.com.
|
| 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.
| rammy1234 wrote:
| cosmotown.com does spam big time. I created a domain with
| name ending *cookbook.com, so much spam. I feel miserable for
| creating one with them.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| I've been using Porkbun for a few years and have no
| complaints.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I use a combo of porkbun, Namecheap, Google domains
| (primarily all the .dev stuff from that landrush), hover
| (some legacy stuff) and Isnic (the Icelandic registrar for
| .is domains).
|
| 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.
| rconti wrote:
| I found it interesting that Ted mentions Namecheap
| searching .is. I have a .is domain through Isnic (actually
| just renewed yesterday), and I'm using 1984 for DNS because
| Isnic requires a domestic NS provider.
|
| But Ted's comment implies you can register .is through
| Namecheap. I wonder how/if they get around the Icelandic NS
| host problem.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| I've had an .is domain for a few years now and wasn't
| aware of that requirement.
|
| DNS service for my .is domain is handled by AWS Route 53.
| ludjer wrote:
| I originally was also on Godaddy, but now I moved to Porkbun
| and never look back. Love their website and their name.
| narwally wrote:
| I've been really happy with Gandi on this front. I just
| checked, and I haven't received an email from them since I
| had to confirm my email address two months ago.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Second gandi, not always cheapest but close enough. Good
| interface and support.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| I've been using porkbun for a while and it works great. Worth
| a look.
| tanatocenose wrote:
| Spam
| nett18 wrote:
| honestly, the company is amazing, they are the discord
| equivalent of domain hosting
| opan wrote:
| Wait, do you mean something positive by this? Discord has
| always struck me as pretty horrible... I'm not even quite
| sure how to interpret what you've said in a positive way.
| Maybe implied popularity, but it's debatable whether
| popularity is in fact a positive even.
| rytill wrote:
| What about discord has been horrible for you?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| No ability to use third-party clients without being
| banned.
| tfsh wrote:
| Sure, it's against the TOS, but I've been using an
| external client for probably 2 years and haven't been
| banned or warned. If Discord are aware then they've
| explicitly chosen to do nothing.
| mc32 wrote:
| Then they must hand select the ones they frontrun because I've
| looked up silly names to see if they did this )like a bunch of
| random stupid queries like bvrankdorfgherbd.com and I don't
| think they squat those. Of course I'm still leery and never use
| them to search for my actual target domains.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| Sounds like a dictionary check of some sort.
| aerovistae wrote:
| Recommendations for superior alternatives? I'm an indifferent
| GoDaddy user but would be happy to switch to something else
| since I've never liked them as a company.
| Shared404 wrote:
| I like Porkbun personally.
| antihero wrote:
| CloudFlare (yes they are a registrar now) or Gandi are my go-
| tos! Never had an issue.
|
| GoDaddy are just bad in every conceivable way.
| donarb wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know CF did registrations (makes sense
| though). And looking at their rates shows they don't markup
| prices. For example, most places charge $12 for a .com
| address. CloudFlare charges $8.03, which is their cost,
| they add nothing.
| drummer wrote:
| The same cloudflare whose ceo decided to deplatform a
| client not too long ago?
| [deleted]
| bhartzer wrote:
| Epik, Namecheap, Fabulous for domains.
| reaperducer wrote:
| DirectNIC. Based in Louisiana. Been around forever. Fair
| prices.
|
| Can't comment on its customer service, because in 23 years
| I've never had anything go wrong.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| I love http://domains.Google
|
| 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.
| bitdotdash wrote:
| Does Cloudflare still require you to transfer in or can you
| actually buy domains from them directly now? The buy and
| then wait 90 days to transfer in thing is a hassle.
| ourcat wrote:
| Interesting. I'd never considered Google for my domains.
|
| Any idea if the 'PS10/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'.
| mattl wrote:
| I think all domains under `dev` have HSTS turned on.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| It's the same every year. I'm sure they could raise the
| price later on, but if you're that worried, you can
| extend your registration to 10 years for 10x the one-year
| price. And if they _do_ end up raising the price, you can
| also transfer your domain away.
| ascorbic wrote:
| They call them more secure because the whole TLD is on
| the HSTS preload list, so no downgrade attacks.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Which means that an SSL certificate is _required_
| buybackoff wrote:
| Second this. Transferred 8 domains a months ago from
| GoDaddy to Google.
|
| 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.
| shafyy wrote:
| DNSimple is great for domain names.
| adityapatadia wrote:
| We use AWS Route 53 for domain registration. Works like a
| charm.
| tnr23 wrote:
| They use Gandi under the hood. Using Gandi directly is a
| much better experience
| nucleardog wrote:
| Can also recommend them. No race-to-the-bottom scammy
| upsell shit since... it's basically just there as a value-
| add on AWS. And you're piggy-backing on all the
| infrastructure/support/etc that people expect from AWS
| instead of a domain registrar where people are generally
| shopping pretty exclusively on price.
|
| And you can expect that they're not going to turn _into_ a
| scammy registar at any point since, well, it's AWS.
| dublin wrote:
| If your servers are in AWS, then Route53 is a no-brainer -
| it lets you do things no other DNS host can do, and it's
| infinitely better plumbed into the AWS ecosystem
| (CloudFormation automation, etc.)
| andawg wrote:
| I use ipage for domains and hosting and never had a problem
| with it. I am looking at my past bill and I paid $96 for a
| year of hosting. I don't use it for much, just static HTML. I
| use ftp to push changes. Dead simple.
|
| Looking their site they have an intro deal going now to host
| for a year for $2/month
| pwdisswordfish4 wrote:
| $96 for static hosting is a crap deal.
| Lammy wrote:
| Big fan of NearlyFreeSpeech.net and use them for any TLD they
| support, unfortunately not including some of the newer more
| esoteric ones like ".cool", but I'm sure that's probably in
| the works. I moved over from GoDaddy after GoDaddy pulled
| down seclists.org for Myspace with no due process:
| https://mashable.com/2007/01/25/myspace-godaddy/
|
| Versus: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| How _do_ registrars "take down" domains? Is it a simple
| nameserver change that would then propagate over the next
| few hours?
| Lammy wrote:
| Yes, in the same way a registrar would redirect a domain
| to an "expired" page during the non-renewal grace period.
| rileytg wrote:
| dnsimple has been a fantastic provider for me for at least 5
| years. it's just... simple.
| chappi42 wrote:
| gandi.net (as mentioned by others). Imho TOP NOTCH service.
| Shorel wrote:
| Basically everyone else is a superior alternative.
|
| I use gandi.net because every domain includes email hosting.
| And France privacy laws.
| axaxs wrote:
| Same, but different reasons. I just like seeing 'No
| Bullshit' on their site, since that's basically what I'm
| thinking when looking for such services.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I just checked-out gandi.net, and I found their page in
| defense of No Bullshit. What a nice page to see amidst
| the many other sites filled with Bullshit.
|
| 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."
| ddingus wrote:
| That slogan has probably done them more good business
| than they know.
|
| 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.
| narwally wrote:
| No spam either. Their UI is also really transparent. You
| can even edit all of your DNS records as a single plain
| text file.
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| Dynadot.com, they've been around a long time, for me it's
| been the provider I always come back to.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I have used https://joker.com/ for 20 years, and have yet to
| find a single thing to complain about.
| aviraldg wrote:
| NameCheap (which I use) and Gandi are common recommendations
| on HN AFAIK.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I've had great experience with Gandi over the last 10
| years.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Gandi is fine. Their domains are slightly more expensive
| than others.
| 91edec wrote:
| Namecheap
| dublin wrote:
| For DNS hosting, not just name registration, EasyDNS is far
| and away the best. Epik and Namecheap are also really good,
| and a bit cheaper, if you don't need all the services EasyDNS
| provides. Both EasyDNS and Epik have a strong commitment to
| supporting free speech (especially Epik, the DNS hoster for
| Gab).
| D13Fd wrote:
| I migrated everything to Namecheap a couple of years ago,
| they have been great. I'm happy not to be giving money to
| GoDaddy any longer.
| karlshea wrote:
| I've been using Hover for years and like them.
| james_pm wrote:
| Appreciate it! I can personally state for the record we
| don't do what is alleged. I also seriously doubt GoDaddy
| does it.
| whyaduck wrote:
| The spirit of GoDaddy's founder soldiers on in it's current
| policies and behaviors. Disappointing but unsurprising.
| coredog64 wrote:
| It's a dysfunctional sweatshop. I've seen high level execs
| leave in groups, colonize another company, and bring their
| dysfunction to the new org.
| mark-r wrote:
| I have no choice, they bought out my hosting provider a year
| ago.
| dannydenhard wrote:
| Likewise, although recently it's improved
| whatch wrote:
| Why not to migrate to another one? There are plenty of them
| nowadays
| mark-r wrote:
| Eventually I probably will, but I'm not looking forward to
| the effort. I'm paid up for now so there's no rush. Luckily
| my domain service is with a different company.
| ghego1 wrote:
| I'm sorry for the OP, and at the same time a bit relieved that
| I'm not paranoid.
|
| 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.
| technick wrote:
| godaddy is ran by crooks...
| rhacker wrote:
| I use name.com for this reason. I trust them more.
| dgellow wrote:
| I faced this ~6 years ago. Someone hired me for a project, at
| some point he told me some domain names he had in mind, and we
| looked them up together on Gandi, GoDaddy and other registrars to
| see prices and what was available. The next day he called me in
| shock, asking me why I bought the domain and if I'm trying to
| steal his company, etc (nobody else knew the names). Of course I
| didn't buy anything, we checked the whois and it was registered
| for GoDaddy... That was a quite bad experience...
| ffhhj wrote:
| I wouldn't take the risk of checking a domain name with any
| domain registrars, use ICANN WHOIS. I even made a simple
| automated domain/website checker that helped me find a great 3
| letter .co domain, registered it with GoDaddy then transfered to
| Namecheap for the cheap/free SSL cert and better practices.
| projektfu wrote:
| Relevant from 13 years ago: Network Solutions sued for domain
| tasting.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123899
| projektfu wrote:
| This is the outcome of the settlement:
|
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/agp-status-report-2009...
|
| The question is whether they are still enforcing the policy.
| dclaw wrote:
| Moved all my domains to namecheap a few years ago and have never
| looked back. I hate godaddy, they are a horrid trash company.
| Domain theft is just one of the many reasons to never touch them.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| This sounds like something that could be easily exploited -
| search for a bunch of nonsense domains on godaddy, let them
| register every one of them, at some point that becomes
| unprofitable. Use the xkcd algorithm - horse-battery-staple.com,
| parrot-bananna-nachos.com, dog-cat-chicken.com, etc. Even if they
| only pay a couple dollars each it becomes unprofitable at some
| point.
|
| 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.
| darkhorn wrote:
| I had mozillazine-tr.org I think I have created it in 2007. Few
| years later I have stopped renewing it. But it still looked like
| it was registered to my fake name and creation date was same
| however it wasn't in my account. It had gihg Google page rank. I
| think thus Godaddy decided to keep it for themselves
| erickf1 wrote:
| I had the same experience with GoDaddy. I searched a domain name,
| which was available. The next morning I attempted to purchase the
| domain and it was owned by GoDaddy.com. I also had a domain with
| them for 9 years, which expired for a day and when we tried to
| renew, they owned it and were selling it for a much higher rate.
| BIG, BIG WARNING! Do not use GoDaddy to search for domain names.
| I would stay away from them period.
| yodon wrote:
| Or perhaps someone else had the same idea. Domains get registered
| all the time. For someone else to want the same domain you want
| on the same day may seem like a low probability event but when
| multiplied by the number of people and domains purchased through
| godaddy every day the rate of low probability events happening is
| quite high. Experiences like yours probably happen to multiple
| people every day through no malicious activity on the part of
| godaddy.
|
| tl;dr never attribute to malice that which is bound to happen
| because statistics
| mmcgaha wrote:
| This was ten or more years ago, so I cannot speak for their
| current practices, but I hosted a domain on a godaddy VPS, and
| they hijacked the robots.txt file to exclude the site from
| getting indexed.
|
| 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.
| laurent92 wrote:
| One workaround for that is, search for domains no-one would ever
| use. They'll register them, losing money.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| As a registrar they probably pay a very tiny fraction of the
| retail price so even if only 10% of the registered domains end
| up selling they still make a profit.
| PretzelFisch wrote:
| It's odd I search on GoDaddy every other day and never had this
| happen. I wonder how they decide you fit the buy profile.
| gbourne wrote:
| I use to use GoDaddy and the same experience most here had. I
| switched to Google Domains and has been a great experience. No
| upsell, one price.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I had this happen to me with instantdomainsearch.com, which is
| owned by GoDaddy, I believe.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| I had this issue with a registrar (I assume it was Network
| Solutions because they kept it in holding) many years ago. My
| firstnamelastname.com domain was registered and I had to get
| firstname-lastname.com instead. A year later, the domain wasn't
| renewed BUT Network Solutions did this gross thing where they
| kept the domain in their own escrow/holding area for 90 days
| before releasing it.
|
| 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| GoDaddy has been doing this since they have existed, I assume. I
| first used them after the superbowl ad to search for a domain
| name and they registered it. Never again.
| bhartzer wrote:
| The registrar is GoDaddy, not the owner of the domain as far as
| I can tell. I don't see any evidence that GoDaddy did anything
| wrong in this case.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| I have a similar sorry about the scuzziness of GoDaddy. When
| Apple first announced the Swift programming language at their
| wWWDC i immediately went to GoDaddy to register every Swift
| related domain I could think of - learnswift.com, swift-
| tutorial.com type domains. I added several and in the process of
| checking out (which used to be like 7 steps as each step along
| they way they tried to trick you into buying something else), the
| price of the domains went from $14 each to $2000+ each. They had
| suddenly realized the value of the domains _while they were in my
| shopping cart_ and raised the price.
|
| 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.
| aprdm wrote:
| It is not like you're sitting on morale high ground by
| squatting domains
| tubularhells wrote:
| I wonder if I search for extremely offensive domain names, will
| GoDaddy register those too? Worth a try!
| McDyver wrote:
| Not to advertise, but easywhois.com have a no front-running
| policy, which prevents exactly this issue. I'm a happy customer
| drchiu wrote:
| On this topic, if it's a domain that seems highly desirable
| (single word, good TLD extension), I typically register it for
| the max period (10 years), just in case the registrar's system
| has a glitch and doesn't auto renew when it should.
| gmays wrote:
| GoDaddy responded to this thread in the article here:
| https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
|
| > _"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."_
| bifrost wrote:
| I'd recommend nobody use GoDaddy, ever.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070829115722/http://www.nodadd...
| pluc wrote:
| Didn't we learn to stay away from GoDaddy after their SOPA
| stance?
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Seems like something someone could definitely abuse... it would
| cost Godaddy more to register a bunch of junk domains.
| altspace wrote:
| Yeah, faced something similar few years ago. Since then, switched
| to command line:
|
| whois felons.io
| symkat wrote:
| And it's free for GoDaddy to do this:
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
| Tepix wrote:
| And during the free period they can do "domain tasting", see
| how many ads they can deliver on that domain and consider
| keeping it.
| boxed wrote:
| Can't be totally free. If we all would run random garbage
| through their search, at some point this evil mudy collapse
| somehow?
| adventured wrote:
| They have some systems that suggest words, word combinations,
| adjacent terms, and such for domains / related domains. I
| suspect that by leveraging those existing systems they can
| relatively easily tell if the names you're entering are
| complete garbage or not (length, any dictionary terms, high
| value words, etc).
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Then someone cobble together a tool that automatically
| queries words from a dictionary on godaddy, maybe with
| variations like numbers appended, "the" prefixed or hip
| things like turning -er into -r.
| FilterSweep wrote:
| I assume "felons" matches a dictionary search that
| "ajandneeksiciajenebdh" does not
| anaxag0ras wrote:
| Does anyone know the story behind 'Godaddy' name? It's a weird
| name for a domain registrar.
| caseyohara wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is authoritative:
|
| "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."
|
| https://www.rewindandcapture.com/why-is-it-called-godaddy/
| [deleted]
| TaylorGood wrote:
| I have a theory that GoDaddy also sells domain search quieries to
| HugeDomains. After the third domain I finally learned. Basically
| would mash two words together that were brandable, low letter
| count and all three times, within 24 hours HugeDomains purchased
| and put up a landing page selling said domain for $1.5k-$3k. Wtf,
| but doesn't surprise me if so. GoDaddy is the king of funnels.
| bhartzer wrote:
| The registrar of that domain is GoDaddy, but that doesn't mean
| that the owner of the domain is GoDaddy. If you look at
| who.godaddy.com you'll see that it's not GoDaddy that owns the
| domain.
|
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| Do you happen to be Bill Hartzer, contributor for GoDaddy?
|
| You might want to disclose your affiliation on these kinds of
| topics, especially when you're arguing the company's side.
| rticesterp wrote:
| You should have bot the Domain Name insurance!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23754056
| justinclift wrote:
| Searching (on DDG) for "Bill Hartzer" and "GoDaddy" doesn't
| turn up any obvious affiliation.
|
| 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. ;)
| luckylion wrote:
| I ran into an article on GoDaddy's blog [1], that's why I
| thought of an affiliation. Might still be a random
| coincidence, there are probably quite a few people sharing
| the name with a certain German cheese.
|
| [1] https://www.godaddy.com/garage/what-is-deep-linking-
| and-how-...
| justinclift wrote:
| Oh, that does look like there's a relationship between
| them.
|
| Good find. :)
| beefield wrote:
| Just came up with a word with thisworddoesnotexist.com and
| searched a .com domain at godaddy (was available, not a
| completely new word, there seems to be hits in the internet)
| Let's see what happens.
| brudgers wrote:
| The .io namespace is a lot shadier than Godaddy. It's for
| occupied territory and managed by a for-profit company of vague
| ownership. https://www.icb.co.uk/
| oedmarap wrote:
| I've seen this happen multiple times to people I know.
|
| Always check for individual domains via the whois command, and if
| you need to do searches across a few TLDs use https://njal.la
| babo wrote:
| I lost my .com in a similar way.
| snapetom wrote:
| This is just part of a long line of scummy practices by GoDaddy
| in its history. Bad PR for GoDaddy constantly popped up in tech
| news sites ~15 years ago, but it was never enough to stop their
| aggressive marketing. Still, I always wondered why anyone in tech
| would use them. Y'all know what they're capable of and what they
| do. Don't support that.
| cnst wrote:
| The amount of upselling GoDaddy does is kind of crazy; I don't
| know why anyone would register domains there.
|
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't think people in the tech world use them. People in the
| non-tech world trying to do tech (e.g. small business owners)
| use them because they are the only hosting company and domain
| registrar with name brand recognition.
| snapetom wrote:
| In general you're right. Their marketing is targeted to the
| small business owner. However, I've met my fair share of tech
| people that did use them.
|
| 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."
| wegs wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the general business model in domains is:
|
| * 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.
| hobofan wrote:
| That must have been a long time ago, as I've only heard about
| them as a bad business for the past ~10 years (= how long
| I've been loosely involved in tech).
|
| 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.
| wegs wrote:
| Yes. It was a long time ago. GoDaddy was where all the tech
| crowd went after Network Solutions circa the year 2000.
| They were great! Until they weren't.
|
| 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.
| dkersten wrote:
| In the comments of every such cautionary tale are typically a
| load of proper saying "I've never had any problems" and
| thinking it could never happen to them. Until it does.
| [deleted]
| Dig1t wrote:
| Wow this is amazing, I just checked right now and this same just
| happened to me. I searched a week ago on NameCheap for a name it
| was available, and now it is registered to GoDaddy.. Is there any
| way that GoDaddy would be able to see searches from NameCheap or
| is that just a really big coincidence?
| ignaciogiri wrote:
| I had the exact same experience with Godaddy 10 years ago.
| ddingus wrote:
| Well, I just tried a few searches on godaddy...
|
| 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.
| driverdan wrote:
| If they are actually front running it's probably for single
| word dictionary domains. They're not going to register
| everything people search for.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Interestingly, godaddysucks.com redirects to Godaddy.
| ddingus wrote:
| Well, good for them.
| calenti wrote:
| Hover and AWS Route 53 don't do this either. It's just the
| GoDaddy scumbags, and same (GoDaddy jacking a searched domain
| name) has happend to others I know.
| sslnx wrote:
| Happened to me too. In my case it was sslnx.com
| Syzygies wrote:
| Hmm, someone beat me to it:
|
| "Sorry, f___yougodaddyforstealingthesesearches.com is
| unavailable"
| obscura wrote:
| Ha ha, I was also putting in rude queries aimed at them.
| Perhaps someone in a backroom somewhere will see them in a log
| and have a laugh.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Surprised not to see more mention of the CEO killing elephants
| and posing with the photos all smiley happy. Fuck the godaddy CEO
| who killed innocent animals for pleasure.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| Is there a way for us to waste GoDaddy's money by searching for
| domain names that we don't actually want? If they waste enough,
| they'll have to stop this practice.
|
| 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.
| cairoshikobon wrote:
| afaik there is something in ICANN that allows them to do this
| completely for free for some period or super cheap, not paying
| the same price customers pay.
| minusSeven wrote:
| I have very unique name for which no domains would exist until I
| searched on GoDaddy. After a few days it was taken. This happened
| in 2017 so this is definitely not new.
| thedangler wrote:
| networksolutions did this a long time ago too. They stole a
| domain from me searching. So I testing it by searching for random
| name and 20 minutes later they registered it.
|
| They got caught and said sorry. That was about it.
| sassycassie wrote:
| I prefer namecheap over godaddy. godaddy is a rip off and scammer
| Jedd wrote:
| I recall there was a massive boycott [0] of GoDaddy about a
| decade ago over their SOPA position.
|
| 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
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| This presents an interesting attack vector. If you know that a
| competitor is looking at purchasing a particular domain name,
| type it into godaddy. It costs nothing and the act can't be
| traced back to you.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Use
|
| https://viewdns.info
|
| for name searches (no affiliation)
| y42 wrote:
| What would happen if someone would write a script to query random
| domain names via godaddy? Just wondering.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| It doesn't cost them anything to do this, see domain tasting or
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
| mrbeemo wrote:
| Where would you recommend searching?
| daniellarusso wrote:
| This was a thing back in the day where shady Adwords advertiser
| registrars would 'register' any unregistered .com that was
| searched.
|
| That is when I learned my lesson to use a 'trusted' registrar for
| searching.
| tsycho wrote:
| If this is what GoDaddy is doing, let's get back at them.
|
| Everyone can search for a variety of domains that we are not
| actually interested in, and waste their money if they frontrun
| us.
| azhenley wrote:
| Funny that this is on the front page right now.
|
| 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
| afrnz wrote:
| I also got burned trying to buy a domain from GoDaddy a couple of
| days ago. Never again ...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| You may be right but they were already on my questionable list
| after using boobs during the Super Bowl to advertise for 5+ years
| straight rather than saying _anything_ about their product or
| business.
| svdr wrote:
| A very quick and safe way to check if a domain is in use is to
| query for NS records (e.g. $dig ycombinator.com NS). This will
| give some false positives though.
| nhumrich wrote:
| Sorry to sound pedantic, Im just trying to make sure I
| understand correctly. A false positive would be domain doesn't
| exist but it has NS records, and a false negative would be does
| exist but doesn't have MX records. Is that right?
|
| This would only create false negatives, correct?
| svdr wrote:
| Positive for me would be that a domain is free, so a false
| positive is a domain that seems to be free (no NS record) but
| is in fact taken (because it is registered but nothing has
| been added to the DNS). But you're right, my wording wasn't
| precise.
| tus88 wrote:
| Obviously.
| code_paster wrote:
| Plausible, but not likely. https://domaininvesting.com/no-domain-
| frontrunning-godaddy/
| foofoo4u wrote:
| I've had this happen plenty of times to be before in the past.
| Back when I did freelance web services, I used to tell my clients
| to never search on GoDaddy in advance for domains.
| _nickwhite wrote:
| I learned this _years_ ago that Godaddy will steal your name for
| fun and profit. As the HN comments confirm, there are several
| shady outfits that do the same thing.
|
| For years, I've gone to ICANN directly to check domain name
| availability: https://lookup.icann.org/
| ausjke wrote:
| That happened to me in the past, the short and concise name I
| tried was quickly taken and becomes unavailable, I since lost
| interests in using godaddy.
|
| anyone has better options to try new domain names?
| krn wrote:
| After doing a lot of research, I would recommend Dynadot as the
| best domain registrar at the moment.
|
| 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.
| cpach wrote:
| I switched over to Dynadot about three or five years ago and I
| have never regretted it. Very solid service IME.
|
| I've also heard good things about Gandi.net but I haven't tried
| them myself.
| krn wrote:
| Gandi.net used to have a cult-like following in its early
| days, was the registrar of _reddit.com_ up until recently,
| and is still the registrar of _ycombinator.com_.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
| ksec wrote:
| Thank You. Never heard of them until today.
| cpach wrote:
| I don't think they advertise much, which I guess is a sign
| that they focus on trustworthiness and stability instead of
| growing too much, like Godaddy does.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I also use Dynadot for most of the same reasons: My main
| criteria were: _great_ prices without any coupon codes, no-
| upselling, free whois privacy as standard, most ccTLDs
| supported, _and a nice clean interface._ (emphasis mine)
|
| 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.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| We use Dynadot as our primary registrar. Their folder based
| assignments of DNS/Contacts is great for all the domains I have
| to keep indefinitely as part of brand identity and protection.
|
| 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.
| manishsharan wrote:
| GoDaddy recently billed be $6 for domain protection renewal for
| my domain which I no longer host with GoDaddy. Now I have to get
| on the phone to have these charges reversed because if I don't
| ,they will keep on billing this amount till the day my card
| expires.
| api wrote:
| Never use GoDaddy for anything. They're well known as being
| scummy in virtually every way.
| [deleted]
| thiht wrote:
| As someone who works at a somewhat big registrar, it always
| amazes me how opaque the whole domain ecosystem and politics is
| to anyone not in the business.
|
| 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.
| jtolmar wrote:
| This happened to me too. I was searching the domain on a variety
| of tools to make sure it wasn't like, secretly a swear word in
| another language or whatever, then a couple days later it was
| registered by GoDaddy. I wasn't sure which tool leaked it, or
| whether that was actually GoDaddy or their domain holder
| protection. But it was pretty annoying.
|
| And they registered it for two years.
| bitminer wrote:
| Don't even fill out a form -- I did that for a friend, decided
| not to press "click here to purchase".
|
| 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.
| lanecwagner wrote:
| This. Never use them, and never work with people who insist on
| using them.
| s_brady wrote:
| I always use gandi.net for searching for domains. They are honest
| brokers. Never had an issue.
| rightisleft wrote:
| We intentionally have our test domains hosted with godaddy to
| make sure our product works with the worst possible DNS tools on
| the planet. If it'll work on godaddy - it'll work anywhere...
| jonplackett wrote:
| This is something I was always worried a registrar would do, but
| I always told myself not to be so silly. That they had better
| things to do. I guess godaddy don't have anything better to do.
| Very crappy behaviour indeed.
| pkid wrote:
| Namecheap did me wrong in a major way. In 2018 I registered a
| domain, all went fine. I register a second domain a few minutes
| later. In addition to the confirmation email I received an
| additional email requesting personal information. I assumed it
| was optional. Nope! The domain was not registered. When I looked
| into the matter the domain had been registered by domainbright.
| I'm not sure what to make of it. Although compared to all other
| domains I have registered with namecheap this was probably the
| most coveted, valuable. Never again namecheap. You make me angry!
| B-Con wrote:
| Pretty sure I first heard about them pulling these tactics over
| 10 years ago. Sad it's still ongoing.
|
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I've never had a problem using who.is for this purpose.
|
| 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.
| gazelleeatslion wrote:
| I used their broker service to buy a really expensive domain via
| a client (squatter).
|
| 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.
| sosuke wrote:
| Is there a safe method to search for domains?
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| Just use the `whois` tool?
|
| man page: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=whois
|
| source code:
| https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/usr.bin/whois...
| csunbird wrote:
| https://lookup.icann.org/ is what I use for basic whois
| information before buying and check if they domain is
| available.
| rkeene2 wrote:
| Yes, asking for the SOA record for the zone within the parent
| domain is safe and usually good enough -- and will tell you if
| it is registered (but not definitively if it is NOT
| registered). Following up with a single normal WHOIS.
| q3k wrote:
| I've been using iwantmyname.com both as a registrar and domain
| search engine. Never had a name sniped from me.
| stilisstuk wrote:
| Agreed. Plus whoisprivacy is free if the tld supports it.
| Autorenewal is nice also. Only gripe is that they use authy
| for 2fa. This is a big gripe though.
| nuccy wrote:
| yes, whois:
|
| whois godaddy.com
|
| whois superuselessdomainforeveryone.com
|
| look for "No match for domain" at the end
| mrweasel wrote:
| If you can understand enough Danish to use it I can recommend
| https://gratisdns.dk
| pixl97 wrote:
| Safest way? Have a budget to buy any domain immediately that is
| free and that might fit what you want.
|
| Is this actually causing other problems? Probably.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| 100% same as my experience with GoDaddy several years ago.
| Checked for domain availability, found an open one, didn't buy it
| and it was registered the next day.
|
| 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| This is unfortunately old news, though I can't remember where I
| heard GoDaddy engaging in this behavior. Anecdotally, I've had
| the same thing happen to me.
|
| Now I only use the Internic DNS lookup when I want to search.
|
| [1] https://lookup.icann.org/lookup
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Just use whois on the cli
| ted0 wrote:
| Ted from Namecheap here.
|
| 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.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Namecheap is the only registrar I can really recommend. Gets
| out of your way in most cases, has a very competent support for
| the other cases
| lordnacho wrote:
| Namecheap is so much better than godaddy.
|
| 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.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| I've actually always used Godaddy for searching and Namecheap
| for registering, simply because Godaddy's search interface is
| faster and more stable but Namecheap is great for not
| hassling you and way easier to configure. Fix the search
| Namecheap, and I will no longer use Godaddy again!
| tsycho wrote:
| Try http://instantdomainsearch.com/
|
| (No affiliation, just a happy user)
| judge2020 wrote:
| I'm more a fan of https://tld-list.com
| TobTobXX wrote:
| > 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?
| weddpros wrote:
| Can I recommend gandi.net as a way to check your domains?
| It's just what I'm using, and their whois interface is
| really nice imho
| ted0 wrote:
| we haven't seen a lot of demand for .as but if there are
| other folks on here that want it, we could consider
| onboarding it! Just upvote this comment to +1 ;)
| iamben wrote:
| Can you do .gs as well please?! I moved almost all my
| remaining domains from GoDaddy to you guys a few years
| back, but you don't take .gs - so I'm still lumbered with
| GoDaddy for those!
| loceng wrote:
| Consider my upvote that I'd be interested in buying .as
| domains on Namecheap.
| lordnacho wrote:
| How about making sure you have all the countries? I think
| it was .it that I couldn't find.
| ted0 wrote:
| We'd love that! Although, some are trickier to support
| than others.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| +1 for .it
| usaphp wrote:
| Namecheap's interface for domain verification is very
| unintuitive, you have to jump through hoops to actually get a
| dns record you need to add, in order for you to verify your
| domain.
| nemosaltat wrote:
| +1 to this.
|
| 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.
| joe33433 wrote:
| If my domains primary users are from USA, i would definitely
| register at Namecheap, but my primary users are from india. My
| understanding is that its better to register with local
| registrar(not godadday ofcourse) to avoid DNS latency, To my
| knowledge Namecheap does not have servers in india. I am new to
| domain registering and would appreciate your take on this
| issue. Thanks
| plumeria wrote:
| My two cents. You can use any registrar you like. Just need
| to update the nameservers to a DNS provider close to your
| user base (e.g. AWS Route 53 in India).
| akent wrote:
| Buying a domain is not the same as hosting the DNS for that
| domain.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| > _My understanding is that its better to register with local
| registrar(not godadday ofcourse) to avoid DNS latency, ..._
|
| 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).
| shadowprofile77 wrote:
| Since you're here answering questions, what do you have to say
| about your policy of selling certain unregistered domains as
| premium offerings for a higher price simply because their names
| are considered more marketable? I know that this is far from
| unique to namecheap and at least you disclose it as a practice
| (albeit in a somewhat roundabout manner) but it seems to me as
| a sort of abuse of registrar privilege. In other words, if a
| domain is not yet registered to any buyer, should it not be
| available for a standard price like other unclaimed offerings?
| ted0 wrote:
| I think what you're describing are Registry Premium domains.
| This is typically unregistered inventory that the registry
| withholds and sells at a higher price point. They are usually
| higher quality keywords. We don't set the price on these. Our
| registry partners do.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Ah Namecheap, the first and only domain registrar I've ever
| used, first used them to get a name for a Minecraft server I
| hosted almost a decade ago :)
|
| Definitely would recommend. Haven't used Godaddy myself, but
| i've heard horror stories from others
| ted0 wrote:
| A decade! Thank you for that.
| pdxandi wrote:
| Same here. Been on Namecheap for as long as I can remember
| with quite a few domains.
| docapotamus wrote:
| Just to highlight this a little bit more! I've used Namecheap
| for years (a lot of) and moved all domains my company owns over
| three years ago, and there is a lot of them. All went
| flawlessly and I have nothing but praise for the service it's
| amazing.
|
| Only problem in the company settings is multiple users but
| other than that no issues.
| swalsh wrote:
| It's funny, I don't even remember why I moved to Namecheap, but
| I remember years ago getting angry at Godaddy, and then
| transferring everything. You guys have a great service. No
| regrets since the move.
| markdown wrote:
| Might have been because of the Godaddy CEO killing elephants
| or something. I vaguely recall some drama about that.
| zizee wrote:
| I switched from GoDaddy to namecheap because GoDaddy was
| supporting SOPA (stop online privacy act)
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/wikipedia-is-leaving-go-
| daddy-...
| gabereiser wrote:
| and this is why Namecheap is awesome. Use them instead.
| j2bax wrote:
| Hey Ted! Been my favorite registrar for over a decade. Just
| registered a genius domain that I thought of the other night
| !:)
| [deleted]
| webbrahmin wrote:
| A happy namecheap customer here. Moved from Godaddy to
| namecheap because they revealed me as the owner of a domain I
| was using for activism. Caused me a lot of harassment.
| ted0 wrote:
| Glad to hear you're happy. Always willing to help if you ever
| need anything: ted [at] namecheap.com
| abc-xyz wrote:
| Here's a HNer claiming Namecheap dumped his personal info
| without even informing him of having done so:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063667
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Yeesh, that's terrible.
| sloshnmosh wrote:
| Hello Ted. A bit off-topic but I was wondering if you were
| aware of the massive amount of malicious sites that use
| NameCheap?
|
| 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?
| __lazybyte wrote:
| Probably because they've got great service, I guess.
| ted0 wrote:
| Abuse@namecheap.com is indeed the best channel. Our Twitter
| reps are quite responsive too. The abuse team reviews every
| case. In some cases, it can also be effective to reach out to
| the "host" too.
| sparkywolf wrote:
| Hey Ted, I currently use google domains and while I'm pretty
| happy with that one service I would like to switch away from
| Google entirely and that is one of the last services of theirs
| I use. What case can you make for why I should switch to
| namecheap?
| harel wrote:
| Thanks for that. I've moved all my domains to you guys during
| one of the other go daddy fiascos (pick one) and never looked
| back. You guys are great. Thanks!
| ted0 wrote:
| Right on!
| lmarcos wrote:
| I would love to hear some objective arguments to use Namecheap
| instead of Gandi (which I'm currently using). The only reason
| I'm still using Gandi it's because it works and I never had any
| troubles with them (although my requirements are super simple).
| Would anyone recommend me to switch?
| Flowsion wrote:
| I've been using Namecheap for domains and domain searches since
| at least 2009. I haven't used any of their other services,
| besides their WHOISGuard offerings.
|
| I have never had issues with them stealing domains after
| searches or any other problems w/ my account.
| httpsterio wrote:
| Same, I have a few local tld's I have to buy elsewhere but
| after moving away from Gandi some five years ago I haven't
| had the need to look back. Namecheap doesn't upsell like
| godaddy and it's affordable, if not the cheapest for many
| tld's. It's also a breeze to config dns rules with them.
| ted0 wrote:
| Thank you for being a longtime customer. We appreciate you!
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Namecheap is one of the best registrars ever. I am constantly
| transferring domains there because they're just so much better
| than the others.
| suifbwish wrote:
| The best way to do this securely is to do a whois lookup on the
| domain via command line to see if it has a registered date or
| not. Only way to steal ideas then is if someone works for the
| icann lookup db
| jjeaff wrote:
| Are you sure about that? I feel like I may have had an issue
| with this with Name Cheap in the past. At least, the 2 day
| window thing. And I'm pretty sure eNom did this and namecheap
| used to be an eNom reseller.
| gervwyk wrote:
| jip. I can say the same. namecheap has been excellent for the
| past few years. even though I do not spend a lot with them,
| i've used their live customer support in a few cases and has
| helped me out where needed. Kudos to the team!
| renewiltord wrote:
| I've loved Namecheap for as long as I've had it. I only
| switched to Google Domains because that gives me auto-
| verification in GCP.
| ted0 wrote:
| How can we win you back?!
| drkstr wrote:
| Hi Ted, for what it's worth, this is the first time I've
| heard of you all, and based on your responses here alone,
| you converted a sale away from Google Domains today. I look
| forward to being yet another happy customer!
| boustrophedon wrote:
| Not the parent but I specifically transferred away from
| namecheap because you attempted to increase my renewal on a
| .club domain by 15x, claiming my previously-registered
| domain was now a premium domain. Google Domains charged me
| the regular price.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23292774
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, when .dev came out, there was a scramble and Google
| Domains was being slow af and you guys weren't, so I have
| my .dev on a 10 year with you. So I guess the answer for
| what worked in the past is: you let me register when I
| could.
|
| 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.
| ted0 wrote:
| I can't speak to any plans re: auto-verification but we
| are always looking at improving our dashboard UX. Big
| things coming there. I should also add that we have
| direct relationships with almost all of our registry
| partners now. Even Google Domains, Route53, and
| Cloudflare don't support a lot of TLDs and/or resell some
| core TLDs through resellers, not directly through the
| registries. It's important for many reasons.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I am very happy with the domains that I have purchased from
| namecheap. We host our own sites and email servers, so
| namecheap's fast ala-carte service has worked great for us for
| a few years.
| timcederman wrote:
| Hi Ted - can you speak to Namecheap's stance on bulk spam
| domain registrations and the fact that Namecheap does nothing
| to stop it?
|
| 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?
| proto-n wrote:
| Well, do they have any obligation to investigate the purouse
| people want to use the domains for?
| MiroF wrote:
| I'm somewhat surprised AlibabaCloud wouldn't act on it. The
| others, not so much - nor do I think namecheap has an
| obligation to do so.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I'm interested to hear a response to this too instead of a
| sales pitch.
| nolok wrote:
| You really, _really_ don 't want registrars to enter that
| game.
|
| 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.
| PhilosAccnting wrote:
| The trouble with free speech is that it hurts people who get
| hit by it (e.g., scams, defamation/slander/libel, intrusive
| advertising).
|
| 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?).
| ted0 wrote:
| Thanks for the question. I can assure you that our legal and
| abuse team do their very best to address bad actors. In fact,
| they are one of the hardest working teams in the company. We
| put a lot of time and due diligence into each case and do not
| takedown domains without sufficient evidence. We believe that
| taking domains down without proper cause can be a slippery
| slope.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I reported a spam domain to namecheap, including a police
| case file, full emails, and basically everything except a
| bank statement after my elderly parent was taken for a
| (several thousand dollar) scam.
|
| Namecheap never resolved it or even responded back beyond
| the precanned message.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Isn't it the police's job to be seizing property from
| criminals to prevent crime? Not individual victims. If
| the police won't demand Namecheap remove it, then sorry?
| They don't have to. It's not like Namecheap committed the
| fraud any more than a carmaker robbed a bank because the
| robber drove away in their car.
| gowld wrote:
| Usually if someone is using your property for crime, you
| have an obligation to stop it.
|
| Don't know if it applies in this particular case though.
| Clearly the government didn't think so.
| geocrasher wrote:
| This is the very reason that Safe Harbor laws are in
| place for these industries.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Legal requests should go through Legal channels. You can
| have all the evidence you want, but do you really want
| the justice system involved to be administered by a
| registrar? No. You don't. You want it to go through the
| actual Justice system.
|
| If you should be upset with anyone, it's your local
| police who didn't escalate the case further.
| timdev2 wrote:
| > How do you feel about registering hate speech in a domain
| name, or someone else's trademark?
|
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I'm getting a lot of text spam from what look like hacked
| cell phones. Someone in the phone industry should get off
| their bottoms and do something about customers sending out
| unusual volumes of SMS.
| thefounder wrote:
| Yeah, let's make the domain registries another walled garden!
| Then start whining when they suspend your supid game or
| whatever they don't like about your website/business(i.e an
| abusive DMCA report)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are you asking Namecheap to take unilateral action against
| domain registrations with no due process? As a Namecheap
| customer, I do not support such behavior, nor is it their
| mandate as a registrar.
|
| 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).
| softwarerero wrote:
| I have only one domain on namecheap, but since a few month I
| cannot access it any more. There is a captcha service
| (hcaptcha) before it which totally locks me out.
| Freaken wrote:
| Hey Ted,
|
| 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.
| danellis wrote:
| But can you please start handling .name domains? I have one
| last domain I want to transfer from Gandi. Your support agent
| spent five minutes trying to convince me that I didn't own a
| domain in xxx.yyy.name format, and that the reason it wasn't
| transfering is because I should be using yyy.name, before
| talking to a supervisor and finding out that you don't handle
| them anyway.
| ddingus wrote:
| Why are people moving from Gandi?
|
| Just wondering if I should be aware of something...
|
| If I do move, Namecheap it will be, given this discussion.
| icelancer wrote:
| Their moral policies in their TOS are... interesting.
| firebird84 wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| ted0 wrote:
| We have always liked and respected the folks over at Gandi.
| They were recently acquired by private equity so not sure
| what their plans are. Regardless, we'd be happy to have
| you.
| ddingus wrote:
| Ok, the acquisition is good to know.
|
| Steady as she goes right now, but I know where to go
| should things change.
| ted0 wrote:
| We do support .name now.
| danellis wrote:
| Really? Because when I try to transfer xxx.yyy.name, it
| says: "Uh-oh! Your domain yyy.name is not eligible for
| transfer to us." I don't own yyy.name. I own xxx.yyy.name.
|
| (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.
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| Only the owner of yyy.name can do those kind of
| transfers.
|
| 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.
| danellis wrote:
| Who is the owner of yyy.name, though? I'd say that's the
| registry itself.
| kugelblitz wrote:
| I don't think you can transfer because the domain doesn't
| belong to you. yyy.name is the domain, you're "renting"
| from whoever owns that domain name.
| danellis wrote:
| I understand that domains are just rented and not owned,
| but in common parlance it's usual to talk about owning a
| domain.
| dingaling wrote:
| But you don't even own a _domain_
|
| Whom do you pay for xxx.yyy.name?
| [deleted]
| jessaustin wrote:
| If ".name" works the typical TLD way, you don't own
| anything. You merely have a business relationship with
| the owner of "ellis.name". _That_ owner could transfer
| "ellis.name", but you don't own anything transferable.
|
| Of course, ".name" might not work in the expected way,
| but it seems a likely explanation for the issue you
| report.
| danellis wrote:
| The owner of yyy.name is the .name registry. That's just
| how they work. The intention was that people register
| first.last.name, and that multiple people could register
| under the same last.name.
| bscphil wrote:
| Then it sounds like the .name registry is also in the
| business of selling subdomains, i.e. they're the owner of
| yyy.name. In other words, it's not possible for Namecheap
| to rent you xxx.yyy.name, because to do that they'd have
| to be the owner of yyy.name, and they're not.
|
| Sounds like the tech support agent and supervisor got it
| basically right.
| brlewis wrote:
| If a domain is unavailable, does the query on namecheap still
| go to third parties? Is it possible for third parties to snap
| up an available domain they know has just been queried?
| ted0 wrote:
| When I say third parties, these are the registries (that
| operate each domain extension or TLD) that we query for
| availability. I've never heard of this happening and it's not
| likely that it would ever happen.
| amingilani wrote:
| I once forgot to renew a domain name and was so late that it
| had dropped from my interface. Namecheap went ahead and renewed
| it for me since it hadn't gone into the pool yet--for no extra
| cost.
|
| Been using you for 15 years now, really happy. Even though I
| wish the website were faster :)
| ted0 wrote:
| <3
|
| 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).
| mintone wrote:
| I can't tell you how much I recommend namecheap, the service
| you provide is excellent as a registrar. You've been my
| recommendation for 7+ years for hundreds of clients and as long
| as you continue in the path you've followed, will be for a long
| time.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Thank you for joining the discussion.
|
| 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?
| OakNinja wrote:
| I've used a fair share of registrars, and Namecheap is the
| best!
|
| 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!
| suyash wrote:
| Lately I've noticed websites dynamically changing price for
| domain names using AI to determine how valuable that name is? I
| don't like that practice, it used to be same price for all
| domains names of certain kind (.org, .in, .com etc) but now not
| just the TLD but also what name you pick can dramatically
| increase the price.
| ribalda wrote:
| Are you considering support .dk domains anytime soon?
| ted0 wrote:
| Not on our radar at the moment but I'll do what I did above.
| If there are another upvotes on this comment, we'll consider
| adding .dk to our onboarding queue.
| cyrialize wrote:
| A coworker of mine recommended you guys. The service is
| fantastic! Thank you so much.
| joshxyz wrote:
| Also got this happen with me on Namecheap, but aint mad since
| they got top notch customer support anyways (if you've tried
| their live chat, thats what im talkin about).
|
| 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.
| birdfeeder8891 wrote:
| They also say "domain unavailable" if you include "godaddy" in
| the domain name. Any other site will let you register profane
| domains with "godaddy" in them.
| unicodepepper wrote:
| I wonder if they'd allow you to transfer such a domain to them.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I experienced this a couple days ago with porkbun.com .I wanted
| to register a domain and the checkout failed. Shortly after that
| the whois showed that it had been registered and populate with
| porkun nameservers. Extremely infuriating...
| aluminussoma wrote:
| For those who have been directly affected, file a complaint with
| your state's attorney general. For California, here's a link:
| https://oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-busine...
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| SMAAART wrote:
| Yees, it happened to me.
|
| More bad news: it's not just GoDaddy.
|
| How's this not an FTC violation?
| sathishmanohar wrote:
| I was always suspicious of godaddy and you never know which
| domain registrars would go rogue in this respect in the future.
|
| 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.
|
| Link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824665
| im3w1l wrote:
| Maybe this works presently, but under the hood whois must still
| be querying some server who could use your query to buy it? I
| guess the purchase intent is lower with whois, as you may drown
| in other queries.
| ve55 wrote:
| GoDaddy is imo the literal worst registrar. It's unfortunate how
| often they're a go-to name for people, but hopefully it won't
| last forever.
| notyourwork wrote:
| An example where marketing to average person works quite well.
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