wasteme · 5 years ago
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
186 comments
ffpip · 5 years ago
Yes. If you search it 2-3 times, they buy it in most cases.
langitbiru · 5 years ago
Then I wonder what if someone trolls Godaddy by searching many names.
hsnewman · 5 years ago
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...
nickphx · 5 years ago
Their domain cost as a registrar is a fraction of retail pricing.
shiftpgdn · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
jedberg · 5 years ago
It doesn't cost them anything to do this. As a registrar they can register a domain name for free for seven days.
smolder · 5 years ago
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.
ceilingcorner · 5 years ago
I had this happen to me with instantdomainsearch.com, which is owned by GoDaddy, I believe.
beau · 5 years ago
Hi, I own/operate Instant Domain Search. We make plenty of money from GoDaddy and other partners by helping them find domain names.
We show results quickly because we check if your search is in the zone file. We keep a copy of the zone file in memory, and check searches against that. Some names are "unconfigured" for a variety of reasons, and do not appear in the zone file. So this means we might show a name as available, but when you go to register it, it's gone. This sometimes leads people to believe that we've registered it for ourselves. If you check the WHOIS record, you'll usually find that it's been registered for years before you searched for it.
The only major registrar that I know of that did this was Network Solutions. They did it for a few days in 2008 before getting trashed in the press:
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/01/network-soluti...
More recently, when we show a name as available, we'll check again with VeriSign (who runs the .com registry) to make sure. And if it's not available, we'll switch the color from green to red -- a good example is eager.com. It's not in the zone, but not available to register.
ceilingcorner · 5 years ago
Okay, I suppose that’s plausible. I just had a few questionable situations and it seemed fishy.
symkat · 5 years ago
And it's free for GoDaddy to do this: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
boxed · 5 years ago
Can't be totally free. If we all would run random garbage through their search, at some point this evil mudy collapse somehow?
adventured · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
I assume “felons” matches a dictionary search that “ajandneeksiciajenebdh” does not
Tepix · 5 years ago
And during the free period they can do "domain tasting", see how many ads they can deliver on that domain and consider keeping it.
sslnx · 5 years ago
Happened to me too. In my case it was sslnx.com
jtolmar · 5 years ago
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.
sosuke · 5 years ago
Is there a safe method to search for domains?
dddddaviddddd · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
https://lookup.icann.org/ is what I use for basic whois information before buying and check if they domain is available.
rkeene2 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
I've been using iwantmyname.com both as a registrar and domain search engine. Never had a name sniped from me.
stilisstuk · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
yes, whois:
whois godaddy.com
whois superuselessdomainforeveryone.com
look for "No match for domain" at the end
mrweasel · 5 years ago
If you can understand enough Danish to use it I can recommend https://gratisdns.dk
pixl97 · 5 years ago
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.
birdfeeder8891 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
I wonder if they'd allow you to transfer such a domain to them.
maremmano · 5 years ago
I use domainr.com often and never had this problem. Just in case you need a nice alternative.
Shared404 · 5 years ago
I've found Porkbun to be pretty good as well.
henriquez · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
miroz · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
That's what I'm thinking as well. You'd think that's counter to their business model to keep on buying domains.
bleepblorp · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
For most non-ccTLDs, that's regulated directly by the ICANN. It's pretty easy to file an ICANN complaint, FWIW.
fanf2 · 5 years ago
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.
rgbrenner · 5 years ago
Called domain front running
4cao · 5 years ago
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!"
digi59404 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
tomhoward · 5 years ago
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.
rozularen · 5 years ago
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
andylynch · 5 years ago
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.
innocenat · 5 years ago
> 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 · 5 years ago
Not by default, definitely. Unless you count via WSL, but WSL isn't installed by default either.
CydeWeys · 5 years ago
It's not even installed by default in WSL; I had to apt install who is literally earlier today.
xoa · 5 years ago
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).
saagarjha · 5 years ago
Network Utility has been deprecated in macOS Big Sur.
christophilus · 5 years ago
Namecheap and Dreamhost are both top notch and would never do this.
pronoiac · 5 years ago
> 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.
fsckboy · 5 years ago
that's not the whois software or the whois protocol returning that, it's the configuration of the particular nameserver you're talking to; whois software/protocol allows you to specify different nameservers, so you could switch
tibu · 5 years ago
A who is server and a domain name server are two different things. But back to the topic: who is servers in most cases have some kind of limit per a certain time frame so you don't abuse them.
mratzloff · 5 years ago
I've never had this issue with Gandi.net. They are excellent.
tomhoward · 5 years ago
I use them for all my registrations.
I thought I saw a complaint about them domain frontrunning once, but it surprised me and I didn't see any hard evidence, and it doesn't seem like them.
But I'll still always feel safer using whois in the terminal. I've been online too long to trust anyone on matters like this.
Besides, whois is right here in my terminal, so it's quicker anyway.
usr1106 · 5 years ago
Not really familiar with submission rules and customs here, but shouldn't that headline be prefixed by "Tell HN:"?
giarc · 5 years ago
I agree, I was confused as there was no url following the title.
rtx · 5 years ago
I hope someone from Godaddy responds to this.
schwartzworld · 5 years ago
I've been using hover.com for years. never had a problem.
unreal37 · 5 years ago
It doesn't even have to cost them very much. Nothing or a few cents at most.
andylynch · 5 years ago
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.
bhartzer · 5 years ago
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.
scrollaway · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
owlninja · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
eloff · 5 years ago
That link seemingly has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
bhartzer · 5 years ago
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.
zerd · 5 years ago
Couple of examples: https://amp.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/60o6j8/godaddy_...
_verandaguy · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
https://domains.google is the best I found.
Also, namecheap’s beast mode if you want to check hundreds of domains at once.
AdmiralAsshat · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
My team built Beast Mode. Would love any feedback you may have.
neilpanchal · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
They were on my radar when I moved over to Gandi, but I'm avoiding using Google whenever possible.
eloff · 5 years ago
I want to see the evidence before I believe that. I've seen nothing but speculation in this thread.
warent · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
HN has been talking about GoDaddy front-running domains since 2012. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4362478
eloff · 5 years ago
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.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
This is a complete lie and total slander of GoDaddy. https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
gravitas · 5 years ago
> This is a complete lie and total slander of GoDaddy
Respectfully, I stated an objective fact and nothing more, backed by an evidentiary link. As the other reply and yours seemed to have missed the context to which I was replying, "This is really bizarre behavior for HN" which was being contested by my reply - in hindsight I should have quoted it to be blatantly obvious to speed readers.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
I should have been clear, I was referring to OP’s statements which were easily refuted by the Whois search. I thought that was relevant to tying this situation to some HN perceived history of this behavior.
mekster · 5 years ago
When you recommend something, please mention what is good as well else I can't tell if it's a shill account or not.
mratzloff · 5 years ago
How about "doesn't scam you"? Gandi is widely respected. I've registered all of my domains there for over a decade.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
This is a lie and total slander of GoDaddy. https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d... The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
andylynch · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
That's because this is a lie and total slander of GoDaddy. https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
jnwatson · 5 years ago
It is called front running in DNS too, and it is perfectly legal.
blablabla123 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
mdorazio · 5 years ago
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.
mark-r · 5 years ago
I have no choice, they bought out my hosting provider a year ago.
dannydenhard · 5 years ago
Likewise, although recently it's improved
whatch · 5 years ago
Why not to migrate to another one? There are plenty of them nowadays
mark-r · 5 years ago
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.
pkphilip · 5 years ago
I have had serious issues with Godaddy as well. Absolutely horrible performance as well.
koonsolo · 5 years ago
Me too. But the worst was that I can only contact them by calling them. What?
mitchdoogle · 5 years ago
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.
wenc · 5 years ago
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.
pottertheotter · 5 years ago
I've been using Porkbun for a few years and have no complaints.
isaacimagine · 5 years ago
I've been using porkbun for a while and it works great. Worth a look.
tanatocenose · 5 years ago
Spam
nett18 · 5 years ago
honestly, the company is amazing, they are the discord equivalent of domain hosting
opan · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
What about discord has been horrible for you?
nonbirithm · 5 years ago
No ability to use third-party clients without being banned.
tfsh · 5 years ago
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.
filmgirlcw · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
filmgirlcw · 5 years ago
I think that there was a time when a smaller number of DNS providers was registered with ISNIC. As the gTLD has become more popular, more DNS providers have gone through that process.
esdf · 5 years ago
ISNIC doesn't require domestic NS providers. They do require the nameservers to register a contact though. https://www.isnic.is/en/domain/req#req-hosts
filmgirlcw · 5 years ago
I believe that requirement ended. I had to get a different DNS at one point for my .is (registered in 2009) and I still maintain that account with DNSMadeEasy out of laziness), but when I helped a friend register a .is and when I got some additional ones more recently, I didn’t have to do that anymore.
I believe Namecheap offloads some of the info for .is back to ISNIC. The only reason I don’t do it under Namecheap is that I’ve had the ISNIC account for 11 years and it’s easy enough to get my annual email reminding me to renew, but I was able to get my friend’s registered through her Namecheap account without issue at the end of last year.
rconti · 5 years ago
Thanks folks. I haven't had mine that long -- maybe since 2015 at the earliest. Must have changed shortly after I registered, since it seems that it changed some time ago. I'm certainly not an Isnic OG :)
ted0 · 5 years ago
Yes, we support .is directly. There can be some quirks but we have a ton of happy registrants.
rammy1234 · 5 years ago
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.
narwally · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Second gandi, not always cheapest but close enough. Good interface and support.
ludjer · 5 years ago
I originally was also on Godaddy, but now I moved to Porkbun and never look back. Love their website and their name.
aerovistae · 5 years ago
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.
daneel_w · 5 years ago
I have used https://joker.com/ for 20 years, and have yet to find a single thing to complain about.
aviraldg · 5 years ago
NameCheap (which I use) and Gandi are common recommendations on HN AFAIK.
notyourwork · 5 years ago
I've had great experience with Gandi over the last 10 years.
Hoasi · 5 years ago
Gandi is fine. Their domains are slightly more expensive than others.
91edec · 5 years ago
Namecheap
Shared404 · 5 years ago
I like Porkbun personally.
antihero · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
antihero · 5 years ago
Yep, can't wait 'till they support .cc and whatnot.
drummer · 5 years ago
The same cloudflare whose ceo decided to deplatform a client not too long ago?
bhartzer · 5 years ago
Epik, Namecheap, Fabulous for domains.
OzMikeRobertson · 5 years ago
Thanks for the support and being such a loyal customer bhartzer. Always good to hear from you.
For those that don't know me, I work for Fabulous.com. I can confirm Fabulous has never and will never engage in activities as described by the OP.
If anyone has any questions, needs assistance with anything relating to Fabulous, feel free to reach out. My email is mike@fabulous.com.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Hey Mike! Hope you're well.
gogopuppygogo · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
tuananh · 5 years ago
you can buy now but the tld is limited
ourcat · 5 years ago
Interesting. I'd never considered Google for my domains.
Any idea if the '£10/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 · 5 years ago
I think all domains under `dev` have HSTS turned on.
ascorbic · 5 years ago
They call them more secure because the whole TLD is on the HSTS preload list, so no downgrade attacks.
colejohnson66 · 5 years ago
Which means that an SSL certificate is required
colejohnson66 · 5 years ago
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.
buybackoff · 5 years ago
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.
tuananh · 5 years ago
how's google support?
gogopuppygogo · 5 years ago
It’s Google, I haven’t had any issue with the service and been using it since launch.
Biggest problem is that the site doesn’t work well in ios on iPhone so I use mobile chrome.
commoner · 5 years ago
Cloudflare Registrar offers domains at cost, which makes it the least expensive option for the TLDs it supports:
https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/
If you use Google Domains, you risk losing access to the domains if Google suspends or terminates your Google account for some reason unrelated to the domains.
gogopuppygogo · 5 years ago
You can add multiple Google accounts to admin a domain. Increases the survivability of access to them.
commoner · 5 years ago
They better not be on the same G Suite account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826368
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109809
Google Domains charges $12.00/year for .com renewals, compared to $8.56/year at Porkbun and $8.03/year at Cloudflare. With Google's reputation for poor support, most domain owners simply have no good reason to use Google Domains.
shafyy · 5 years ago
DNSimple is great for domain names.
adityapatadia · 5 years ago
We use AWS Route 53 for domain registration. Works like a charm.
nucleardog · 5 years ago
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.
tnr23 · 5 years ago
They use Gandi under the hood. Using Gandi directly is a much better experience
dublin · 5 years ago
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.)
miguelmota · 5 years ago
I second Route 53 for domains. It’s straight to the point and clear cut unlike other registrars that try to upsell gimmicky features at every step.
andawg · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
$96 for static hosting is a crap deal.
Shorel · 5 years ago
Basically everyone else is a superior alternative.
I use gandi.net because every domain includes email hosting. And France privacy laws.
axaxs · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
No spam either. Their UI is also really transparent. You can even edit all of your DNS records as a single plain text file.
D13Fd · 5 years ago
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.
rileytg · 5 years ago
dnsimple has been a fantastic provider for me for at least 5 years. it’s just... simple.
vgb2k18 · 5 years ago
Dynadot.com, they've been around a long time, for me it's been the provider I always come back to.
Lammy · 5 years ago
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/
colejohnson66 · 5 years ago
How do registrars “take down” domains? Is it a simple nameserver change that would then propagate over the next few hours?
Lammy · 5 years ago
Yes, in the same way a registrar would redirect a domain to an “expired” page during the non-renewal grace period.
dublin · 5 years ago
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).
NateEag · 5 years ago
I've been using EasyDNS for years.
I'm a big fan. I've never had any issue at all, and their DNS hosting seems incredibly robust (I'm not qualified to really analyze it - there's a reason I don't do my own DNS).
reaperducer · 5 years ago
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.
OzMikeRobertson · 5 years ago
Thanks for the support and being such a loyal customer reaperducer.
I work for Directnic. I can confirm Directnic has never and will never engage in activities as described by the OP.
If you (or anyone) has any questions, needs assistance with anything relating to Directnic, feel free to reach out. My email is mrobertson@dnc.io.
karlshea · 5 years ago
I've been using Hover for years and like them.
james_pm · 5 years ago
Appreciate it! I can personally state for the record we don't do what is alleged. I also seriously doubt GoDaddy does it.
Wintereise · 5 years ago
I've been using https://internetbs.net/ for the better part of a decade now.
They email me once a year that stuff is about to expire, I renew it.
I've never had to interact with them otherwise about anything, which in this case means they're clearly doing something right.
tzfld · 5 years ago
Gave up Godaddy recently, after 10 years. Overpriced ssl, old php version and no sign for upgrades and improvements.
rezonant · 5 years ago
If you are hosting a PHP website, then just host it yourself. You can get cheaper and better hosting from one of the "economy" clouds like DigitalOcean or Linode, and nowadays TLS certs can be automated for free with LetsEncrypt. GoDaddy as a registrar is fine but the rest of its services are completely unnecessary today.
cloudwizard · 5 years ago
Whenever I talk to startups, I check their domain. If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.
ars · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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. :-)
jansan · 5 years ago
>If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.
Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.
tyingq · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
cirno · 5 years ago
GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.
haswell · 5 years ago
Another exception is that at least for awhile (not sure if they still do), Google Domains would farm our registrations to GoDaddy, eNom, etc. So you might not have even realized GoDaddy was in the picture (at least initially).
kovacs · 5 years ago
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
BrianOnHN · 5 years ago
Wow, samesies!
brian1999@yahoo.com
ThePadawan · 5 years ago
> 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).
munk-a · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
Igelau · 5 years ago
Hey, maybe that's short for Bret Igswag (born April 20).
I used to work with a guy whose first + middle initials and last name resulted in an official corporate email of "xlwang", no lie.
Only you can save Corbin Untcrasher and Tyrone Ridel-Tafcups from crushing student loan debt.
samaxe · 5 years ago
You assume 1999 is their birth year...could be a graduation year.
Igelau · 5 years ago
Or a random year. I like using random dates in usernames.
saagarjha · 5 years ago
21 here: anecdotally, almost all of them. Having a @yahoo.com address is pretty uncool, though.
brlewis · 5 years ago
I've never had an AOL email but you just inspired me to sign up for one.
qntmfred · 5 years ago
there's kinda that ironically-lame hipster vibe to using aol.com email addresses. they're coming back in style.
kbenson · 5 years ago
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...
simcop2387 · 5 years ago
I feel attacked. I still have my aol email, HNUSERNAME@aol.com
edoceo · 5 years ago
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.
bredren · 5 years ago
If you can afford $12k for a domain hopefully you’re not worried about the registrar signaling to an investor.
edoceo · 5 years ago
I'm one of the investors too.
hangonhn · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
> 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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
> 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.
hnzix · 5 years ago
> It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar.
GoDaddy are on my shitlist after the elephant killing incident, their predatory business practices and low quality tooling. And don't ever forget to renew your domain or GoDaddy will squat it.
I would absolutely yellow flag a tech company for using GoDaddy.
bzbz · 5 years ago
Elephant killing incident??
na85 · 5 years ago
quickthrower2 · 5 years ago
Looks Like this guy pulls the philosophical train lever to save 5 and gets crushed himself.
haswell · 5 years ago
It would help to better understand your criteria vs. an arbitrary label like yellow flag.
I was not aware of the elephant killing incident, have not experienced their poor tooling (because I have not used them) and was not aware that GoDaddy squats expired domains.
Does this lack of knowledge yellow flag me as a competent person?
Domain registration often happens in a hurry. After a brainstorm that revealed an aha! In that moment, the only thing that matters is grabbing that domain while it's still available. Someone hurriedly registers the thing, with knowledge that it can always be moved later.
If you want to judge a company based on the early inception of the domain, often before deeply technical/experienced folks get involved, that's obviously your prerogative. But I think you'd be unnecessarily filtering out great opportunities in the process.
Oh, and didn't Google Domains use GoDaddy and others behind the scenes for awhile?
lostcolony · 5 years ago
Is there greater danger in passing over a possibly competent startup with technical debt such as this, or greater danger in ignoring a potential sign?
Obviously it's not a 100% sign. Just a heuristic. One of many, I'd assume. But I can't fault someone for using one when the cost of a false positive so far outweighs the cost of a false negative.
cellularmitosis · 5 years ago
> gives us almost no benefits.
> until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
> would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company
You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective.
There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godaddy remnants. The flawed DB schema fragments from two refactorings ago which stubbornly survive. The fact that the site goes down for 30 seconds every time someone ships a change to production. The fact that shipping frequently is discouraged because of this. The overly aggressive cache invalidation strategy which causes 30% more DB load. The fact that no one is monitoring the DB load. The API endpoints with 4,000ms of latency. The fact that this will never be fixed because you are way too deep in bed with a poorly chosen framework and ORM.
All of these things can be justified from a business perspective as "not worth the effort to fix". Customers aren't leaving, revenue isn't dipping. It's fine. Just focus on the sprint.
But on every engineer's internal balance scale of "should I stay or should I go", all of these things get noticed. Each one adds a pebble to the "leave" side of the scale. For your talented engineers, two pebbles.
Don't let too many pebbles pile up.
tazard · 5 years ago
Thanks! That scale/pebbles metaphor very nicely describes something that I have been having a difficult time explaining for some time now.
quickthrower2 · 5 years ago
Leave to where exactly ... the company that writes perfect code? Little or no tech debt? Only possible in rare circumstances, probably when it is business critical that it be that way.
selfhoster11 · 5 years ago
No company is perfect, but clearly some are better than others from the technical perspective. I know I would enjoy my work more and remain more productive if I felt like I'm struggling a little, rather than a lot, to release anything.
krageon · 5 years ago
From experience, there's very big differences between the amount of terrible decisions the upper management forces upon engineers between various companies. When it's very very bad, you should leave because the odds of it being better somewhere else are very high (they might be only average bad instead of objectively terrible).
Edit: It is also exactly this kind of thinking that keeps people in bad situations. Nobody wins when anyone thinks like that, except of course the people in the exploiting position in the first place.
cellularmitosis · 5 years ago
> the company that writes perfect code?
You are touching on an important point, which I did not state: that there are no companies with zero pebbles on the scale.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is to avoid a pile of pebbles large enough that engineers feel hopeless / "why do I bother" / "this place is a joke anyway". Good people don't stick around long for that.
But the main point was that thinking that a technical blemish has "zero cost" is a trap. The cost is not zero. The cost is having one more pebble on the scale.
boomlinde · 5 years ago
> A lot of startups are rather low in engineering talent early on
I.e. "technically incompetent"?
vmception · 5 years ago
/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 · 5 years ago
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.
mattl · 5 years ago
What if a non-technical co-founder bought the domain?
Biganon · 5 years ago
This is likely to happen, too. Parent comment is not being very wise here.
mattl · 5 years ago
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.
behnamoh · 5 years ago
Then it probably means the technical people didn't have much say in this.
haswell · 5 years ago
What are you trying to say here? Domain purchases often happen before there are any technical people at all. It's not about who had a say.
ci5er · 5 years ago
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.)
rfrey · 5 years ago
Please have mercy on those of us whose CEOs set up the email and Office365 accounts.
driverdan · 5 years ago
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.
prh8 · 5 years ago
Frequently it's the non-technical idea person who grabbed a domain before finding technical people to work with.
wmeredith · 5 years ago
> it means that they are technically incompetent
That's a mixed signal. I can really help my technically incompetent clients.
rezonant · 5 years ago
The registrar's job is to facilitate the transaction for the domain, charge you for renewals, and give you a way to assign the authoritative name servers. For that purpose GoDaddy works about as good as any other registrar. You can debate the merits of GoDaddy as a company on [oh so] many levels, remark on their absolutely terrible user interfaces, and certainly discuss their sleazy practices, but none of this is an indicator of ineptitude on the part of the purchaser. Having a slick user interface around what amounts to a Purchase Domain button and a text box for setting name servers isn't terribly exciting or something I care about, and GoDaddy covers a very large swathe of the available TLDs (though certainly not all of them), so managing many related domains across TLDs with a single account is appealing.
All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude.
And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better.
You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc.
GoDaddy's hosting is unfit for any purpose.
shivekkhurana · 5 years ago
I don't see it mentioned anywhere, but Cloudflare has as domain registry service too. They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay.
They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now.
All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.
krn · 5 years ago
> They claim to not charge any markup and you pay what they have to pay.
That's because all domains transferred to CloudFlare are required to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. It's just a different business model.
mc32 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Sounds like a dictionary check of some sort.
whyaduck · 5 years ago
The spirit of GoDaddy's founder soldiers on in it's current policies and behaviors. Disappointing but unsurprising.
coredog64 · 5 years ago
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.
technick · 5 years ago
godaddy is ran by crooks...
yodon · 5 years ago
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
Supermancho · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
bhartzer · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
justinclift · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Oh, that does look like there's a relationship between them.
Good find. :)
rticesterp · 5 years ago
You should have bot the Domain Name insurance!
bhartzer · 5 years ago
I have no business affiliation with GoDaddy, and absolutely never have. I am active in the domain industry, so I happened to know how domains work.
I’ve written a ton about domains over the years, and the articles you’re referring to that appeared on the GoDaddy blog were syndicated. They actually picked them up through another source.
No disclosure needed, I’m not affiliated with GoDaddy in any way.
vegetablepotpie · 5 years ago
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.
afrnz · 5 years ago
I also got burned trying to buy a domain from GoDaddy a couple of days ago. Never again ...
_nickwhite · 5 years ago
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/
tzs · 5 years ago
That doesn't work for all TLDs. I just checked a .us domain and it says "No registry RDAP server was identified for this domain. Attempting lookup using WHOIS service", and then "Failed to perform lookup using WHOIS service: TLD_NOT_SUPPORTED".
ausjke · 5 years ago
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?
api · 5 years ago
Never use GoDaddy for anything. They're well known as being scummy in virtually every way.
s_brady · 5 years ago
I always use gandi.net for searching for domains. They are honest brokers. Never had an issue.
roosgit · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.)
CrociDB · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Then why did you renew? Domain squatters suck.
wusel · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Domains that are blocked by people not using them for years are just as bad.
devenblake · 5 years ago
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
XCSme · 5 years ago
So does GoDaddy.
freedomben · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Thanks! Glad you like the interface. We work hard to make it simple and also still powerful and easy to use.
james_pm · 5 years ago
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.
juped · 5 years ago
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.
zeppelin_head · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
Marc_Bryan · 5 years ago
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!)
user5994461 · 5 years ago
I hope you charged back the money.
m_km · 5 years ago
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
thiht · 5 years ago
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.
snowwrestler · 5 years ago
Why would they be sanctioned? If GoDaddy is the registrar for a domain, GoDaddy knows who the real owner is. They have to, per ICANN rules.
And if GoDaddy reaches out to that customer on behalf of another customer, they don't reveal any private information. Each customer only sees their own interaction with GoDaddy. They don't see each others' info.
Aeolun · 5 years ago
They would be sanctioned because they’re a bunch of scammers that take your money without providing a service?
croes · 5 years ago
I don't think he means sanctioned for contacting the domain owner but sanctioned for taking money without actually doing anything.
thiht · 5 years ago
The ICANN states that you must provide a way to directly contact a domain's owner. If I'm correct, the contact info must be freely available in the whole, whether it's an email address, an obfuscated email address, or a contact form on the website of the registrar.
Charging for this is really shady, but not contacting the domain owner when requested is a registrar agreement violation.
Note that it's also the responsibility of the registrar to ensure that contact information of their registrants are correct.
theogravity · 5 years ago
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.
abrichr · 5 years ago
> 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.
Thanks for the heads up! Any recommendations for alternative methods for accomplishing this?
GiantSully · 5 years ago
Will see many domain ADs when you browse websites in the following days after search the domain
TenJack · 5 years ago
Had this happen as well. Use whois in the console instead: whois felons.io
ghego1 · 5 years ago
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.
dgellow · 5 years ago
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...
tzs · 5 years ago
The way I check prices at multiple registrars is to check the price on admrgbldflkrjanjscknadsc.<tld> instead of <name_I_want>.<tld>, where admrgbldflkrjanjscknadsc is just a bunch of random keyboard mashing.
I do not enter <name_I_want>.<tld> into any registrar until I am actually attempting to buy it from that registrar.
brudgers · 5 years ago
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/
Syzygies · 5 years ago
Hmm, someone beat me to it:
"Sorry, f___yougodaddyforstealingthesesearches.com is unavailable"
obscura · 5 years ago
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.
jimbob45 · 5 years ago
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.
betteryet · 5 years ago
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.
technoluvvo · 5 years ago
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.
josefresco · 5 years ago
Have any big name registrars committed publicly to refrain from "front running"?
juandazapata · 5 years ago
Another data point here. Happened to me ~7 years ago. FWIW, I haven't had any issues with Ghandi.net.
samtheprogram · 5 years ago
> Ghandi.net
I think you meant Gandi.net?
I definitely agree with the sentiment, Gandi has not done this to me in the past -- I've looked up short domains weeks before purchase -- and in general provide an outstanding service.
thunfisch · 5 years ago
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.
mmcgaha · 5 years ago
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.
McDyver · 5 years ago
Not to advertise, but easywhois.com have a no front-running policy, which prevents exactly this issue. I'm a happy customer
drchiu · 5 years ago
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.
snapetom · 5 years ago
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.
nerdponx · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
cnst · 5 years ago
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.
krn · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
ksec · 5 years ago
Thank You. Never heard of them until today.
cpach · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
B-Con · 5 years ago
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.
blahyawnblah · 5 years ago
Just use whois on the cli
echelon · 5 years ago
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.
smithza · 5 years ago
Sounds as though they weren't great friends. Sorry to hear of this.
tehwebguy · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
cure · 5 years ago
> I'm at peace, and I've got a lot to look forward to.
Good for you! That's the healthy path.
DelightOne · 5 years ago
Good that it didn't kill your drive! Do you still share your account details with friends or did that stop?
jefftk · 5 years ago
That sounds really unpleasant! It's not clear to me, though, what you're saying GoDaddy did wrong?
IggleSniggle · 5 years ago
> 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.
Seems pretty clear that although they had server credentials, they were never given any account credentials, but they were able to get into the account and transfer ownership anyway.
jefftk · 5 years ago
"I had another friend on the account because I was paying for his domain and wanted to let him administer DNS. They conspired together..."
Abimelex · 5 years ago
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.
Animats · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
godaddy-murders-elephants.com is also unavailable on godaddy, but is available on other registrars.
wombatmobile · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
rhacker · 5 years ago
I use name.com for this reason. I trust them more.
beefield · 5 years ago
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.
lucasmullens · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
y42 · 5 years ago
What would happen if someone would write a script to query random domain names via godaddy? Just wondering.
gnopgnip · 5 years ago
It doesn't cost them anything to do this, see domain tasting or https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
azhenley · 5 years ago
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
abetusk · 5 years ago
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.
aluminussoma · 5 years ago
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.
SMAAART · 5 years ago
Yees, it happened to me.
More bad news: it's not just GoDaddy.
How's this not an FTC violation?
sathishmanohar · 5 years ago
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.
im3w1l · 5 years ago
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.
brk · 5 years ago
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.
awill · 5 years ago
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
projektfu · 5 years ago
Relevant from 13 years ago: Network Solutions sued for domain tasting.
projektfu · 5 years ago
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.
darkhorn · 5 years ago
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
anaxag0ras · 5 years ago
Does anyone know the story behind 'Godaddy' name? It's a weird name for a domain registrar.
caseyohara · 5 years ago
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."
code_paster · 5 years ago
Plausible, but not likely. https://domaininvesting.com/no-domain-frontrunning-godaddy/
manishsharan · 5 years ago
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.
ekanes · 5 years ago
100%. Has happened to me too. SUPER scammy company.
dclaw · 5 years ago
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.
oedmarap · 5 years ago
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
Dig1t · 5 years ago
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?
rightisleft · 5 years ago
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...
gazelleeatslion · 5 years ago
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.
ve55 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
An example where marketing to average person works quite well.
mariust · 5 years ago
well all corporations rise and fall, guess the direction for godaddy - tbh I wonder how they managed for so many years ..
diob · 5 years ago
Could you flood their logs with nonsense domain searches? Would be fun to do a coordinated effort around that.
DonHopkins · 5 years ago
Fucking sexist elephant murderers.
GoDaddy's most infamous ads
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7yFCqOAb9Y
GoDaddy CEO Kills Elephant
jhgorrell · 5 years ago
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!
anonAndOn · 5 years ago
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.
zxcvbn4038 · 5 years ago
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.
PretzelFisch · 5 years ago
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.
filmgirlcw · 5 years ago
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.
babo · 5 years ago
I lost my .com in a similar way.
tus88 · 5 years ago
Obviously.
lanecwagner · 5 years ago
This. Never use them, and never work with people who insist on using them.
ted0 · 5 years ago
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.
webbrahmin · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Glad to hear you're happy. Always willing to help if you ever need anything: ted [at] namecheap.com
NetOpWibby · 5 years ago
Yeesh, that’s terrible.
abc-xyz · 5 years ago
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
harel · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Right on!
Flowsion · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Thank you for being a longtime customer. We appreciate you!
tamar · 5 years ago
Me too!
httpsterio · 5 years ago
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.
IncRnd · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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?
toomuchtodo · 5 years ago
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).
proto-n · 5 years ago
Well, do they have any obligation to investigate the purouse people want to use the domains for?
Simulacra · 5 years ago
I’m interested to hear a response to this too instead of a sales pitch.
kevin_thibedeau · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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)
MiroF · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
This is the very reason that Safe Harbor laws are in place for these industries.
vorpalhex · 5 years ago
Safe harbor laws only apply when you reasonably don't know or couldn't know about the illegal behavior. Once you become aware of it then safe harbor no longer applies.
Aeolun · 5 years ago
If Tesla is aware that a certain car is stolen, and they have the ability to remotely disable it, should they?
And if they’re aware that the car will be imminently used for a terrorist attack, does that change the equation?
yjftsjthsd-h · 5 years ago
And if we trusted Tesla to make that determination, that would be an interesting question. But counterpoint: Do you want Tesla to remotely kill your car because someone decided to tell them that it was stolen? I can think of some "fun" ways for that to blow up...
dogecoinbase · 5 years ago
Contrariwise, should they be permitted that ability, when what it will actually be used for is someone to disable their abused partner's car?
manquer · 5 years ago
Tesla can do that at government instruction. They have no business doing that if private individual asks for it even if it is world ending nuclear threat terrorist attack.
Same for namecheap. They cannot be the judge of what is spam and not. they should not be asked to gatekeep for the justice system
vorpalhex · 5 years ago
Your local police department doesn't have any authority over namecheap. In scams, we do open a case file with them so that they can monitor problems, to create a verified paperwork trail and if issues such as stolen identity arise.
Namecheap does have a duty when they are informed with reasonable evidence to not be an accessory to a crime. Prior to being informed, Namecheap is in the clear. Once they're given clear evidence (and in my case it was blatantly obvious because it was a crappy scam) then they do have a duty to act.
It's the difference between Ford selling a car which happens to be used in a bank robbery, and Ford knowingly selling a fleet of armored vans after being told that their client is a known bank robber.
geocrasher · 5 years ago
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.
tommoor · 5 years ago
I had exactly the same experience recently with Namecheap too, I guess this is why the scammers use them.
MertsA · 5 years ago
As a counterpoint to that a few weeks ago I reported a Bitcoin giveaway scam site to Namecheap and it was NXDOMAIN later that day.
nolok · 5 years ago
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.
shiftpgdn · 5 years ago
Registrars already deal with abuse complaints (and have done so since the 90s.) GoDaddy, eNom and other large registrars are happy to suspend domains with proof of network abuse.
PhilosAccnting · 5 years ago
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?).
timdev2 · 5 years ago
> 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.
timcederman · 5 years ago
It's not a legal requirement for them (AFAIK) to make decisions on allowing someone to register a domain or not. They're a private business, so my argument is it's (probably) in their best interest to not upset their customers and partners. There are plenty of examples of limits on almost all registrars, and I was curious why they have such a hands-off stance on bulk registrations very clearly being used for illegal activities. Ted's answer gives me partial insight, but my takeaway is not enough damage, legal risk, or people complaining to say no to the money.
cyrialize · 5 years ago
A coworker of mine recommended you guys. The service is fantastic! Thank you so much.
WanderPanda · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
TobTobXX · 5 years ago
> 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?
ted0 · 5 years ago
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 ;)
loceng · 5 years ago
Consider my upvote that I'd be interested in buying .as domains on Namecheap.
lordnacho · 5 years ago
How about making sure you have all the countries? I think it was .it that I couldn't find.
ted0 · 5 years ago
We'd love that! Although, some are trickier to support than others.
supermatt · 5 years ago
.lt (lithuania) for me!
simonebrunozzi · 5 years ago
+1 for .it
iamben · 5 years ago
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!
DetroitThrow · 5 years ago
.ke anytime?
NoMoreBro · 5 years ago
+1 for .it
weddpros · 5 years ago
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
johnisgood · 5 years ago
Gandi is great. I, and a couple of my friends have been satisfied customers for years.
nemosaltat · 5 years ago
+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.
Mrtierne · 5 years ago
Was it an easy transfer from 1and1 to Namecheap?
nemosaltat · 5 years ago
Yes- although with 1and1 I hosting services and domain registration as a bundle. Now I point Namecheap at Vultr, DO and my bare metal rig.
usaphp · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Are you talking about verifying a domain (say for GSuite) with a TXT record? Unfortunately, there's no way to make this one-click since the TXT records provided are unique but we appreciate the feedback and will explore how we can make this use case more straightforward.
1123581321 · 5 years ago
Would you consider the ability to export a zone file? I realize you may be withholding it because it aids transferring it out, but we often wish we could do that instead of taking screenshots or manually copying each record before we make a major DNS change.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Certainly something we can look into.
1123581321 · 5 years ago
Thank you!
offmycloud · 5 years ago
Export a zone file? Namecheap can't even export a text or CSV file of all of my domains and their expiration dates. This is a long-standing open issue that Namecheap support has dodged several times with us. I'm still a customer right now, but I'm looking for another registrar.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Dodged? Just not currently a feature in our dashboard but it's straightforward and we know there's demand for it. We have some major updates in the works. Happy to manually provide an export for you in the meantime.
offmycloud · 5 years ago
Yes, I was offered a manual export of my domain list. By "dodged", I mean that the request for an export feature in the same ticket was ignored, sort of a passive-aggressive "wontfix". I would have just scraped the HTML table, but at the time it just didn't work in Firefox/Chrome, and there was a weird interaction between filtering and showing more than 25 domains on a page. This might be fixed now, but was very frustrating at the time. I felt like support ignored all of that and just offered a manual export, without understanding how much more time it takes for me to write up a ticket (and wait for response) vs implementing a proper export feature.
WarOnPrivacy · 5 years ago
> We have some major updates in the works.
Will one of those updates be the ability to export domains & expiration dates, from the dashboard?
If so, then say so; otherwise your response feels, well, dodgy. If not, why are you mentioning them in response to offmycloud's issue?
Past that, we appreciate your time here.
disclosure: I'm a 15 year Namecheap customer
joering2 · 5 years ago
Sadly I still have few domains with them, after disgrunted ex-employee claimed few domains via chat (knowing company details) and namecheap put our domains into 2 weeks suspension (loss of about $250,000 of revenue) until we finally get them back and it wasn't about providing some additional evidence of who's the real owner, it was more of a pushing hard thru chat to the point majority of their Eastern European-based only chat crew knew my company by name.
But I still get some weird error messages, empty red alert boxes that doesnt say anything, and general burps time to time when trying to navigate their GUI. At least GoDaddy GUI is much more intuitive but yet they try to sell more - an obvious goal of any for-profit company.
I eventually routed most of my domains to dynadot that has much more safe chat and is US based only. No Easter European have access to my names, contacts, credit card info etc - God only knows what they can do with that info knowing an average salary in countries like Ukraine is $200 per month.
Sometimes when I read these comments like "Namecheap is the best domain provider ever" I chuckle a little - every company has an outstanding record until you test them in times when rubber truly hits the road. 99% of domain users never had any issues because ownership of domain is pretty straightforward business. So these folks than never have a problem are the last one you should be listening to when you pick a domain provider.
Just my 2c.
Edit: I don't have a dog in this race, I don't work for any domain provider and my business is entirely unrelated so I have no business in badmouthing namecheap other than personally having crappy experience with them. But I am sure for every me there is 100 people who got no issues, so that's that.
tibu · 5 years ago
It is really sad that you had such a bad experience with their support but having such an option about a whole region of a continent just because the GDP is lower... Our salaries here in Europe's Eastern part are definitely lower than in Western Europe or in the US that definitely this does not mean we would steal to have more money. Honor is not related to how much money you earn...
vincentmarle · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Try http://instantdomainsearch.com/
(No affiliation, just a happy user)
judge2020 · 5 years ago
I'm more a fan of https://tld-list.com
davchana · 5 years ago
Fan of https://domcomp.com && https://tld-list.com checking in.
emmelaich · 5 years ago
Who is affiliated with it, if anyone?
beau · 5 years ago
I made Instant Domain Search.
gigmana · 5 years ago
I use this one too https://www.domainhamper.com/
ted0 · 5 years ago
Try our new Beast Mode tool for searching: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...
3131s · 5 years ago
I've been on Namecheap for 7-8 years and while I am satisfied, I have to say that Namecheap's search interface is unusably broken.
It's been so bad for a few years that I've actually wondered if it's a sign of decline at the company... if you want very specific complaints about the UI I am happy to elaborate.
Godel_unicode · 5 years ago
You want hover, best of both worlds. Amazing search experience, no misogynistic customer-hostile company (GoDaddy, not namecheap) behind it.
spicybright · 5 years ago
Misogynistic? How so?
icecap12 · 5 years ago
I guess you never saw the superbowl ads of years past.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Sure, your feedback is welcome. Thank you.
jeswin · 5 years ago
Feedback on beast mode: it's super slow with bulk keywords (100s). It makes a separate request per keyword, and gets stuck in a minute. You should be doing the splitting server-side.
ted0 · 5 years ago
It's usually quite fast. It's using web sockets so it's full duplex. You may have hit a rate limit. Rate limits (albeit generous) are in place to prevent abuse.
jeswin · 5 years ago
I think I had nearly 5k keywords. I know it's a lot, but the form/page specifically mentions that I can go up to 5000 keywords.
jamescampbell · 5 years ago
Beast mode has been great. I want a python cli for it and heaven.
rezonant · 5 years ago
https://domainr.com is a great way to search for domains super fast
august125 · 5 years ago
This is my go-to for workshopping potential domain names.
EricE · 5 years ago
Another very satisfied namecheap customer. It's so nice to not have to feel like you need to take a shower after visiting your DNS control panel.
johnisgood · 5 years ago
What do you mean by that? I use Gandi and I think their UI is excellent. Their "DNS control panel" is top notch, straight to the point, can do anything you want, easily. It is intuitive, no bullshit.
rendall · 5 years ago
I'm pretty sure the shower comment is a ding on GoDaddy.
I use Gandi too and am very satisfied
thearthtyagi · 5 years ago
I use Namecheap for domain registration and then Cloudflare for evrything else.
rkagerer · 5 years ago
Another long time Namecheap customer with good things to say. Only "complaint" is that discount codes are not more prolific :-).
santa_boy · 5 years ago
+1 ... I bought 3 domains last month and have no particular affinity for provider.
The Namecheap interface and usability was very pleasing. I actually searched first on Godaddy before settling for Namecheap on all the domains.
Not least, but I got a lower price on Namecheap on all of them and yeah much lesser cross selling attempt which is nice for the DIY types :-)
dheera · 5 years ago
Also a very satisfied Namecheap customer. I do wish I didn't have to click so many things to modify DNS records though. But just a minor issue.
GoDaddy doesn't even sound like a professional service to me. The name itself wreaks of technical incompetence. I want round-the-clock network infra experts managing my domains, not some random dude's daddy.
gabereiser · 5 years ago
and this is why Namecheap is awesome. Use them instead.
gervwyk · 5 years ago
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!
danellis · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
We do support .name now.
danellis · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Who is the owner of yyy.name, though? I'd say that's the registry itself.
kugelblitz · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
I understand that domains are just rented and not owned, but in common parlance it's usual to talk about owning a domain.
dingaling · 5 years ago
But you don't even own a domain
Whom do you pay for xxx.yyy.name?
danellis · 5 years ago
Like I said in my first post, I pay Gandi.
Look, you can register one yourself: https://imgur.com/tIESzRr
You're surely familiar with domains like foo.co.uk? You don't have to own co.uk to own or transfer foo.co.uk, even though it's the uk registry, not the co.uk registry.
jessaustin · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
BGZq7 · 5 years ago
They're not really subdomains. If you try to do a whois against e.g. smith.name you'll see it's not a registerable domain. Only the second level can be registered, xxxx.smith.name. Similarly if you had xxxx.co.uk, you own a domain because co.uk isn't registerable. The only quirk about .name is that common names can't be registered at the top level, but uncommon ones can.
danellis · 5 years ago
> it's not possible for Namecheap to rent you xxx.yyy.name
I'm sure they could if they wanted to. Gandi will happily do it for $15/year. I can only assume they've decided it's not worth their time to do so.
mratzloff · 5 years ago
Early on (nearly 20 years ago) it was possible to register a yyy.name by itself. For example, I own the domain for my last name.
ddingus · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Ok, the acquisition is good to know.
Steady as she goes right now, but I know where to go should things change.
icelancer · 5 years ago
Their moral policies in their TOS are... interesting.
firebird84 · 5 years ago
Can you elaborate?
icelancer · 5 years ago
Worth combing through this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
Algolia will have more.
exikyut · 5 years ago
Extremely curiously, the first comment for this article link is about... what do you know, Gandi possibly doing the same thing as the OP's experience, albeit less provably / over a longer time period.
brlewis · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
shadowprofile77 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
indigodaddy · 5 years ago
Strikes me as a bullshit practice though
ted0 · 5 years ago
Not our practice. Registry partners set our pricing and we try to give you the best price possible.
shadowprofile77 · 5 years ago
I still dislike the practice, but my apologies for the more curt earlier comment. My assumption was that the practice was indeed your own. I had maybe confounded registry with registrar. That said, in general terms, who would these registry partners be for unclaimed domains, who then set elevated "premium" prices?
dylz · 5 years ago
The underlying TLD holder.
Usually all dictionary words, domains below 3chars, domains below 4chars, etc.
indigodaddy · 5 years ago
Right, I meant on their part
sloshnmosh · 5 years ago
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?
ted0 · 5 years ago
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.
adam1210 · 5 years ago
Does the abuse team always reply to abuse reports? I've had one open since the 5th with no activity and I'm unsure if it is just being ignored.
selsta · 5 years ago
I have reported a large amount of phishing domains and never received a reply, they also never got taken down.
ted0 · 5 years ago
There is a backlog. Like I said, they're a very busy team and are quite thorough in their review. Feel free to ping @namecheap on Twitter with the ticket number and they may be able to help escalate, depending on the severity of the case.
__lazybyte · 5 years ago
Probably because they've got great service, I guess.
jjeaff · 5 years ago
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.
renewiltord · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
How can we win you back?!
renewiltord · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
drkstr · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Highly doubt this was intentional. We get pricing from the registry. What likely happened here is that the registry reclassified this as a premium and our support wrongly quoted the new tier to you even though it wasn't relevant since it was a renewal. Sorry you had this experience. It was likely an honest mistake.
boustrophedon · 5 years ago
The price was increased in my auto-renewal notice - I spoke with support after receiving the email.
doctoboggan · 5 years ago
Hi Ted, I've been a name cheap customer for something like 10 years, although recently I've been moving some of my domains to Cloudfare DNS. I am moving because they offer API access which lets Acme's certbot renew certificates automatically.
robotnikman · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
A decade! Thank you for that.
pdxandi · 5 years ago
Same here. Been on Namecheap for as long as I can remember with quite a few domains.
qxxx · 5 years ago
I used to use goDaddy like 15 years ago... than moved to namecheap. namecheap is so much better. I needed the godaddy support few times, it was always a terrible experience. And the UI was always bloated with unnecessary crap.
amingilani · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
<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).
ribalda · 5 years ago
Are you considering support .dk domains anytime soon?
ted0 · 5 years ago
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.
swalsh · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Might have been because of the Godaddy CEO killing elephants or something. I vaguely recall some drama about that.
zizee · 5 years ago
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-...
suyash · 5 years ago
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.
j2bax · 5 years ago
Hey Ted! Been my favorite registrar for over a decade. Just registered a genius domain that I thought of the other night !:)
ted0 · 5 years ago
We need to introduce some sort of "lifer" discount code for these decade+ customers! Thank you for your business!
glxxyz · 5 years ago
I switched to Namecheap what feels like pretty recently; 2007! ;)
j2bax · 5 years ago
I support this idea!!!
Tokkemon · 5 years ago
Namecheap is one of the best registrars ever. I am constantly transferring domains there because they're just so much better than the others.
joe33433 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
Buying a domain is not the same as hosting the DNS for that domain.
jlgaddis · 5 years ago
> 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).
xnyan · 5 years ago
This is a common misconception but not correct. Namecheap offers free DNS services with your registration and there’s nothing wrong with them, but due to my individual requirements, cost and perf considerations I have my domains registered with namecheap but the nameservers are hosted on cloudflare. It’s really easy to separate the two.
davchana · 5 years ago
Dns is like a big phone book with domain & its host server's ip address, all dns servers around the world routinely & frequently copy each other's changes & updates, but the additions & changes originate in TLD Owner's zone file, a master phone book for that TLD, & then it propagates to other world.
A registrar takes your money & coordinates with TLD owner to add your domain to the master phone book. In about x time, minutes to hours to few days, all servers over the world has your domain's dns information. Most of the time registrar's job is done, & now hosting provider as well as dns servers come in picture.
Now, when a user types your domain, his internet provider or dns address server looks up the relevant ip & or ask around. Closest/fastest/reliable records are then used. Your registrar usually do not control or operate these servers, but Google 8.8.4.4, Cloud flare 1.1.1.1, your ISP & such operate these.
The geographic closeness to hosting servers is preferred, but I think geographic closeness to register doesn't matter much.
sparkywolf · 5 years ago
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?
ted0 · 5 years ago
I guess my main point here is: if shit hits the fan and you lose access to your DNS, your domain is hijacked, or there is some other urgent catastrophic event, who would be easier to reach to remedy your issue? I'm a senior executive posting here offering up my email and as an industry veteran, I frankly do not even know who runs Google Domains. We're a bootstrapped founder-run company with a 20-year track record and even after all those years, we're still passionate about making customers happy.
iakov · 5 years ago
Every time I had to get in touch with support person at Namecheap I've had very good experience. No matter if I had a presales question or was asking for technical advice, there was a real person to talk to, via live chat or email.
I'm a very satisfied Namecheap customer :-)
lmarcos · 5 years ago
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?
OakNinja · 5 years ago
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!
ted0 · 5 years ago
Who else wants .se? ;) Upvote and I'll see what I can do.
softwarerero · 5 years ago
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.
commoner · 5 years ago
You might be using a VPN that is blocked by Namecheap. Try turning off the VPN and then logging in. If this is inconvenient, you can transfer the domain to a registrar that does not block VPNs. As far as I am aware, Namecheap is the only one that does.
docapotamus · 5 years ago
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.
suifbwish · 5 years ago
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
ted0 · 5 years ago
Command line is a great way to query whois. It actually doesn't even ever hit ICANN. The request goes straight to the whois server.
Freaken · 5 years ago
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.
social_quotient · 5 years ago
subscribed - Same issue here.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Yes, we have a concierge service. If you shoot me an email, I'll help kick off the process for you: ted [at] namecheap.com.
mintone · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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?
burnte · 5 years ago
I use Namecheap and I'm happy. However, this is known behavior from GoDaddy. You can't really say a lot because you're a competitor, but I can because I've seen them do it and many other shady things to customers.
rayalez · 5 years ago
I have switched to Namecheap from GoDaddy, and it's been great. I've been using Namecheap for a few years now, and never had an issue.
Just wanted to add my opinion to the thread and thank you guys for a very good service.
ryan-allen · 5 years ago
I've used namecheap for over a decade, very happy customer :)
IgorPartola · 5 years ago
That’s really good insight, thank you. I am curious why everything isn’t just tied into Whois since that is what I typically use to do quick lookups.
Also, will Namecheap ever add a second factor method that isn’t SMS? Security aside, logging in just feels clunky.
renata · 5 years ago
I'm using Google Authenticator. It looks like they also support U2F now: https://www.namecheap.com/security/2fa-two-factor-authentica....
ted0 · 5 years ago
That is correct. We support TOTP and U2F.
systematical · 5 years ago
Not affiliated with namecheap but I only use namecheap.
Jetroid · 5 years ago
I have used namecheap as my first and only registrar since I made my first website in 2013. Those free .me domains in the GitHub student pack paid off for you guys in my case.
Always had great service, including quick resolution when I tried to register .id shortly after they allowed international registration (and encountered a few speedbumps).
Thanks for the good work!
timmit · 5 years ago
I did transfer my names from GD to NC last month :) :) :)
davchana · 5 years ago
My experience with Namecheap, Dynadot, Godaddy, Hexonet is, in current times, I prefer Dynadot, then Namecheap, then Hexonet & never Godaddy.
I found Dynadot prices very competitive, Namecheap is not shoving ads but dns management is not easy, & is expensive. Hexonet offers way more tlds, have robust search, & retains domains in cart for months if you are not ready. Dynadot record manager is better. Hexonet is expensive.
Godaddy used to be my choice in around 2012-2016, but not any more.
Shameless plug, one of my total three blog posts is about my journey of Domains https://davinder.net/my-journey-with-domains/
ted0 · 5 years ago
We are good friends with the folks over at Dynadot!
m00x · 5 years ago
I found namecheap to be way cheaper in most cases.
I was gonna use google's new domain product since I'm a huge Google fanboy, but it ended up being 10x pricier in some cases and the interface isn't as powerful (maybe for the better, but ymmv).
davchana · 5 years ago
Out of maybe total 10-15 domains I own now, most are .com .net .in .us & a single .one. Com renewal at dynadot is 9, at Namecheap it is 13. transfers are same, around 9.
Net renewal is again $11/15 at Dyna/Namecheap. Transfers are same, $11.
.in renewals are $7/$12, transfers same $7.
I mostly prefers renewals because of inertia of moving nameservers and or other DNS records. I sometime transfer between namecheap and Dynadot. Most of my purchases are multi year.
*All prices rounded roughly to nearest dollar.
+1 for having same experience at Google, living in Google verse 24/7, but google.domains is expensive.
SethKinast · 5 years ago
I used NameCheap for around 10 years, until they bungled up an order I made.
I renewed a .com for an additional 9 years. When the order processed, it turns out domains can only be extended out to a maximum of 10 years, and this domain was still a few years away from expiry.
The order didn't go through and I wasn't charged.
The next day I got an email from NameCheap saying that they had manually charged me $80ish, renewed the domain for 3 years, and put the rest in the NameCheap wallet. None of which I asked for.
I went back and forth a couple times with support saying they would cancel my domain if I wanted the money refunded, when all I wanted was for this transaction I didn't ask for to be undone.
After they "made an exception" I transferred everything to PorkBun, which works just as nicely.
midasz · 5 years ago
So you made a mistake, namecheap made an exception because they understood mistakes happen, and then you moved to a different registrar... where you wouldn't make that mistake? Agree it's not a good look to let the customer think the order was failed and then it proceeding anyways, but I can think of a situation where it was a desired outcome - like you wanted to extend the domain and they moved to do that.
terrycody · 5 years ago
Namecheap is best for domain register, no need more discussion, and their support is the best.
Some drawbacks of NC are some support need sharpen their skills and response more quickly, but in overall, I am really happy with everything namecheap did, and would love advise anyone try it.
viraptor · 5 years ago
Can you tell us how does the potential reservation impact the availability? I started a checkout for a .com.au domain on namecheap. When I restarted it a day later, the domain was marked as unavailable. After contacting namecheap support, it turns out I could buy it after all.
To be honest, my initial reaction was "I've been godaddy'd" since the messages don't indicate anything different.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Unfortunately, .com.au is one of the very few TLDs where we don't have a direct relationship with the registry. This was likely the cause, since we have to rely on an another provider to sell these domains. Sorry about your experience though!
selsta · 5 years ago
Unrelated but I have reported phishing domains to Namecheap and they have completely ignored all abuse tickets for over a month now. How should I proceed here?
stevenjohns · 5 years ago
Exactly the same boat! Namecheap offshores all their abuse to their “legal” department - underpaid level one support in Eastern Europe.
Namecheap is abused to prop up the largest SMS phishing scam in Australia and they do not care to enforce their TOS to stop it.
ted0 · 5 years ago
See my post above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509104
This is a skilled in-house team that is working hard on these cases. We absolutely do enforce our ToS but we do not takedown domains without due diligence.
oedmarap · 5 years ago
I'm close to the 100 domain mark with Namecheap, and it's the registrar I use and recommend for both clients and myself. The UX, prices, and grace-periods are second to none.
ted0 · 5 years ago
100, nice! Have you inquired about special account pricing? Sometimes we offer this to big accounts with lots of domains.
stevenjohns · 5 years ago
Hi Ted! It’s good to hear you won’t be stealing domains. It would be even better to hear that Namecheap starts enforcing their TOS and doing something about your registrar being used for hundreds of thousands of SMS scams in Australia by the same botnet.
stanislavb · 5 years ago
Thanks for chiming in, Ted! Another happy customer here. Namecheap has been my registrar of choice, too, and I have slowly moved most of my domain names to it. I also believe that Namecheap is not involved in any shady practices.
In the light of this thread, I've shared my experience with domain names search and how to perform it securely without worrying that someone will grab your name https://stanbright.com/domain-name-search/
SpaceNugget · 5 years ago
I currently use namecheap. Ironically it's actually one of their biggest mistakes that convinced me to stay with them. When namecheap rolled out its custom 2fa authenticator app thing I started to look for alternatives but stuck it out long enough for them to switch to u2f and reading the 'we took the wrong turn' kind of explanation post they made was enough for me to have a bit of faith that they listen to their users AND act on it.
ted0 · 5 years ago
We definitely made a mistake here but glad to hear you're happy now. 2FA support has been a huge focus for us in the last couple years.
emmelaich · 5 years ago
I went to register.com to renew some domains I had, register.com reported them as expired!
And then I remembered I had transferred them to namecheap a year ago. You guys are the best.
windex · 5 years ago
Hi Ted, a query, I see godaddy registered domains being available on my O365's outlook custom domains for email, is it possible that namecheap would do something like that as well?
ted0 · 5 years ago
Not sure I fully understand. Can you elaborate? We don't currently sell O365.
windex · 5 years ago
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/setup/a...
platetone · 5 years ago
Moved all my domains and many of my friends' domains to namecheap a few years back. I'm always impressed by how quick and informed customer support is whenever I have an issue. Good job, guys.
ConcernedCoder · 5 years ago
It's not strange if it's their business to pre-register anything you might be remotely interested in, so that they can profit more when they "sell" it to you...
monkeywork · 5 years ago
Namecheap and Tucows/Hover/OpenSRS are the only folks I would trust with domain name registrations.
xmodem · 5 years ago
I recently bought a premium domain on Hover. A week later it was still showing a for-sale page and hadn't been transferred to my account. So I bought it again directly from the registrar that was advertising it, and I had control of it instantly.
A few days later I was contacted by Hover support saying they were unable to acquire it. I'm now in the process of transferring everything to Namecheap.
crx07 · 5 years ago
I can speak to GoDaddy's practices. This exact same thing happened to me. I've never searched another domain through them again.
commoner · 5 years ago
Namecheap blocks you from logging in if you are connected to some VPNs. Attempting to log in returns an error saying that the username/password is incorrect, and you won't be able to interact with Namecheap until you turn off the VPN. If you are using one of these VPNs, Namecheap is simply not a feasible option.
There are less expensive options than both GoDaddy and Namecheap that do not have any of these issues. The renewal rate for a .com domain is $17.99/year at GoDaddy, $8.88/year at Namecheap, $8.56/year at Porkbun, and $8.03/year at Cloudflare.
Namidairo · 5 years ago
A bit understandable from an anti-fraud point of view.
Seems a bit strange that someone would be willing to hand over their Name, Address and payment for a domain, but not willing to show up not behind a VPN.
commoner · 5 years ago
I am not aware of any other domain registrar that blocks VPNs, so the fact that Namecheap does is a drawback that is particular to Namecheap.
It's inconvenient to turn off a VPN just to use Namecheap. Although Namecheap already has my information, if I have more than one browser tab open and need to do something on another site while interacting with Namecheap, I would be exposed to an unprotected connection with not only Namecheap but also the other site. This is unacceptable considering that other registrars don't have anti-VPN restrictions.
dannyw · 5 years ago
It’s more intended to protect against hackers hacking your account.
rawoke083600 · 5 years ago
Yea namecheap USED to be my go to place for domain names, but too many times have your interface crap out on me. Or even some my DNS records reverted/lost their info. Like how do you "loose" my dns entries !? I now use porkbun.com - what a pleasure to use !
shiftpgdn · 5 years ago
Really? Because Namecheap recently lost one of my domains due to an API error on your side, resulting in SEDO picking it up. Namecheap has absolutely refused to help recover the domain even though it's 100% in your court.
ted0 · 5 years ago
Sedo is not a registrar. Do you mean that you tried to renew the domain via API and it failed, resulting the domain being deleted?
shiftpgdn · 5 years ago
No. I renewed through the normal Namecheap checkout process and the renewal failed somewhere inside Namecheap. I guess there isn't any sort of process to catch a successful order where the renewal date doesn't change.
As a result of Namecheap not doing their due diligence as a registrar my domain got deleted and picked up by SEDO.
sumgame · 5 years ago
Namecheap is awesome. I switched from godaddy's predatory practices to namecheap, couldn't be happier.
To be honest most providers suck. Another common scam these guys run is skinning you for renewals, its just messed up that sometimes i have to pay double to triple the price of buying the domain for renewals.
amitheonlyone · 5 years ago
The problem I have with Namecheap is that I can't make purchases with Indian debit cards while with Godaddy, Bank transfer, UPI and Indian Debit cards are accepted. I have a few domains which I really want to switch to another provider and checked out Namecheap twice but had payment issues. I even tried Paypal which didn't work either.
phynax · 5 years ago
Thats weird - I've been using PayPal for years with Namecheap Perhaps try loading your wallet first and then paying from your balance. (Not ideal i know, but it may work)
ted0 · 5 years ago
Not aware of this issue but I'll have the team look into it. Have you tried adding account funds? https://ap.www.namecheap.com/profile/billing/Topup
jagtesh · 5 years ago
I love namecheap. Been a satisfied customer for close to a decade. I have to thank Drew Houston for this.
Many many years ago, when YC was newish - I read a blog post featuring Drew. He registered the first Dropbox domain (getdropbox.com I think) on Namecheap. That's when I decided to give Namecheap a try, and I'm so glad I did.
Haven't been disappointed since. Thank you!
ted0 · 5 years ago
I actually didn't know that Drew had registered getdropbox.com with us! That's awesome. Thanks for being a customer.
tallanvor · 5 years ago
You need to fix your support for ipv4+ipv6 glue records. There's really no excuse for not letting me configure this via the web interface.
phynax · 5 years ago
+1 for Namecheap - I've been using you guys for many years and across multiple businesses - I don't even consider using another registrar anymore.
On the flip side, when I hear GoDaddy used in any sentence - The hairs on the back of my neck stand up :(
WarOnPrivacy · 5 years ago
I've been super happy with Namecheap's domain services. After 15 years, I've no plans to go anywhere else.
I've been less happy with Namecheap's abuse responses, unfortunately. I quit trying to report NC registered domains (or NC hosting), that were being used for clearly malicious activity.
ungerik · 5 years ago
I think it was within the last 2 years when I searched for domains on Namecheap. They were shown as registered and I was offered to buy them for a premium price. When I searched on another other provider, it was shown as available and I bought it there. Will never use Namecheap again.
python-3 · 5 years ago
Been using Namecheap for 2 years now. Love it.
Also Louis Rossman mentioned you in his latest video. That's what brought me here.
neycoda · 5 years ago
Frankly I think what GoDaddy does here should be illegal, because it causes an unethical inflation of prices and undercuts other domain searchers and registrars, causing them to need to compete on a price-gouging scheme. Maybe NameCheap should investigate a lawsuit or lobby Congress for some ethical practices here that don't cause artificial pricing and spending.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
Just so you know, this is a complete lie and total slander of GoDaddy. https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
momeunier · 5 years ago
Verisign is a well-oiled machine indeed. Remember this? https://www.cnet.com/news/suit-filed-over-verisign-domain-re...
jhoutromundo · 5 years ago
Another customer extremelly satisfied with Namecheap. Your "beast mode" has saved me countless times.
joshxyz · 5 years ago
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.
pgrote · 5 years ago
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.
aalbertson · 5 years ago
you know, this explains why I have lost a couple domains in the past. What a shady shitty thing to do.
skc · 5 years ago
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.
twox2 · 5 years ago
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.
tubularhells · 5 years ago
I wonder if I search for extremely offensive domain names, will GoDaddy register those too? Worth a try!
TaylorGood · 5 years ago
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.
WanderPanda · 5 years ago
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...
aleks5678 · 5 years ago
The godaddy search works while Namecheap is slow
secondbreakfast · 5 years ago
I tell everyone who will listen to use DNSimple. The best.
ckrailo · 5 years ago
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.
Wistar · 5 years ago
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.
gbourne · 5 years ago
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.
pluc · 5 years ago
Didn't we learn to stay away from GoDaddy after their SOPA stance?
SteveNuts · 5 years ago
Seems like something someone could definitely abuse... it would cost Godaddy more to register a bunch of junk domains.
minusSeven · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
bitxbit · 5 years ago
This should be illegal and they should get sued by the US govt.
donohoe · 5 years ago
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).
aasasd · 5 years ago
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.
ffhhj · 5 years ago
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.
svdr · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
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.
bitminer · 5 years ago
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.
andrewveitch · 5 years ago
I’m old enough that I always just typed ‘Whois’ at a Unix prompt.
erickf1 · 5 years ago
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.
bluedevil2k · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
It is not like you're sitting on morale high ground by squatting domains
bluedevil2k · 5 years ago
Who said I was squatting? You’re assuming I couldn’t put together a website with tutorials on Swift. It’s literally what I do all freakin day.
pembrook · 5 years ago
Chances are they literally had the same idea as you and just beat you at your own game.
It’s a certain kind of justice when a squatter gets squatted.
bluedevil2k · 5 years ago
Who said I was squatting? You’re assuming I couldn’t put together a website with tutorials on Swift. It’s literally what I do all freakin day.
gmays · 5 years ago
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 · 5 years ago
I'd recommend nobody use GoDaddy, ever.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070829115722/http://www.nodadd...
ddingus · 5 years ago
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.
TheRealSteel · 5 years ago
Interestingly, godaddysucks.com redirects to Godaddy.
ddingus · 5 years ago
Well, good for them.
driverdan · 5 years ago
If they are actually front running it's probably for single word dictionary domains. They're not going to register everything people search for.
ddingus · 5 years ago
Agreed. That and something catchy might be worth doing for them.
Still, it a lousy practice.
ErikAugust · 5 years ago
This happened to me... in 1998. Network Solutions. Never again.
homarp · 5 years ago
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
cairoshikobon · 5 years ago
First time I noticed this was in 2008. Over a decade later, they didn't change :/
lazyeye · 5 years ago
Use
for name searches (no affiliation)
daniellarusso · 5 years ago
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.
foofoo4u · 5 years ago
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.
thiht · 5 years ago
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.
jonplackett · 5 years ago
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.
reilly3000 · 5 years ago
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.
samaxe · 5 years ago
Hover has been great for me.
mcdevilkiller · 5 years ago
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).
altspace · 5 years ago
Yeah, faced something similar few years ago. Since then, switched to command line:
whois felons.io
ignaciogiri · 5 years ago
I had the exact same experience with Godaddy 10 years ago.
laurent92 · 5 years ago
One workaround for that is, search for domains no-one would ever use. They’ll register them, losing money.
Nextgrid · 5 years ago
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.
calenti · 5 years ago
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.
mrbeemo · 5 years ago
Where would you recommend searching?
pkid · 5 years ago
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!
Jedd · 5 years ago
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
tsycho · 5 years ago
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.
erikig · 5 years ago
This is perfectly devious and would only work if what the OP said is true. I love it.
goatherders · 5 years ago
.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 · 5 years ago
This is so much more believable than the idea that GoDaddy have chosen to perform front running.
cryptoz · 5 years ago
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.
ravenstine · 5 years ago
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.
burnte · 5 years ago
Honestly, they've been doing this for a decade or more. The good news is they usually only stay registered for a few days.
anonymfus · 5 years ago
If that is true, does that mean that we/somebody can make them spend significant amount of money by searching for random domains?
mesozoic · 5 years ago
Have some fun and search for millions of domains per day!
platesacrossusa · 5 years ago
GoDaddy has always been doing this. They used to do it by forwarding the search to a company that was just a cloaked subsidiary who would buy it and offer to resell it to you. I guess now this sort of unethical practice can be out in the open for all. Once upon a time you would have to be ashamed of this sort of business practice.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 5 years ago
This is why ICANN is a joke.
They proclaim themselves sui generis authority in charge of domain names, domain registries and domain name regsitrars on the internet (there is not and never was any legal basis for such "authority"), they turn domain names into a "business", they make up arbitrary rules that line their own pockets (initial gTLD application will cost $185,000), they allow registrars to do things like front-running, etc., etc.
Why things do not change: When a user gets screwed by front-running, the user calls for a boycott of GoDaddy instead of questioning the entire ICANN-administered system itself. The protection of ICANN's racket relies on security through obscurity.
Front-running is a very old practice amongst ICANN-approved domain name registrars.
timmit · 5 years ago
That is terrible.
I did get a very similar situation,
I searched one domain, and about a month later, when I searched again, it is registered.
I did not check how long the domain age was, but I felt so disappointed that time.
pschastain · 5 years ago
This is a topic that has come up before (i.e. HN thread from 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2326790), and while GoDaddy continues to deny this practice (https://www.godaddy.com/community/Domain-Aftermarket/Is-Goda...) I tend to think that where there's smoke there's fire. Too many instances over the years to not be at least a bit suspicious.
[edit] spelling
pilsetnieks · 5 years ago
I'm feeling old when I remember the original domain name frontrunning scandal in 2008 when Network Solutions was cought doing it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
Ever since I've been using whois in terminal for domain name lookups.
terrycody · 5 years ago
Without reading, I even know what you are going to say, yes, that shady tricks Godaddy already doing it for at least 10 years lol.
m3kw9 · 5 years ago
I figured they would do exactly that, had to be a combination of algorithm and human analysis to see if it’s worth it to front run searches. From your case it probably uses a dictionary of popular words as matches
bob1029 · 5 years ago
I just got done looking for a new domain and I told my team this exact thing (but in a more paranoid "anywhere on the internet" way).
If I find a domain candidate I think we might want and its available, I buy it as soon as humanly possible (I.e. Route53 tab on the other half of my monitor). ~$12 is not a big deal if we end up never using it. I'll just go through and uncheck the auto-renew option.
mahuani · 5 years ago
I've got all my stuff at Directnic. Never had an issue in the 15+ years that I've been doing business with them. I've searched for thousands of domains over the years and never had them mysteriously pick it up after a search.
rkagerer · 5 years ago
I've always wondered about the possibility of search tools sniping like this.
zakki · 5 years ago
I thought the same thing a few years ago. Since then I'll use dig or nslookup in my computer to check if a domain is available. I don't use Godaddy or similar service anymore for checking domain's availability.
didibus · 5 years ago
I've had good experience with hover.com which is a subsidiary of Tucows.
dryst · 5 years ago
Also, don't use a GitHub page as a test for a client. Set up a reasonable bootstrap page and suddenly the domain by the same name was bought up.
bgdkbtv · 5 years ago
I have had exactly the same thing happen to me, fucking GoDaddy so shady. Hate it. Never use it
ecabuk · 5 years ago
I have a similar story with Github. I filled the website field on the Github repo settings. The project was new and the end was not near and didn't register the domain. After a year or so decided to register but figured that the domain is already registered a month ago. I can't prove it but somebody in Github could have been checked website domains if it is already registered. (Or I was unlucky) The domain was never used and released after 2 years. The lesson here is: register your domain when you have a chance.
perplex · 5 years ago
I use Hover for the past 10 years. Clean UI with no ads or up sell. Free whois privacy is really nice. Only contacted support once and was positive experience.
realchucknorris · 5 years ago
good luck trying to move your domain out of godaddy. the amount of bullshit they throw at your face is ridiculous. disable domain lock >> oh can't because "enhanced privacy" is turned on >> disabled "enhanced privacy" >> oh we sent you an email click the link >> click the link >> oh can't you need to contact support >> contact support >> sent you a link >> ok now you can cancel "enhanced privacy" >> another link >> ok enhanced privacy is cancelled >> disable domain lock >> can't you need to wait few hours until enhanced privacy cancelling takes effect .....
initially i wanted to move 1 domain ... i ended up moving ALL my domains and my company domains .. and advised others to move their domains.
tomcooks · 5 years ago
Next time use porkbun, the only sensible choice
(not affiliated, just mindblown)
surds · 5 years ago
Been there, seen that.
Some good domain names I found were suddenly not available and were up for auction on GoDaddy.
After a couple of times, I have completely ditched them for search.
Namecheap is good. Also use Google Domains for checking now.
kirillzubovsky · 5 years ago
Just a quick plug for DNSimple. If you need a blazing fast tool to register domains, they’ve got it. Beats GoDaddy 1000x, no exaggeration.
I just did a quick interview with their founder, judge for yourself - https://www.raddadshow.com/episode/anthony-eden
They really run the company for the sake of providing the best service, even if that doesn’t make them the biggest or richest.
yalooze · 5 years ago
Equally, it’s a single English word, spelled correctly. It’s not unreasonable that someone else in the world purchased it in that time. And given GoDaddy has decent market presence it’s not unreasonable they purchased it through them.
VladimirGolovin · 5 years ago
Never search for full domain names anywhere. Find a service that can search for a substring in the domain name (e.g. https://www.namedroppers.com/), and search for substrings instead of the full name.
For example, if you want to see if DogHeaven.com is available, search for "ogheave".
CodinM · 5 years ago
+1 happened to me as well with GoDaddy.
dwg · 5 years ago
Felt this happened to me once before too. Could have been a coincidence but... since then try to be careful not to search on GoDaddy.
nottorp · 5 years ago
Always use the command line whois tool to check domains, never go through any registrar :)
Domain Name: FELONS.IO Registry Domain ID: D503300001186478247-LRMS Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com Registrar URL: http://www.godaddy.com Updated Date: 2020-09-16T21:06:29Z Creation Date: 2020-09-16T10:42:26Z
Yep, created 2 days ago.
ijafri · 5 years ago
Godaddy has been doing it for at least decade now, i just searched a domain i think 10 years ago that I in fact needed, however didn't want to use Godaddy for registration, anyway the only mistake I made was, i searched for its availability on their site, and it was available, then i went to namecheap to register it. (im from Pakistan no way affiliated with Namecheap anyhow) .. and to my surprise it got registered within i think 10 min, I was quite shocked, and then I tried to look for its whois and found Godadday had registered it, and I can swear, this was the last time i visited their website.
this godadday practice story keeps showing up every now and then everywhere reddit or HN etc.
Some people say it's great, they 'secure' your domain than hijacking.. blah blah. nonetheless it's a creepy behavior.. in the past such discussion i guess it only cost them few cents to register it for a month period etc.. not sure exactly, some peeps had suggested to make a bot to search tons of them.. but I think it doesn't cost them much... somehow....
dika46 · 5 years ago
GD is just overpriced. Since then I move away all my domains to local registrar. thanks.
indigodaddy · 5 years ago
Literally stunned that no one has mentioned Namesilo in this thread. Simple, cheap, been using them for years without any issues.
aaron695 · 5 years ago
How the fuck is this bullshit fake news still here.
It's just not true and is also pretty close to liable.
It's understandable OP mightn't understand domain front running and how Go Daddy will NOT be doing that.
But Go Daddy has addressed front running before and also this specific incident [π]
Is everyone here mentally ill?
No one able to even talk about how this might have come from a side channel so we all actually learn something rather than whatever this is?
[edit] And wow, the account claiming this, was created to post this. No other comments. Not even on this thread. We don't even know if they are 12 and also searched for the domain on another site but forgot. This is what we are basing this liable on?
[π] https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d... https://twitter.com/GoDaddy/status/1306731693710204928
zupreme · 5 years ago
I have experienced this too, more than once, and thought it was just me.
I found the explanation provided here by GoDaddy itself....inadequate at best.
https://www.godaddy.com/community/Domain-Aftermarket/Is-Goda...
python-3 · 5 years ago
Seen Louis Rossman talk about this thread in his latest video this morning. Wanted to chime in.
I have stopped using Godaddy for a while now because I had suspected that was happening. I wasn't 100% sure, but when I would spend hours looking for a domain name and searching through hundreds of names, I noticed a few of them with the least amount of characters and words they might consider more "premium" were taken. The few I noticed were some of the top choices I was considering using.
I do suspect they have some sort of algorithm where they take domains you might consider buying, but I can't prove it.
I've stopped searching on there for a while now and just stick with Namecheap. Never have any problems with Namecheap and their customer service was pretty good/fast when I got locked out of my account 1 time.
Now days I'm pretty paranoid about searching for domains on any domain site...
NoInkling · 5 years ago
Yup, I searched for a desired domain name on GoDaddy once. It was available at the time (at the standard price), but when I checked again the next day it was registered to some reseller and said I could buy it for ~$2000. I had to wait 2 years for that registration to expire.
techslave · 5 years ago
well known. only use domains.google (for searching).
neycoda · 5 years ago
True. Heard this story many times.
letstryagain2 · 5 years ago
Two registrars I like:
internet.bs inwx.net
gandi.net has a terrible interface. But free Email hosting included. If you need email hosting only, try swiss based infomaniak.com
aniix · 5 years ago
This happened to me on two occasions about two years ago, I can’t remember the domain names I was trying to register. In my case, the godaddy website I used was Godaddy.co.za (probably because I was based in South Africa). I thought it was a fluke or mistake from my side at the time, but seeing that others have experienced the same issue then I would say it’s a deliberate bad business practice by godaddy.
digital_voodoo · 5 years ago
Wow, I thought it was widely known.
I had this back in the days, or should I say back in the years, when I was still awake staying late at night to have a decent ADSL speed.
Searched a domain name for a project, it was free. Searched the day after, it wasn't. I was naive enough to think that other people had the same idea at the same time! When it happened the following days, I got it. And immediately told everyone around me.
jgowdy · 5 years ago
Just so you know, this is a complete lie and total slander of GoDaddy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-still-not-frontrunning-d...
The whois information is masked, because that's what we do to protect customer privacy.
https://domaininvesting.com/godaddy-whois-records-no-more-co...
It's registered to someone in New York, not to GoDaddy.
Registrant Organization: Registrant State/Province: New York Registrant Country: US
dunderinit · 5 years ago
I deleted my godaddy account a month ago, transferred my domains to namecheap. Better features.
troydavis · 5 years ago
Here’s GoDaddy’s response, which denies this occurred or has ever been their practice: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistere... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901)
aschatten · 5 years ago
This always has been one of my concerns when checking for a domain with a registrar.
dang · 5 years ago
There's a detailed response here: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/godaddy-felons-io-unregistere...
currently discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24523901.
gigmana · 5 years ago
You can use a tool like this one to search for domain name securely. https://www.domainhamper.com/