While trying to renew a few domain names recently, I found that cancelling the Privacy service that GoDaddy offers (via Domains By Proxy) is much more difficult than I had expected. The $8.99/year service conceals your name, address, and phone number from the public WHOIS listing.
Being concerned about privacy as most people are (or at least should be) it seemed a reasonable option but when multiplied by quite a few domains, it gets rather expensive. So during this last round of renewals I decided to cancel the service; figuring it would be no harder than removing the item from the shopping cart. To my surprise, it wasn’t nearly so easy.
Turns out that you have to sign into the DomainsByProxy web site with a Customer ID and password to cancel the service; so I tried the obvious and used my GoDaddy ID and password, though no such luck. I searched my email archives and didn’t find a single email from DomainsByProxy, at this point I was pretty sure whatever email address they had on file wasn’t valid, which is bad news for me. While there is an option to recover your customer ID, if their records aren’t accurate then it’s of no real use.
But there is hope.
It took a fair bit of reading and testing, but I finally found a method to get to your account IDs, and it’s fairly simple:
- Go to the Private Registration Page on GoDaddy’s site (make sure you’re logged in to your GoDaddy account)
- Type in some random characters into the search box
- On the results page, click “Continue to Registration”
- Click “No Thanks” on the ad page
- Scroll down to the section labeled “3. Select Your Domains By Proxy® Account“
You should now see your customer IDs for the DomainsByProxy web site. The web site only shows the first four account IDs, if you have more than that you can contact DomainsByProxy and have them merge the account IDs you know. Just continue the process until you have all of your accounts merged into one.
Unless you’ve changed your password on the DomainsByProxy web site, your GoDaddy password should work. From there, you can update your information – or like me, cancel the service completely. Now you are free to renew the domain without paying the extra annual fee or transfer to another registrar.
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Wow. Working with GoDaddy is as enjoyable as pulling teeth. I found myself stuck in the exact same situation as you. Not sure how you came to find that user ID (that they magically hide from the user itself) but thank goodness you did. I was about to strangle someone.
Thank you times 100 for posting this!
THANK YOU! You wouldn’t believe the amount of crap I had to do to find the customer number for one of the (various) Domain by Proxy accounts. This totally got me where I needed to go.
[...] Thanks to Adam Caudill [...]
You just saved me so much trouble. Had 4 domains I am attempting to transfer and Domains by Proxy wants you to email/fax identification to retrieve your customer number. Bye Bye GoDaddy!