In December 2002 I made my first purchase from GoDaddy, since then I’ve spent $1,200 with them. Over the years I’ve seen them grow up to be a major force both in the registration and web hosting markets; I’ve also seen them go from lean and efficient to annoying and unfriendly.
Once upon a time GoDaddy had the best prices and the best search of any registrar; unfortunately things often change, and not always for the best. As time went on they added more products and adopted a very “in your face” style of marketing. For years I’ve dismissed the aggressive marketing as the cost of the low prices, but times have changed.
The aggressive marketing style, incredibly difficult to cancel subscriptions, feature lock in, and many other annoyances and issues. And why do I put up with this? It’s not the low prices, as for many things my current hosting company is far cheaper. I’m no longer locked, it’s not that. Loyalty? That it, well, that was it.
After 7 years, and $1,200 – I’ve started moving my domains over to my hosting company; and so far I couldn’t be happier. No aggressive marketing, good service, and they don’t nickel and dime me to death.
Loyalty can be a good thing, but how much is loyalty costing you? Is it worth it?
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.
