I had an interesting and informative experience with GoDaddy today.
GoDaddy typically will offer you the a first year free privacy service with Domains By Proxy, on new domain name registrations. Then on the second year, when you go to renew your domain name with GoDaddy, you are locked in to purchase the privacy feature at about $10, with no way to disable this privacy purchase, and no explanation.
After research I learned that you have to log into their DomainsByProxy company and cancel this feature with them. Accept that you have to log in with a different user name account than what you used with GoDaddy, BUT with the same password you use with GoDaddy. So if you didn’t save the emails you received from DomainsByProxy when they first created an account for you, and still know your user name, you will have some trouble to get that user name to log in and cancel.
Once you cancel the “Private Domain Registration” with DomainsByProxy, it does not update and cancel on GoDaddy right away, it takes time, or so I thought. I had to call GoDaddy to see why it wasn’t cancelled. I explained to the GoDaddy sales rep that I had already cancelled the privacy feature on their company known as DomainsByProxy, explained the situation, asked she why it wasn’t removed. She seemed surprised I had made it that far in the privacy cancellation, in fact she specifically asked if I had actually logged into DomainsByProxy and done so. It didn’t take her long to tell me what was wrong, in fact it was incredibly fast, yet she claimed to want to make a mental note so she could help any other customer that might have the same problem, like I was the first to experience this.
It turns out that it remains locked on those accounts if you were in the process of placing an order with those domains in the Cart. So you or GoDaddy have to empty the cart (logging out will not help) and then they supposedly won’t force the purchase of the privacy feature. But then the GoDaddy person on the phone politely insisted on helping out and doing up the order for me for convenience, claiming she added the best discount available, which ended up being $2. My purchase was well over $100. So I pointed out the best discount might be the email they last sent out for 25% off, which ended up being more than $2, and she acted all surprised and happy for me, like she had never seen such a large discount for GoDaddy before.
So is this poorly thought out by GoDaddy, or incredibly clever? How many people would give up and simply pay the $10 per domain and be done with the hassle? I think most people would not go to the trouble I did.
