No, it was not.

We contacted GoDaddy last week to ask for a clarification, and over the weekend they responded with the following explanation:

We appreciate you bringing this matter and the customer's concerns to our attention. Go Daddy does provide customer support for not only its own customer base but for Go Daddy's many sister companies as well. One sister company for which Go Daddy does provide customer support for is Wild West Domains, which has many resellers and reseller customers. In order to prevent confusion or frustration, we do keep the answers vauge to not induce conflict with our resellers and their customers.

Please know, Go Daddy does not outsource its Office of the President staff or any other position. This topic has even been addressed by Go Daddy's CEO, Mr. Bob Parsons, at BobParsons.me stating that we do not outsource a single job (article found at link below).

It's true, Parsons states explicitly on one of his blog posts that he's not a fan of outsourcing and doesn't practice it:

GoDaddy.com doesn't outsource a single job.
Wayne liked the fact that GoDaddy.com is first and foremost an American company. With one minor exception, GoDaddy develops all of the technology it provides its customers right here in America by Americans. We don't out-source a single job overseas, and all of our over one thousand customer service representatives are located right here in the USA – all in Arizona, in fact.

So there you have it—GoDaddy doesn't oursource overseas, and their "Office of the President" is a rather nebulous catch-all group that supports GoDaddy and its other companies and resellers. That explains why Cyberguy couldn't get the CSR to give him a straight answer.

It doesn't explain why the CSR wasn't empowered to provide more help to Cyberguy, but that's a separate—and sadly, not unique—problem.

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"Web Host Outsources Their 'Office Of The President'?"

The massive data splurge was apparently caused by a third-party backup module Adam installed alongside the widely-used open source website management software Drupal. Like a cancerous tumor, the custom module was unstoppably copying thousands of temporary files into Adam's account. GoDaddy agreed to slash Adam's bill to $969, supposedly the maximum discount they could offer under special circumstances, but because of the bug, they explained, Adam was going to get a bill next month for another $6,579.

Adam considered canceling his account and eating his prepaid hosting fees. GoDaddy claimed that they wouldn't send the matter to collections, but refused to put the guarantee in writing.

Adam started chronicling his issue on the Huffington Post, drawing the attention of GoDaddy's President. He directed his executive team to wipe out the $969 charge, and promised to kill any additional obscene bills that might pop up.

While GoDaddy's second resolution was the only action that made sense this week, will its billing system pour salt on the wound a month from now? What caused the influx of data in the first place? Was the refund a result of the Huffington Post blog or would it have come without it? Most important, will GoDaddy listen up, learn and install processes to prevent this situation and others like it in the future?

I'm on the fence whether I'll be around to see GoDaddy through to my 2010 hosting renewal date. On Thursday, I said it wasn't a pleasure to meet you, Bob, and I'm sure you can understand why. Now that it's Friday, we've somewhat kissed and made up. Consumers deserve and demand more, Bob, and it'll take you and your machine time to earn back my trust and your credibility.

In the meantime, I know one lesson for sure: If you're in the right and you've been wronged, people hear you so long as you're loud enough.

As a result of Adam's experience, GoDaddy may now warn customers when their accounts are set to exceed their allowances, a basic precaution you'd think any responsible web host would have already implemented.

Adam's story reaffirms one of our core strategies: when reasoning fails, get the attention of the executive office and watch your previously intransigent problem melt into a surprisingly satisfactory resolution.

Update: Drupal offered an explanation for the surprising data use:

The user, Adam Fendelman, installed a third party contributed back-up module, and set it do infinite back-ups, a reasonable default for people who don't want to lose their data. The configuration of GoDaddy hosting server timed out the backup process, so back-ups were never completed and the temporarily created back-up files were not cleaned up. This led the failed back-ups to exceed the disk server limits.

Why I Don't Owe GoDaddy $6,579.51 (or $969) [Huffington Post]
Why GoDaddy Refunded My $969 (and Will Be Making 'Significant Changes') [Huffington Post]
*Urgent!* Drupal creating thousands of 75-meg temp files! [Drupal]

Mr. [redacted]:

The situation with the Web site RateMyCop was absolutely NOT about censorship in ANY way.

The site's operator has publicly disclosed the concerns were over bandwidth. More accurately, Go Daddy's concerns were about how the RateMyCop site was far exceeding the amount of server usage for which it had contracted.

This customer paid for a shared server plan. The connections to his site were six times more than an entire 'shared server' accommodates. While he was paying for a service that cost $14.99 a month, his site actually required a much more extensive set-up.

Basically, he was paying for compact car, when he really needed a semi-truck.

The customer was not willing to work with our staff to resolve the issue.

While the "censorship" allegations certainly make for an edgy "story," they simply had nothing to do with this situation.

- Go Daddy
Office of the President

(Thanks to Mike!)

"Go Daddy Shuts Down RateMyCop Watchdog Site"
"GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com" [Wired]

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RateMyCop.com

One Consumerist reader sent Go Daddy the following letter this morning to voice his concerns that the company might be selectively censoring content (which certainly is within Go Daddy's right, but might turn off some customers):

I am writing to express my concern over Go Daddy's recent action in taking down the "RateMyCop.com" site hosted for one of your customers. Recent media attention has raised some controversy and your action was to suspend the site and post an "oops" page asking for the site's owner to contact you.

While I'm not necessarily a fan of "RateMyCop" or its message, the content of this site did not violate any laws, nor did it violate any normal standards of decency. That Go Daddy would censor this site, without warning or consultation to the site's owner, is deeply troubling to me.

I have been a Go Daddy customer for many years, and recently went through significant steps to transfer the last of my domains from previous registrars/hosts to consolidate under Go Daddy. I am now seriously considering taking my business elsewhere.

My domains are "hobby" websites, which I'm sure makes them very profitable for Go Daddy because I pay for Premium level services but place very little load on your systems, in that traffic is steady but not massive. I pay for this type of hosting so that I have absolute control over the content and presentation of my domains, free from advertising, bias, or other restrictions.

If Go Daddy is going to insist that constitutional protections extending to publications on other media do not apply when published on Go Daddy's servers, then I'm afraid I will feel the need to publish my speech elsewhere. And I promise to do so in as noisy and spectacular a manner as possible.

I look forward to hearing your response, and furthermore hope that you will reconsider your policies regarding censoring the content of the sites you are paid to publish.

"GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com" [Wired]

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RateMyCop.com

The only merchant in common on the two cards? GoDaddy.

Don't merchants have an obligation to tell their customers about their failure to secure the account information their customers have entrusted them with?

(Photo: danesparza)

UPDATE: In the comments, GoDaddy says there was no breach.

My name is LaTrisha and I work in the GoDaddy.com Fraud Detection Unit. We noticed your posting and immediately reviewed our records. We found no breach on our end. As you might guess, we can not comment on other merchants' situations but can assure you the problem was not with the customer's GoDaddy.com account.

The owner of FamilyAlbum.com had an invalid email address in their domain name info registered with GoDaddy. A third party complained to GoDaddy. The company sent an email to the invalid email address informing the owner that he needed to update his email address. Under the bylaws of ICANN, which oversees and administers domain names, all WHOIS info must be accurate.

Unsurprisingly, the owner never got it. 8 weeks later, GoDaddy yanked FamilyAlbum.com and sold it to someone else who backordered the domain.

After getting exposed, GoDaddy said they're going to try to get the domain back for the original owner.

Whether or not the backorderer is the same person as the third-party complainant will make the difference between technical snafu and outright scandal.

GoDaddy needs to revise its policy. It makes no sense for GoDaddy to use contact information it know is incorrect to communicate with a customer to tell them they need to correct their contact information. — BEN POPKEN

GoDaddy Deletes Domain Name for Inaccurate Email Address[Domain Name Wire]
GoDaddy Responds to Deletion Over Invalid Email Address [Domain Name Wire] (Thanks to Abe!)

The screenshot above is what happened when the guys over at the Idea Grove "accidentally" tried to register ho.com. It was taken. But GoDaddy wasn't without some colorful alternatives! In particular, the system seems fascinated with the term 'ho bag'. As are we!

A couple years ago, when I registered my now defunct through exhaustion blog which happens to have the word 'pimp' conspicuously in the URL, one of the suggested URLs GoDaddy handed back to me was 'PIMPBABIES.COM'. I was confused: were the babies the pimps, or were they merely the tricks? I almost registered it because the former reading was pretty hysterical, but then started fearing government agencies might parse it as the latter.

What GoDaddy Recommends When You Accidentally Check for the Availability of Ho.com [Media Orchard]

Scott got his domains through RegisterFly.com and, "quickly found out just how much they suck (DNS servers often going down, abysmal customer service, account info "magically" changing all by itself, exceptionally slow response to 'help' emails, to name just a few)."

He's since transferred all his domains to GoDaddy. But now he has $20 in his RegisterFly account that they refuse to refund him. They claim he was in TOS at the time. Scott says he can't remember. Rather than take the company to small claims court, he's using those leftover dollars to poison RegisterFly on its own bile.

He tried to register RegisterFlysucks.com but it's already taken, by RegisterFly. He's come up with a few variations: RegisterFly-Sucks.com, RegisterFlyBlows.com, RegisterFlyIsBullshit.com, RegisterFlyHatesYou.com, RegisterFlySwatter.com, RegisterFlyTraps.com. Scott requests your help in thinking up others

This all seems rather petty. If Scott wanted to be a model consumer, he would take them to small claims court. However, if he was an even better consumer, he wouldn't have gone with RegisterFly in the first place. Do not find your piss-ant domain register through Google Ads. They are .0001 a dozen (see VistaPages). We would like to sympathize with Scott but he's broken the first rule of good consumerism: being an informed buyer.

Most egregiously, RegisterFly isn't even cheaper. Currently their domains are $9.99, a dollar and four cents more than Godaddy.

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