In the domains I bought with GoDaddy.com, ‘auto-renew’ billing is ON by default. I turn that off for some domains whose projects may still be pending or don’t push through.
Recently however they’ve removed the easier to understand auto renew ON or OFF with ‘Cancel Renewal’, which can obviously mislead people into believing they might be cancelling the domain altogether. In fact the resulting message ‘Sorry this didn’t work out for you’ reinforces that, especially if you don’t read the date in the smaller print.
Of course you can always say ‘you weren’t misled you just didn’t read it through’ but why did they change it to this from the far easier to understand Auto – Renew On/Off switch?
This is just one example. Another is when you try to use your own DNS servers instead of their default hosting. Their interface puts up large yellow warnings saying that you might ‘lose your website’ or something to that effect during the process. Yes of course that MAY happen but it is just as likely you know what you’re doing especially since you’re deep in their admin area already fiddling around with DNS.
These weren’t the case just a few months ago. Obviously they’ve been put there to scare people with less experience to stay with their service.I’m a Godaddy reseller with a lot of client accounts. I like their support (with offices somewhere in Filinvest) and sure I understand they have to make a buck, but deceptive business practices make me cringe. Like many resellers I’m also a reseller for other brands, in my case NSI.com and Tucows.com. It will only take a day to migrate all of them without any of them the wiser. Godaddy needs to stop doing cringey stuff.
