Godaddy.com

I call them, tell the situation, tell them I want the service canceled and I want a refund. Because I could not give them the last 4 of the card it had originally been charged with, they basically said they couldn’t help me. I was able to do more research and called my bank today. I asked if she could see the last 4 of the card the original transaction. It was ABCD. Funny thing, though, when I pull up the link for the receipt for the original transaction, the card is now ending in WXYZ. Impossible as this card did not exist at that point in time. I’ve disputed the charge, and am now trying to figure out my next steps. Bottom line, no scruples and not above committing bank fraud to get money.

Three weeks into this fight, my marketing plan is trashed and my work samples are gone. My project is also late at this point. Of course, I've been encouraged to "hire a broker" from, you guessed it - Godaddy themselves - to try and purchase my OWN DOMAIN back for a low price of $69.99 plus 20% commission, in addition to the purchase price they "negotiate." But that'll be one, cold day...

The final kick in the teeth is the fact that the domain is still "parked" at Godaddy, but the "account recovery team" does nothing but send the same form response email to me EVERY TIME I give them additional documentation. NO human contact. NO explanation. Upon further investigation, I see that this has happened to NUMEROUS other customers--Godaddy is happy to help when domains are transferred out, but not when they're directly benefiting financially. BEWARE: Godaddy supports online mob behavior, they're doing their part to put small businesses out of business, and I'll never buy from them again.

As I attempted to transfer domains, some would work, some wouldn't. The error? A vague "There was an error processing your request. Please try again. If the error continues contact support at (02) **.". I verified that everything on my side was fine. After trying to work around calling the number, which is always a massive delay, I figured it was time to make the call. Investigating into the actual error from the server (not just the frontend), it confirmed the issue was on their end. A 500 "Internal Server Error" performing a standard task on their site. It's probably a great (for them) business strategy, as not answering the phone and not allowing transfers of domains out, the user is forced to pay the higher price.

After 70 minutes on hold, listening to the same basic 4 chord tune every minute or so, I was beginning to wonder why I would have ever paid a premium price for domains has I known the support was so below zero. First of all, I'm only calling them because the website is so poor that it is unable to provide an error message of any substance that I can use to solve the problem myself.

Eventually getting through, the level one support rep had to keep putting me on hold - my request was far beyond the "my password doesn't work" requests typically assigned to 1st level. GoDaddy tech support told the rep to ask me to email them at an internal only email address. I didn't know this until the email bounced stating as such, but what kind of support department does that? By now, my frustrations are at 100/10.

After 4 hours in total, I'm still at the mercy of GoDaddy support. Will they call back as promised? My expectations are low. What would I do differently next time? I would find another provider - their domains are easy to buy, but good luck trying to transfer them out. There are many other providers for domains, my choice was CloudFlare and Google domains. GoDaddy will waste your money and worst of all your time, if you ever get a response from support.

EDIT: I wasn't called back as promised by the support person. Their site is still producing errors and my domain issues remain. 11/04/23: GoDaddy reached out in response to a review, their support on the other hand didn't call back when they promised they would the following day. It has been over a month now and while my domains have transferred out. I received an email about auto-renewal for a domain that I had turned auto-renewal off, because it costs 10x more than any other registrar. I used the chat feature as it was late, I figured I would get better support. How wrong I was. Not only was the issue not resolved, the person wasn't capable of understanding that I wanted to ensure the domain would not be charged. After wasting another two hours with this person, I decided to continue the original email chain. No response after a full week of silence.

I called the GoDaddy customer service number, Patrick and Susie from the customer service team answered my call after I was held on the line for 1 hour, she told me she doesn't know what those risk factors are when I asked about the risk factors in Sasha's email, we asked Susie who is the right person we should talk to and will help us with this issue, she said NOBODY, she couldn't help in any ways. It is such a shock to know that GoDaddy illegally possesses our fund for no legitimate reasons and their customer service is horrible and don't help solve any problems. I will keep posting the updates publicly on how this incident goes and how they respond to me. Sharing my experience to let more people know how GoDaddy explain why they illegally possess the fund from sales for no reason.

In the past month, I have spent a total of 9 hours on the phone with GoDaddy, and at least 5 hours on chat. On the phone, there was an actual dialog with a real person for at most an hour total, chat (which seems to be a little better as far as wait times go) at most an hour, which that time was spent waiting for them to "review or research". Only one time during those 4 phone calls and 2 chats, did I actually get a resolve, which were for trivial issues to be honest. Nothing that you would have to dig deep into your "Knowledgebase" for.

For ANY and ALL future (and previous) Domains, Hosting, Website Designs, ETC, I will be using another company, and have already started the process thus far. Let's hope I am able to not only save money for my extremely small business and Ranch, but also continue with Great Customer Support and Service, that I once had with GoDaddy. I wish them the best, Kind Of...

When I signed up with GoDaddy many years ago, I was told email came with the domain - free. That was taken away but was changed to something we were told would be much more secure and better. We were then forced to move to Microsoft 365 for a charge, of course. A year later, email stopped working without an explanation other than receiving error notices asking for passwords. After checking further, I was informed I must pay $368.28 to get it working again! The bill showed a list of 11 items. Each only stated: "1 Email Essentials Basic - Renewal - 1 year at $33.48." No other detail was given as to what email address it applied to so there was no way to determine whether it was correct, needed, an error, etc. A gun was to my head so I had to pay the total.

I then spent almost two hours on the phone, first to get past their fake humanoid AI Assistant and waiting on hold for over an hour before speaking with a live person in the Philippines. He dug deeper to discover that I was charged six times for emails that I was not using. These were set up by a GoDaddy tech previously. I would not have learned this had I not pushed for that information. I wonder how many others did not find out. I do not begrudge the techs in countries like the Philippines. They do their best. They are hired because they need less to survive so will work for less resulting in higher profits for corporate. This is a race to exploit the less fortunate in order to raise the bar of earnings for the most wealthy. This has become the American way - creating a greater distance between the poor and regular workers and the very wealthy who require constant feeding of riches.

I am not surprised to see at ConsumerAffairs that the majority of GoDaddy complaints now appear to be rated at 1 Star. I will soon be one of them. And, to add more pain, I am told that I must now pay almost $600 per year for website security! I feel the pain and now know, GoDaddy is the wrong place to be. I have clients who receive much more as part of their hosting package elsewhere. Unfortunately, those will likely change as well as greed becomes the greased rail to increase wealth of the newly revised American Dream.