Don’t.
To either.
I foolishly signed up to GoDaddy for an offer of cheap hosting and moved my domains over to them to take advantage of it. They’re mostly vanity sites with no real purpose (as of yet), but I also had my business domain there too.
I used one of my vanity domains one time in a hacking demo at a company I worked earlier in the year and since I hadn’t paid for the privacy service, one of my co-workers (oldmanpete) looked me up and said hurtful about the kitchen tiles in the house I was selling.
Fair enough, buy privacy. So I did.
And everything was okay until I decided to migrate away to a proper registrar and stop using the soon-to-be-massively-expensive hosting that I didn’t really need.
As part of the process of migrating I had to remove the privacy. Sensible. Without removing it, the domain transfer couldn’t be initiated from GoDaddy’s end.
So I removed it, following their process, and waited. The transfer initially failed since it was a Nominet-registered domain and the transfer process requires that GoDaddy update the IPS Tag to allow it to move. This was my first GoDaddy Experience™ — it took about 20 minutes to convince them that they had to do this, all the while being spoken to like an idiot.
So they updated the IPS Tag and the domain transfer started. And then it failed. And then everything went titsup.
As part of the transfer process the new registrar needs to send out the Form of Authorisation (FOA) email to the registered address. Despite having removed the privacy, when the domain transferred the DomainsByProxy email address was still on the whois record.
When the new registrar emailed the FOA to the privacy service email address despite it supposedly being there to forward emails on to me, it just blackholed the email. Which meant that I couldn’t authorise the domain transfer.
My second GoDaddy Experience™ followed. The first 10 minutes of this call were spent trying to convince them that I was in-fact a customer of theirs at all. They were practically at the point of a petulent 7 year old and screaming “I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT AN INTERNET IS” when I out-logiced them and explained that since they’d identified and authenticated me that I must be a customer after all. And then he looked into the problem for me and agreed that I did exist.
GoDaddy insisted that they couldn’t do anything, and despite it being their balls up by not properly removing the privacy information, they basically didn’t care. Even though DomainsByProxy is a service I paid cash-money for, there was apparently no associated service or recourse for bellendery attached.
Apparently the new registrar needs to update the information.
Then the email and phone call tennis begins.
The new registrar said that it needs the FOA to complete, and that GoDaddy needs to update the registration information.
GoDaddy insists that they can’t and that it’s not the registrar any more — it’s actually me that needs to update the information. How? Well I have to log in to Nominet to do it.
So I log in to Nominet aaaaand, no domain.
I speak to Nominet (who were incredibly helpful) and they explained the situation to me and told me that GoDaddy need to update the information via their Nominet portal.
GoDaddy tell me they don’t have a Nominet portal. I insist and they eventually accept that they actually do but then said that they don’t do that so it sucks to be me.
I need to talk to the new registrar.
They tell me that the transfer hasn’t come across to them so they can’t update it and that I need to talk to GoDaddy again.
I decide to see if Nominet have any other options for me. Again they’re amazingly helpful, but explain very clearly that it’s with GoDaddy to fix this.
GoDaddy again. Nope. They suggest that I arrange a conference call with Nominet so that it can be sorted.
Nominet again. Sorry no, it’s nothing they can fix, and since my GoDaddy Experience is getting ludicrous they suggest that I just ask my new registrar to update the information at their end to avoid having to speak with GoDaddy ever again.
So I explain my final situation and Nominet’s proposed to solution to the new registrar and throw myself on their mercy.
Within a few hours, I have my domain back and am an ex-GoDaddy customer.
tl;dr
1. GoDaddy’s privacy service doesn’t forward emails, it blackholes them. Don’t use it.
2. When GoDaddy’s processes fail this is YOUR fault.
3. GoDaddy’s first line support team are, by and large, a bunch of arrogant morons whose sole purpose seems to be to convince you that you’re the problem.
4. Nominet are ace.
5. My kitchen tiles were red and green and ugly.
6. Don’t use GoDaddy.
