Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

It finally happened: the legendary Bob Parsons will no longer be in charge of the company he founded, GoDaddy.com

Not many seem to like GoDaddy for practices of the past. And yet, the biggest domain registrar in the world with 40 million domains seems to have found the Holy Grail of domaining: controversy.

When it wasn’t about the buxom GoDaddy Girls that had “wardrobe malfunctions” in Super Bowl commercials, Bob himself would make sure the attention drawn to his persona and GoDaddy remained constant.

The scandal of Bob Parsons taking aim at and killing an elephant in Africa only temporarily hurt the GoDaddy image, primarily after PETA – an association that holds its own record of controversial marketing – complained about the incident.

I can understand Mike’s sentiments over at DomainConsultant. It’s not easy to swallow a bigger than life icon and his assorted antics. The fact is, that Bob Parsons stood up during rough times by utilizing a shrewd amount of innovation, timed marketing and – why not – pure luck.

The end result of all these years of Bob Parsons’ personal involvement with the domain industry is of course pay day. The $2.25 billion sale of GoDaddy – half of which is incurred debt – signifies that aiming large is the way to success.

It’s the all-American, capitalist way. Happy Independence Day, America.

It’s important to state that GoDaddy was my primary domain registrar after I broke the chains of Network Solutions in 2000.

Positive things arise from competition, all while monopolies bring down entire industries. Throughout my early active use of GoDaddy – and prior to discovering Stargate around 2002 – I witnessed my domain portfolio climb into three digits.

While at GoDaddy I also had my first ever domain sale and it was there that I transferred my sole hijacked domain after it was temporarily stolen while at Network Solutions. In addition to that, I helped GoDaddy squash a serious security bug and also witnessed the GoDaddy appreciation of humor two years ago.

In other words, just because I don’t use GoDaddy anymore doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the past; business decisions are sometimes quite simple.

However, GoDaddy has annoyed the heck out of me for the past 30 days. How so?

A month ago I received an email asking me to authorize transfer to GoDaddy of an important domain that I own – which sits safely at Fabulous.  The email read in part:

Dear GoDaddy.com, Inc. Customer,

GoDaddy.com, Inc. received a request on 12/20/2010 for us to become the new registrar of record.

You have received this message because you are listed as the Registered Name Holder or Administrative contact for this domain name in the WHOIS database. If you are not the Account Holder, or you are transferring the domain to a new owner, please forward this email to the appropriate Account Holder so that they may complete the transfer process.

It then provided a transaction ID and a security code that’d initiate that transfer of my domain. I left an important detail out: I never initiated that transfer.

After the first three emails arrived, I contacted GoDaddy and explained to their tech support that I never authorized such a transfer; whoever was doing this was basically trying to fool me into approving the process.

I asked them to stop the process and GoDaddy’s response was that they could not. Every week, I got one such reminder email telling me how the transfer is in danger of failing if I did not log in and approve it.

What pissed me off was not the fact that I was receiving emails attempting to gain authorization to transfer a domain to GoDaddy. As it is, whoever attempted this transaction could not have completed it without further knowledge of the Auth/EPP code and without first unlocking the domain itself.

My domain was secure – the whole time at Fabulous.com.

What ticked me off was GoDaddy’s refusal to terminate this transaction, despite the fact that I alerted them to it. Were they hoping that despite all this whoever initiated the transfer would forget about the fees they paid?

I was told that the process would automatically end a month after it was started, and so it did. Four weeks and six email reminders later, it stopped.

It’s one thing to get renewal reminders at GoDaddy, attempting to also sell a dozen different services, it’s another to get “spammed” for domains that are with a different domain registrar.

We all have our preferred domain registrars and sometimes we even change our preference, depending on customer experience.

GoDaddy is the registrar that I used in 2000, once the dreaded Network Solutions monopoly was broken by a handful of registrars. Back then, they were lightweight and offered less clutter along with the domain registrations.

They had some issues that I helped them with, which shows I was very satisfied at the time.

There’s nothing wrong with GoDaddy in its entirety as far as I’m concerned. In other words, overall it’s a healthy company – the biggest domain registrar in the world with almost 40 million domains. They also seem to possess a good sense of humor.

I just prefer not to use GoDaddy, simple as that.

As a domainer, I prefer convenience, competitive pricing and ease of managing my domains; for that matter I use Fabulous.com

However, when it comes down to GoDaddy, there is a single function that I really like, and that is the process of transferring a domain away.

While GoDaddy still enforces the annoying 60 day lockdown period every time a domain’s contact information is changed, GoDaddy is refreshingly understanding when it comes down to transferring domains away once that lockdown is not in place.

Once you initiate and accept a transfer out to your registrar of choice, GoDaddy will email the domain holder that a pending transfer exists; they can then log into their GoDaddy domain panel and accept or decline the transfer on the spot.

The process takes a few hours to complete, depending on the gaining registrar but it surely beats the practice of most other registrars that wait a full 7 days until a domain leaves their grubby paws.

GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar today, with 40 million domain names under their control.

Bob Parsons started small but by 2001 they were already growing by leaps and bounds, having thousands of customers.

Having registered my first domains with GoDaddy in December of 2000, it didn’t take me long to realize that there was something fishy with the user account and password system.

Back then I didn’t have a need to keep all of my domains under the same GoDaddy account, so every so often I’d create a new account which would correspond to a new, incremented customer number. If the browser cookies were deleted, the registration process would provide that new account with a matching numerical password.

So if you were user 123456 the password for that domain registration would also be 123456.

It got even scarier: having deleted all cookies, you could enter one such account number during the registration process and all you had to do was enter the matching number as the password; the contact and billing info of the account holder would be automatically populated.

Back then there was no direct support, one had to post their issue at SupportWebsite.com – so I had to catch GoDaddy’s attention, which I did by making a post with the title “SEVERE security issue discovered!” – GoDaddy emailed me asking for the details.

Barb Rechterman, VP of Development for GoDaddy Software contacted me, thanking me for letting them know of the details. Within days, the security hole was patched and the password allocation system was changed.  Nowadays, Barb is the Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer for GoDaddy and I’m glad she did not ignore my emails back then.

When creating an account system, it’s not smart to generate sequential account numbers; but defaulting the password to the same number is simply dumb. The majority of account holders don’t view this as a risk but rather, as a “convenience” and would not bother to change the password, as it was the case with GoDaddy in January of 2001.

Just another story from the vault that might or might not be of interest today – you be the judge.

Let’s face it: you’ve seen the various endorsements that media and organizations have provided the Democrat candidate, Barack Obama with. It looks like Obama is heading towards a steadfast landslide victory on November 4th. There are lots of domains and web sites that do the same type of endorsement by promoting Barack Obama’s message and/or attacking the opposition.

A few weeks ago I registered GoMilfy.com and built on it a web site that serves two purposes: One, to spoof VP candidate Sarah Palin, whose mannerisms and political bravado has surprised many equally new and old in politics and two, to provide a platform that pokes fun at GoDaddy’s use of mostly female celebrity figures and “in your face” advertising, consistent with the culture of NASCAR racing. Two birds with one stone, you might say.

I did not advertise the web site at all, other than through the signature of my (admittedly numerous) posts at DNForum.com. Then, 10 days before the election I decided to put the domain name GoMilfy.com and its current content on eBay. If you’re wondering why the high starting price, you’re obviously missing out on the low cost of conducting such large scale advertising: roughly $11 for 10 days of promotional listing. Plus it might actually sell.

By visiting GoMilfy.com you get an instant idea that it’s a parody, a spoof web site that cannot be seriously “real”. I mean, every drop of my known sense of humor is there: from the mirroring of the GoDaddy logo and the “.mom” TLD, to the statements supposedly made by Sarah Palin – consistent with her well-known, airhead phrases during the past weeks of her campaigning.

There are no Joe the Plumber jokes, I’m afraid.

GoDaddy is the world’s largest registrar of domains, famous for their Superbowl commercials and constant use of NASCAR racing celebrities. The depictions are more iconic than kitsch; and for that I must say that GoDaddy has become a household name outside the domain industry, rising from the levels of “just another registrar” around 2000 to that of world dominator with domains.

And as such, spoofing GoDaddy is a fun thing.

Around 4pm today I received a call by a GoDaddy domain services manager, Karen N. She politely explained that they have received inquiries about GoMilfy.com – apparently from people that were wondering about GoDaddy’s affiliation with it. I shared a laugh with Ms. Karen, explaining that this must mean I did a good job spoofing their web site, if I had visitors wondering about GoMilfy.com. It was a compliment towards the roughly four hours of detailed work I put into it, on a boring Friday afternoon, a few weeks ago.

So now the web site has been mentioned on Digg and Stumbled upon and the hits keep coming. I’ve added GoDaddy’s requested disclaimer that they are not affiliated with the web site and although I don’t foresee it will sell on eBay, it has definitely received some “word of mouth” visitor traffic.

Does GoDaddy and its CEO & former jarhead  Bob Parsons, endorse Barack Obama? I don’t know, but I have a hunch that they do