You either love or hate GoDaddy – there is no in-between.
Or maybe, there is: when things work as expected, one gets to appreciate the quick in/out transfers.
GoDaddy is also the only domain registrar that regularly shares coupon codes for below the cost registrations, in the $0.99 – $2.99 range, plus ICANN fees.
Recently I wrote about how inbound domain transfers appear to be speedier at GoDaddy, but there is a slight caveat to be examined.
Quite often, the WHOIS info on the domain contains inaccurate, jumbled up, or missing information from one or more contacts.
For example, the Registrant company and name fields become joined, or the phone number disappears; in many cases, the administrative email is missing or defaults to a GoDaddy email, “nocontactsfound@secureserver.net.”
I find this to be due to some inconsistency of how GoDaddy parses WHOIS info data. Since I have not witnessed a similar behavior when transferring domains to other registrars, I believe it’s safe to point the finger at GoDaddy’s peculiar processing of the WHOIS.
So next time you transfer a domain to GoDaddy, double-check that the contacts are as they should be.
This happened to me twice last week transferring names into GD, once from eNom and once from NetSol. Hopefully they get it resolved.
That’s the crux of the “thin registry” (.com/.net where the whois information resides with the registrar and not with the registry – like for .ORG, INFO etc). The whois of a thin registry only holds a referral to the registrar. This means that the contacts are not transferred as part of the transfer itself, so the gaining/new registrar has to parse them when a domain is transferred or will replace them with the contacts that were entered on the order.
In a thin registry setup every registrar has a slightly different whois format and a different internal system to store it, making the parsing of the whois information difficult. At one point some registrars even rotated their whois display format for each query they received.
the difference between thin and thick registry
The problem with Go Daddy is that they don’t update whois, with the account default or the order details, with inbound transfers. Instead they do this parsing thing…
This is more problematic when you are transferring a domain to the buyer and then your details get stuck there for ever.