Slashdot Mirror

Since the article is heavy on claims and light on the basis for those claims, I thought I'd dig in to it a bit. Turned out to be a difficult. I couldn't find the registration agreement via Godaddy's web page. I had to search Google for it.

http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/sho w_doc.asp?se=+&pageid=REG_SA

Section 7 is the one that deals with spam. Here's what it says:

7. restriction of services; right of refusal

You agree not to use the services provided by Go Daddy, or to allow or enable others, to use the services provided by Go Daddy for the purposes of:

        * The transmission of unsolicited email (Spam).
        * Repetitive, high volume inquires into any of the services provided by Go Daddy (i.e. domain name availability, etc.).

If You are hosting Your domain's domain name servers ("DNS") on Go Daddy's servers, or are using our systems to forward a domain, URL, or otherwise to a system or site hosted elsewhere, or if You have your domain name registered with Go Daddy, You are responsible for ensuring that there is no excessive overloading on Go Daddy's DNS systems. You may not use Go Daddy's servers and Your domain as a source, intermediary, reply to address, or destination address for mail bombs, Internet packet flooding, packet corruption, or other abusive attack. Server hacking or other perpetration of security breaches is prohibited. You agree that Go Daddy reserves the right to deactivate Your domain name from its DNS system if Go Daddy deems it is the recipient of activities caused by your site that threaten the stability of its network.

You agree that Go Daddy, in its sole discretion and without liability to You, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. Go Daddy also may in its sole discretion and without liability to You delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to: activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which You conduct business; activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; and activities designed to harm minors in any way. In the event Go Daddy refuses a registration or deletes an existing registration during the first thirty (30) days after registration, You will receive a refund of any fees paid to Go Daddy in connection with the registration either being canceled or refused. In the event Go Daddy deletes the registration of a domain name being used in association with spam or morally objectionable activities, no refund will be issued.

Okay, so there are some pretty nasty things in there. One thing I don't see is where they say they'll hold on to the name, refuse to let you transfer it or charge you an extra fee. In fact, they're quite specific: If you spam, they cancel the registration. Period.

I also read the supposed letter from godaddy at http://majordomo.ru/about/letter.htm . Maybe its just me, but the letter smells false. That's not the careful legal language I would expect from a company Godaddy's size faced with this sort of situation. I'm not discounting the possibility that its real, but it smells false. If I saw that letter in my inbox, I'd suspect phishing.

As someone else pointed out, if they are really doing this for legitimate reasons, why is their reinstatement fee orders of magnitude greater than the initial registration fee?

Because they reserve the right to do that in their TOS, probably to discourage spammers from setting up shop with them.

Why is there no initial warning followed by a probationary period?

It would surprise me if that Russian reseller did not get an initial warning, although me nor you can know that for sure of course. That said, from the earlier mentioned TOS:

If Go Daddy determines that the services in question are being used in association with spam, Go Daddy will re-direct, suspend, or cancel any web site hosting, domain registration, email boxes or other applicable services for a period of no less than 2 days. The registrant or customer will be required to respond by email to Go Daddy stating that they will cease to send spam and/or have spam sent on their behalf. Go Daddy will require a non-refundable reactivation fee to be paid before the site, email boxes and/or services are reactivated.

I could imagine a hefty fine for repeat offenders, ultimately resulting in permanent removal of the domain registration, but a sudden $200 fee does not strike me as motivated by seeking justice. Especially when the judge and jury are a spam blacklist...

From the TOS it's clear that repeat offenders can be terminated (it doesn't say anything about fines for those), and that GoDaddy is the one which determines whether or not "the services in question are being used in association with spam".

Finally, to those who've defended spamhaus as one of the better spam blacklists, that's still not a good reason to use their judgement to impose such a large penalty. It does not take much of a configuration error to open your relay and end up on a blacklist.

Spamhaus does not list open relays. It lists websites used by major spammers to peddle their porn, pills and whatnot, as well as the hosting and dns providers for those sites.

I smell a PC user. Unimaginative, dogma-bound drones like you should stick to right-wing Republican registrars. Leave tasteful registrars to your creative betters.

I agree they should only be able to handle according to their TOS, but their TOS does specify that domains for spamming can be suspended or terminated. Of course, by blocking all domains of an entire reseller, they also hit innocent bystanders.

I was mainly reacting to the sentiment that self-policing is a bad thing because it would supposedly encourage laws to this end though. Imo, it's exactly the other way around.

Absolutely bad advice. You want real advice for how to setup a mail server with a given program find a tech support forum for that software, or just be lazy and go find a developer or desing firms like http://godaddy.com/ or http://avidcastonline.com/ Not all geeks are Gods, but the ones that are appreciate the business and the opportunity to flaunt Knowledge, and this article ie pretty much all that it's accomplishing.

I own two domains that are "parked" there until I can use them (i.e. iheartje.ws) and who cares? Their parked domains have no reason to really stay online. They exist to advertise for GoDaddy and their minions until you setup shop. In a way I assume that is why there are so many sales at GoDaddy.

No matter you can get Linux & Windows (shared) hosting still:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp

and it's all Fedora on the dedicated side:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/dedicated.a sp

Not really a story.

I own two domains that are "parked" there until I can use them (i.e. iheartje.ws) and who cares? Their parked domains have no reason to really stay online. They exist to advertise for GoDaddy and their minions until you setup shop. In a way I assume that is why there are so many sales at GoDaddy.

No matter you can get Linux & Windows (shared) hosting still:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/shared.asp

and it's all Fedora on the dedicated side:

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/dedicated.a sp

Not really a story.

My experience with GoDaddy shows that the company takes advantage of people with little technical experience by confusing them. Visit the GoDaddy website yourself and see what you think. It's filled with ads, especially when you are in the second and third pages of registering a domain.

I'm guessing Microsoft paid GoDaddy to change. That would fit with my conception of the behavior of both of them.

no, a white spaghetti strap top that rips at the worst moments, spilling her heaving bosoms out for all to (almost) see.

TV Commercials

I think most registrars do this, but I know that GoDaddy can "Make any domain private." I think this may involve turning ownership of the domain over to them, but I could be mistaken.

Here's their email support form

Enjoy

It seems to me that GoDaddy takes advantage of people who have little technical knowledge, and tries to push them to buy services they don't need.

Sometimes GoDaddy web pages are so full of ads for dubious services that it is difficult to find the useful content.

I can't believe it took this long. Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/ Domain Name: CYBERMONDAY.COM Created on: 28-Oct-05 Expires on: 28-Oct-06 Last Updated on: 28-Oct-05

Google for "MTAI inc" only turns up this one result:
www.dkpto.dk/publikationer/tidender/ugeliste0542_2 31005.pdf
Google for "PO Box 80626" 98108 Seattle Washington pulled up this:
http://www.usaexporters.net/companyprofile.asp?cat ID=10260

Registrant:
MTAI, Inc.

P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com/
Domain Name: MTURK.COM
Created on: 22-Oct-01
Expires on: 22-Oct-06
Last Updated on: 11-Oct-05

Administrative Contact:
Hostmaster, MTAI mechturk1@hotmail.com
MTAI, Inc.
P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States
2065794562

Technical Contact:
Hostmaster, MTAI mechturk1@hotmail.com
MTAI, Inc.
P.O. Box 80626
Seattle, Washington 98108
United States
2065794562

Hotmail? They registered with a hotmail account.
That strikes me as incredibly unprofessional.

You mean, like this?

This is a moot point, though. Everything that's been said on this matter has had nothing to do with the TLDs, but rather with the root servers, the ones that tell you which TLDs exist and the IPs for the master DNS servers for each TLD.

Can it be found out who registered it? Can they be shut down at all?

Can it be found out who registered it? Can they be shut down at all?

"BTW, can anyone tell my why register.com limits your password to 8 characters? Seems counter-secure."

It is, and that is why you should dump the overpriced idiots and register with godaddy.

I have had similar problems with GoDaddy hosting. As far as a registrar, they seem to be fine in my experience. However, they somehow seem to mess up their hosting sever configurations, and when you bring it to their attention, instead of fixing it, they write it off as an "unsupported" feature.

Take, for example, using mod_rewrite. I discovered that on their servers you cannot rewrite anything with a .php extension. (You can go to a php extension but not from) When I contacted tech support, they claim that "we do not support mod_rewrite with php files."

This also screws up 404 pages. If you request a non-existant php file, instead of the 404 page you should get, you recieve a nice "No input file specified" error. This comes from the php parser when you execute it without a filename. After bringing that to their attention, they came back with "It's not our problem, fix your script so it doesn't reference a non-existant file" However, my scripts are fine, and that is completely missing the point. If someone bookmarks a file and later you move it. The user should be able to hit that bookmark and get a 404 page for your site, redirecting them. Of course after responding with that, they ignored my message and I have not gotten a reply.

Anyway, stay away from godaddy unless you want to just serve static html files. I wish they would spend less time writing blogs producing "radio shows" and just focus on getting their core business to work properly. I recently just switched to 1and1.com and they seem to be much better so far. After using 1and1's admin interface, it completely blows away the meager interface godaddy has.

A streaming version of the video can be found here: http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/superbowl05/landing. asp

This streaming video was going quite a bit faster than the Network Mirror link. (1 hour download compared to a couple of minutes.)

Or, instead of waiting 45 minutes to download the file from this mirror, you can see it immediately from GoDaddy's site. Just select Full "Web Only" Censorship Hearing, enter in the numeric code (apparently to prevent automated retrieval), and it will play as a high-quality Flash movie.

You can get the ad from GoDaddy themselves here.

How does Powweb compare for hosting?

GoDaddy is extremely aggressive about pushing things people don't need, in my opinion. The company seems to me to take advantage of people with less technical understanding by exploiting their doubt. For example, there are sometimes as many as 30 ads on a GoDaddy screen at one time, so many it is difficult to navigate.

I know it's a bit costly, but in the case when your domain does expire and your current registrar doesn't renew it, by backordering your domain using another registrar, but be the thing to save your domain at the end.

godaddy offers this service for only $18.95.
network solutions and namecheap goes through snapnames which cost $60, probably more reliable and better service, but i've never used either of them to really tell you what the difference is.

What is Domain Name Backordering?
If you "backorder" this name, we will ATTEMPT to grab it and to register it on your behalf, if and when it expires and once again becomes available.

The low $18.95 backorder cost includes the registration fee, ICANN Fee, plus automatic monitoring and email alerts on changes to the Registrar, Status, Expiration Date, and Name Servers. Your domain backorder fee can be re-assigned to other names as often as you like, until you are successful in acquiring a domain name.

You also have the option of making your backorder private -- which means your personal identifying information (name, phone number, email and home addresses) is shielded from public exposure in the WHOIS directory from the very moment the backordered domain is successfully acquired.

Please understand that a backorder does not guarantee that you will acquire the domain name being backordered. The domain name you are backordering may be renewed by its current owner and not become available or we may be unsuccessful in our attempts to grab it and register it on your behalf.

Once again if your backorder is not successful, it can be reassigned to another domain name. (And if your unsuccessful backorder is a private one, your private registration can be applied to any other backorder).

hopefully your domains aren't that popular. then you shouldn't have much problem backordering them.

Depending on if anyone else is out there trying to grab your domain, I guess you can just let it fall and then buy it back through someone else. Or maybe you can try godaddy's back ordering system. This would also depend on if someone else is out there trying to grab it.

A whois on this dubious website that seems to just mirror/copy slashdot, networkmirror.com, revealed it was reigstered through a proxy-domain registar.. domainsbyproxy.com

A simple look at the site will show it's very plain and shows very little work done besides straight mirroring/copying slashdot.

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
(http://www.godaddy.com)

Domain Name: NETWORKMIRROR.COM

Created on: 01-Apr-05

Expires on: 01-Apr-06

Last Updated on: 01-Apr-05

April 1st, eh? Look at this guy's posting history again.. This here was the first post of his showing 'mirrors'.. on April 4th...

Godaddy certs are actually issued by "Starfield Secure Certification Authority" which is in turn signed by Valicert I think.

Godaddy (unsurprisingly) use one of their own certs so you can go to their site over https and see one.

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl_opensource. asp

Warning: Too many connections in /var/www/pnadodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 108

Really great article...

Go Daddy.com recently annouced they were offering free SSL certificates for Open Source Projects:

Go Daddy.com

Perhaps even more appropriate (since we are talking about godaddy anyways) is the fact that godaddy is providing FREE (as in beer) ssl certificates to FREE (as in speech) projects...

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ssl/ssl_opensource. asp

Here's google's cache of the front page that we beautifully slashdotted. Also, on a related note, many companies offer free SSL certificates if you do a little business with them. Ever-popular GoDaddy recently joined the ranks of those companies. They started offering free SSL certs to open-source projects.

In practice the ID checks that I've seen done are fairly flimsy. And with "hundreds" of dollars being charged by big name certifying authorites there is strong motivation for them to just give you the cert (and take your money) once you've faxed them a couple of vaguely official looking signed bits of paper.

Anyone paying "hundreds" of bucks for a certificate is being scammed though. Much cheaper ones are available from people like GoDaddy. I can't see why anyone wouldn't just go for the $29 one, your users won't notice any difference between them unless they are particularly inquisitive and enjoy poking around obscure browser dialogues.

My steps for web design/web server on shoestring budget (steps 4 and 5 are for those who just want a design).

1. Learn linux enough to manage a server--all the docs and how-to's you ever need are on the web, don't buy books (unless you want a standalone easy quick reference).
2. Buy a domain name from godaddy.com.
3. Get a VPS plan from rimuhosting.com or the multitude of other VPS providers. I prefer to have Debian installed in the VPS because it's minimal in disk space usage and packages can easily be installed with apt-get (i.e. you have have to muck around to try to find rpm's or tar.gz files)--you'll need to apt-get apache to get the webserver up. You'll also need to install a content management engine like wordpress, moveabletype, drupal, geekblog, etc.
4. With the money you saved by NOT buying books on how to design, purchase a web logo from The Logo Company or any comparable business that supplies you the logo for your site. They include full ownership of your logo (to file for trademark if you want) and all the vector graphics files you need to take it from there and build your own templates, CSS, etc. This is the most important part of the "design" process because you will use your logo to assemble your website -- it has the color palette that you want and the overall theme that will be persistent in your site.
5. Using the logo as "inspiration", create the CSS for the content management engine such as wordpress, moveabletype, geekblog, drupal, etc. Drop the CSS into your server.

Obviously, there are lots of in between steps I didn't care to mention, but the main steps are listed. Overall, for the startup cost and the first month of your web page going live, you shouldn't need to spend more than $105 USD ($75 for the logo, $20 per month for the VPS, $10 for a year's worth of domain name service) -- the price of 3 or 4 books.

Their email is pretty nice. For $20 a year you get 5 email addresses, 1GB of space to divide up any way you want among them, and webmail(with spam filters).

This is a much more attractive alternative to Verisign, even over fun names like GoDaddy, and NameBargain.

Having done ISP work back in the day, I have personally submitted registrations on thousands of domains with the venerable Network Solutions. With Verisign and the recent mix, I have lost tons of my own personal domains I have collected over the years -- and registration on these things is quite expensive! Finally there are alternatives, and I think I would trust Google over Microsoft, Verisign, or the US Government. This is my Internet, and I don't want it fucked-up!

Also, I think that Google doing root nameserver fun would be more like a DNS cache for them.

Bob Parsons, the owner of GoDaddy.com, posted info on his blog about taking out a Super Bowl ad. Cost of 30 seconds is $2.4 million, with about an extra million in production costs. But, unlike some of the tech companies advertising in the 2000 Super Bowl, it sounds like this cost will not be a problem for them even if the ad is not very successful. Here are some excerpts from the post:

Now, some facts about Go Daddy:

-- snip --

5. Go Daddy has no debt and no equipment leases. Except for the monthly rent we pay for our buildings (which we made the decision to lease), the company has no debt service or lease payments.
6. Our sales this year were over $100 million. If we do nothing different (other than continue to promote our business the way we have been) our sales for 2005 should be about $170 million.
7. The company will continue to have substantial cash reserves even after paying for the Super Bowl ad.

-- snip --

Here's the answers to some questions I've been asked by reporters and others, since it became known that Go Daddy is going to have a Super Bowl ad:

Q. How do you know that the Super Bowl ad will work for Go Daddy?
A. There are no guarantees. I don't know if it will work.

Q. Is the Super Bow ad a one shot deal?
A. Not really. We will be following up our Super Bowl ad with an extensive advertising campaign that will embrace television, radio and print.

Q. Do you expect to earn your investment back?
A. Not immediately and maybe never. What the Super Bowl ad will do is to lay the ground work for better recognition of our follow up campaign.

Q. What if the Super Bowl ad doesn't work at all? What will happen to Go Daddy?
A. You can be sure that I certainly want to see it work, but if it doesn't work at all we'll be just fine. The entire ad production costs and airtime have been paid for out of cash reserves earned last year. Many company owners would have taken this cash out of the company for themselves as a dividend. Not me. (What follows is the line that was misquoted by Brand Autopsy) I'd rather have a Super Bowl ad.

Its not that simple. Yes Iran is an economic midget sitting on billions of barrels of oil reserves. Much of the poverty is cultrually/structurally induced. And the poverty and illiteracy serve the Iyatollahs quite well so don't look for great leaps forward any time soon. And that is such a shame. Iranians are as smart as anyone. The web presence in question in the article is NOT something being put up by the peasants. MOST college educated Iranians are necessarily expatriates, if only for 4 years. No one with the resources to study abroad would lack $4 a month to put up a modest web site with e-mail service. And trust me, the modest bourgeoisie that grew up around the Shah had a few billions and neither they nor their money were completely liquidated. And if we suppose instead that the "students" are a front for the Imam's? I bet they could pry a few bucks loose from their Nuclear Weapons budget to inform or disinform as they please via the web.

No, money is not the real problem for any of the players here.

I've been very pleased with http://www.godaddy.com/

Good news! The domain name guerillamarketingsucks.com is available!

(Usual disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with GoDaddy in any way other than as a satisfied customer)

Quite personally, I prefer spending $50 a year on a Custom DNS and my own private domain than putting my stuff on anyone elses server.
What I do is this:
1) Go get a Custom DNS from DynDNS.org.
2) Go get a Domain Name from a selection of many different registrars.
3) Go set up a box running Gentoo, Debian, SuSE, or FreeBSD, and install Apache.
And then boom. I'm the master of my own domain, for the low-low price of $50 per year. thats an average of $4 a month for hosting, totally within your control.
I can even give subdomains to the people I like, considering if I have enough bandiwdth. But that isn't a problem considering many Canadian ISP's offer over 800kbps upstream.

I noticed on http://www.godaddy.com/ you can go through the transfer proccess for seemingly any domain you want without entering any information regarding the current owner. If you do this(and pay the few $$), then the real owner doesnt shootdown godaddy's request for transfer, it'll be transfered to godaddy correct?
At that point who would have access to the account details/ownership? The owner would need an account with godaddy in order to make changes, but if they are unaware of the transfer.. what then? Would godaddy create an account automagically and perhaps email the owner the account login/pass? If that is the case and the owner had bad contact info listed then the domain would sit stagnant for the next forever years wouldnt it?
... I think I'm missing somethin here...

Besides, except for the few curious ppl who won't believe anything at prosco.com and SCO employees how many visitors is it really likely to get? They probably figure that $8.95 is better spent elsewhere with budgets as tight as the must be.

Now it makes you wonder why Google registered gbrowser.com.

People: the cost of registering a domain name is $8 a year . If there is the slightest, faintest, remotely conceivable chance that Google might someday have some use for that name, it's stupid not to snap it up. Especially now that they have $20 zillion ka-gillion dollars in the bank.

I always get a kick out of those rumor sites who try to guess a whole new product line based on some feeler that Apple put on Monster, or a domain name by Google. It's kind of a truism in economics that true preferences aren't revealed unless the actors have some sort of financial/emotional stake in the matter. And $8 to a publicly-traded company does not a stake make.

I'm sick of getting mail from "registrars" charging $40 and up for two year renewals and so forth

Hi, if you're interested I've been using godaddy for about 2 years now. The seem fine and are quite cheap (about $8 per year). Although I've only used them for registration and not DNS or hosting.

I then thought better of it when the credit card number page came up; after all, $35...

Even the big dog, Network Solutions, looks like they don't allow you to add TXT records.

Might be helpful if a lot more people started to ask. :)

But the original statement said "I decided to pay the extra money to have email for the domain I registered" WFT?! Go to something like directnic.com, get your domain for $15/yr and get mail forwarding included (including wildcard)!
Not an endorsement, just happen to be a happy customer so far, and it's somewhat related. I just registered my domain with GoDaddy for $8/year and I get catch all email forwarding.

> [insert tired 1997 reasoning for using crappy "free e-mail" service]

The easy answer is to get one's own domain.

That you CAN keep forever, and $8/year is WORTH not having to worry about tiny mailbox size, those damn little ads that go on every outbound message, and *ahem* not having to go to a bloated, ad-filled web-interface just to check your e-mail even when you're at home on your own computer!!

I say 1997 reasoning because it wasn't a value for most people to do that kind of thing back when a domain cost maybe $25 or $30 a year just for the registration. But I pay $8/year for the domain and $49/year for "1gbhosting.com" which provides 1GB of webspace/mailbox space and unlimited IMAP/POP accounts. For the average newbie, however, a cheap solution can be found with a few minutes' research: Domain, $8 (GoDaddy). E-mail forwarding: Free. Forward to you@isp-of-the-month.com and voila. Instant, non-sucky, POP/IMAP account that not onl is completely personalized, but also doesn't serve as a billboard for some asshole company every time you give it out: Priceless.

Yeah, because spending $3.95 a month for web hosting is just too much to ask!