Decius wrote:

Last your GoDaddy yanked the domain for the data center where my computers are hosted. (nectartech.com) They managed to take thousands of domains offline as a result. I helped get them back online by recording two phone calls to their tech support department.

GoDaddy shut down an entire internet provider overnight in January by killing their domain, which broke their DNS resolution. You can listen to phone calls in which their customer support people refuse to bring the domain back online in spite of the fact that 100s of customers are offline. Whats more, people who work for GoDaddy show up in the threads and start threatening the person who posted the recordings!! The fact is that $8 domain name registrations sometimes have millions of dollars riding on them. A company with this sort of flippant attitude about people's network infrastructure shouldn't be responsible for it.

If they thought such a heavy handed broad approach is the way to handle such a situation, why do they not shut down the domain " "godaddy.com" to show how responsible people should deal with spam.

Rattle wrote:
One big question remains.. What good registrars are out there these days? I have not had a chance to do any research.

I'm also interested if anyone has any feedback on this question. I've sent them a formal email and tried to explain to them why I think this situation was mishandled, but it remains to be seen if they are going to address the problem in a substantive way. So far their public communications have been defensive and somewhat misleading. They need to acknowledge the mistake and communicate about how they are addressing the problem. I'm willing to give them time for that to sink in. They provide a good service at a really good price and I don't want to go through the hassle of transferring from them, but if they don't clear this up I really have no choice. It is inevitable that people post objectionable material here, and Rattle and I are usually on top of it, but the last thing I need is for my DNS registrar to pull my domain and then offer that they'll get back to me in "1 to 2 business days" about a resolution, and charge me a fee for my trouble. Thats not OK.

Decius wrote:

Rattle wrote:
One big question remains.. What good registrars are out there these days? I have not had a chance to do any research.

I'm also interested if anyone has any feedback on this question. I've sent them a formal email and tried to explain to them why I think this situation was mishandled, but it remains to be seen if they are going to address the problem in a substantive way. So far their public communications have been defensive and somewhat misleading. They need to acknowledge the mistake and communicate about how they are addressing the problem. I'm willing to give them time for that to sink in. They provide a good service at a really good price and I don't want to go through the hassle of transferring from them, but if they don't clear this up I really have no choice. It is inevitable that people post objectionable material here, and Rattle and I are usually on top of it, but the last thing I need is for my DNS registrar to pull my domain and then offer that they'll get back to me in "1 to 2 business days" about a resolution, and charge me a fee for my trouble. Thats not OK.

Objectionably material? Whatever. The only thing I regulate on is spam and things which are blatantly illegal. So far, I've only had to deal with the former. The shit we let ride is amazing.

I'm one of those people who can recite/type the first amendment by heart down to the semicolons, and structure arguments to support every point therein.

I still have not had the chance to do much research on domain registrars. These are the ones currently sitting open in my browser: Namecheap, RegisterFly, and HostWay. I've barely scratched the surface of what is available. And this time around, surveying ToS agreements is key. This is going to take some time. It's truly annoying that it has to be done at all. I've been happy with GoDaddy, but their current behavior is simply unacceptable.

Rattle wrote:
Objectionably material? Whatever. The only thing I regulate on is spam and things which are blatantly illegal. So far, I've only had to deal with the former.

It depends how you define that. I think we'd respond if someone dropped a list of credit card numbers in a post. The question is whether the person who complains about the copyright of an image that gets linked through here complains to us or to GoDaddy.

And this time around, surveying ToS agreements is key.

The fact is that I don't think you're going to find a TOS agreement that doesn't allow them to cancel your domain on a whim and forward your traffic to disney. The question is about their processes and not their agreement. It may be hard to figure this out except through talking to people who've worked with their abuse department.