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I’d like to write the first entry in what may turn into a series, however I haven’t decided yet. My first victim is going to be GoDaddy. I’ve never liked GoDaddy. They suck…..hard. Anybody who uses them knows that there administration system is crappy, and the signup process for a domain name is ridiculous because of the amount of advertising that is done along the way. They do nothing but sell sell sell all the way during your purchase. It’s ridiculous. I decided to document the whole GoDaddy experience a little better so people can see what it’s like.

#1. HomePage

What a beautiful homepage(not!). Definitely built for the first time visitor to the site to show off all their wonderful features(because you won’t find about them at all through a domain purchase). It’s loaded with tons of blurbs about their various services and such. Let’s login to an account so we can see the wonderful new interface they present to their regular users.


#2. After Login

Wait a minute….I thought I logged in. Oh that’s right, I did. What do you know, I’m still bombarded with useless advertisements. The page is pretty much the exact same as before. No sight of anything remotely useful to someone who needs to modify their existing domain name information. Anyway, I came to register a domain, so that’s what I’m going to do. Let’s run a little search and see what we come up with.

#3. After Search

Good news for me, MYREGISTRARSUCKS.com is available, just what I wanted to hear. I can get the .net, .org and several other variations with just the click of a button. And oh goody, .info and .us are on sale! And just in case that wasn’t the domain I wanted, they came up with about 1,000 other variations of the domain name. Let’s buy this puppy, it should only take a couple of seconds.

#4. After Continue from Search

Wow, what a great offer they on this page, they will offer me the .biz, the .net, and the .info all for only an additional $16.00. That would save me 41%! There is nothing to this page other than to offer me this great deal. I think I’ll pass.

#5. After Continue from Crappy Sales Page

What a joy, options for me to choose from! What do you know, registration length is automatically set to 2 years, I get to change that to one. Also set to automatically renew and automatically bill me each year, set that to manual. It is set to standard registration instead of deluxe, so I don’t have to change anything there. Although, they care about me, so they want me to know that the standard registration leaves my information available to the public through a WHOIS search. This “exposes you to an untold number of potential problems – and yes, it can happen to YOU”. I’m glad they warned me, because I wanted to pay and extra $8.95 so no one could get my information and they could make an extra $8.94 in profit. On to the checkout preferences…..Automatically selected is the option to “Show me exclusive offers that will help me get the most from my domain. Gotta click over to the “Quick Checkout” option, then we can wrap this thing up in a page or 2, right? All that should be left is for me to enter the credit card info.

#6. Trying to Checkout

Another special limited time offer. I’m sure this special offer will be going away any day now because it’s so special. I can keep my personal information private for only $4.99 a year instead of the normal $8.99. I feel honored and blessed to have this option given to me, but once again, I’ll pass. Nothing to this page other than the special limited time offer. So let’s continue to the checkout….

#7. Still Trying to Checkout

Wonderful, I get to review my order. Let’s see, 1 year(I can change it to 2 or more very easily if I was mistaken). I can change it to private for only an extra $4.99 a year in case I changed my mind from the first 5 times they offered it to me. $8.95 for the domain, plus and extra $.25 for the ICANN fee. It would’ve taken out of their profit to just roll this into the domain name cost apparently. A nice fee of $9.20 for 1 year of domain registration. So let’s finally checkout now!

#8. Finally Entering Information

Hooray! A screen that’s actually useful to me. I can enter my personal and billing information with not a sales pitch in site(other than the standard ads on top). Let’s enter that info and get it done with.

#9. Security Check

Thank you, Bob Parsons for putting a security checkpoint here. “The access code you see an additional security process GoDaddy.com has developed to protect you” Thank goodness, I wouldn’t want a bot to come in and purchase a domain name, then I just wouldn’t feel safe shopping for domain names here anymore. Thank you again Bob Parsons for leaving this personal note here letting me know how much you care about me personally. I feel safe, I feel secure.

#10. And I’m Spent

We’re done, finally! It only took going through 10 pages and about 50 different pitches to get the domain name I wanted. I do need to hurry though, because the “clock is ticking” and they’ve got tons(in fact, a whole pageful) of special prices that expire in just 30 minutes. I better jump on these before they expire

Alternatives

The only registrar I use is NameCheap(this is not an affiliate link, I benefit in no way by you using them). Their administration system is simple and it doesn’t bombard you while trying to make a simple purchase. If anybody has any further suggestions, I’d love to hear them and I’m sure everyone else would too.

To sum it up, I Jacob Gower, think GoDaddy is a terrible registrar. They suck, hard. I highly do not recommend them. If you want to spread the word on this, link to this article with “GoDaddy” as the link text. That should get this page bumped up in Google when people search for their name. If you’d like to read more on GoDaddy’s terrible suckage, I’ve made a small list of the many articles out there:

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Stopping at Page Three

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