What makes you happy ?

A domain of a friend’s expired and it was not renewed. Not good. It was still in the cycle though and for $200 could be recovered from enom. No, not for that much. As it was getting close to being up for grabs we decided to wait it out. This domain only has the .co.uk registered otherwise, and that is to the same person. Still, he really did want it. So I placed two backorders.
One was at GoDaddy, the other at Pool. GoDaddy is $19 upfront and includes the domain. Pool is free to try but then $60 if they get it. Pool is well thought of in this game. I was online and constantly reloading my registrar’s domain search page - I use Namecheap - and saw nothing. I was reloading GoDaddy’s page and all that said was that they had last checked the day before and I knew that the domain was dropping at about 6pm that day.
Pool got it. It’s cost $60 but the domain name is returned. It wasn’t a high demand domain but the $60 is one of those lessons that you learn. I emailed GoDaddy. I said that the backorder had failed and what were my options with the $19 they had. I did not ask for a refund. I was told there are no options. All I can use it for is a backorder. I have 32 domains registered at Namecheap and I have enough in an account there to cover the renewals for the next few months. After doing all the above I’ll not be letting any domain expire. So backordering has no use at all to me.
It’s not that I want the $19 back. If I had been told that I could buy a domain and hosting I’d have been happy. Just hosting would be okay. But no. Bob Parsons has obviously decided that as most people will use backordering just the once it’s a really easy way to lock money in and away from people. It would not cost to move the credit. In fact there is no earthly reason to stop a credit being moved - apart from inflating profits. The amount is not the point - and it is part of the lesson learned in some ways - but the fact that GoDaddy refuse to allow that credit to be used anywhere else in their system is just plain annoying.

When I used to answer people in the wordpress.org forums who asked about hosting I would advise them to stay away from GoDaddy for a couple of reasons - and this event above is exactly the sort of detail that to me demonstrates how they would deal with an actual problem - badly. Come to think of it I don’t think they ever featured on the /hosting page there. Wonder why….