GoDaddy’s new cross-sell warns about domain theft.
Last week I wrote about how GoDaddy is now redacting most personal information in Whois records. People who paid for Whois Privacy now have the option of getting an improved “Full Domain Privacy” product or a pro-rated refund.
But it looks like there’s more to GoDaddy’s (NYSE: GDDY) privacy changes. The company has introduced three levels of privacy and changed some of the details of the Full product.
Basic Privacy Protection is what comes standard now. GoDaddy redacts your personal name, phone number and email address from Whois records.
Full Domain & Privacy Protection redacts your remaining information including Organization name and state/province and country. It also adds a forwarding email address like Domains by Proxy did. Customers also get protection from accidental domain expiration and hijacking.
Ultimate Domain & Privacy Protection adds malware scans and blacklist checks. Last week, the malware scans were included in the Full service.
GoDaddy customers are no longer warned about spam when they check out. Now, GoDaddy warns them that there are 170,000 domain theft attempts a year (see picture).
While Basic is free, Full costs $10/year and Ultimate is $15/year.
One thing to keep an eye on is what happens to the expired domain market. If lots of GoDaddy customers convert to Full, their domains won’t expire when they usually would. It’s not clear how long registrants have to renew in case of an invalid credit card, but I suspect GoDaddy adds one year to the registration.
Come on. I’m not buying this exaggerated problem used to justify this decision and sell more product. Creating a boogeyman to sell anti-boogeyman spray. The wave of the future.
Exactly.
“One thing to keep an eye on is what happens to the expired domain market. If lots of GoDaddy customers convert to Full, their domains won’t expire when they usually would. It’s not clear how long registrants have to renew in case of an invalid credit card, but I suspect GoDaddy adds one year to the registration.”
Interesting.
At least GoDaddy gave people the option to opt out of their new domain whois privacy. Although it took me a few days to get my domains whois privacy turned off.
This definitely needs to be given a thought.
Yep. By default, Full Domain Privacy is selected with a new domain registration.
GoDaddy and Verisign are going to put domain investors out of business someday.
Redacted whois, volume selling, new registries/registrars, backorder blocking etc.
Also, domain name hater Google.
Triple headed monster.
Oh yeah and pushover ICANN.
Enjoy domaining while it lasts!
5 years from now domaining will probably be gone.
GoDaddy should offer this full service for free and only charge for their ultimate service.
You do understand that Full Domain protection is just prepaying for the next year correct? How do you expect them to make that free?
Business for profit looks to profit. Shocking.
As someone who knows very well what happens in the world of domain theft I can tell you that any service I am charged extra for in the event my domain is stolen is in my opinion a service that should already exist without additional charge. Further on any system (sometimes failing at the customer support line) which allows my domain to be stolen, should not be a problem I am charged for.
There is as far as I see NO service that quickly and affectively retrieves my stolen domain name. While the new service may make my domain “safer” or make me feel more secure it does not in any way remove the human element, email or phone for the equation.
I am not saying not to buy any of the new services but what I can say is the greatest threats still remain and always will. Otherwise all our great domain name lawyers might as well retire lol
Internet.bs or cloudflare provide this for free. Their domain regiatration services are much cheaper as well.
I will love a my domains from Godaddy. It looks like it is unsafe to keep domains with Godaddy
This appears to be a official message from Godaddy who is looking to earn more money by making domains unsafe. It will be good to move all domains from Godaddy
I cant wait to transfer my domains from godaddy to other domain managers. Like cloudflare that offers this for free
As Godaddy redacts your email from Whois, the domain owner is unable to list the domain for sale on Flippa. Something stinks here.
Flippa surely has a workaround to that. Most registrars already redact.
With the power of the patents granted, this is worse than a patch in Windows, it smells really bad.
we are being customers of godaddy and our domain security is responsibility of godaddy
Accidentally let my domain expire, but since we had the “full” version, we were warned at 30 days about the lapse and emails to inboxes associated with the website stopped showing up, then it was actually cancelled at 60 days, (all whilst delivering to an inbox we didn’t monitor anymore).
Anyhow, in the end, they wanted to charge us an additional $80 fee for the privilege of renewing it, while keeping it “safe” (from a website no one wants mind you)
Isn’t this a good thing? I get my personal info removed for free from the whois records. Before they were charging me for this service.