Domain Madness
Mar 7th, 2008 by Dave
The other day I purchased a domain online through Godaddy.com which I’ve had pretty good success with in the past - low prices; fast efficient service - and got an email confirmation back of my purchase. Then 34 minutes later I get an email back that the domain registration failed because the domain had already been registered, but that GoDaddy would retry the registration (see email details below). I had logged out for the night by then, but when I checked my email the next morning and found that registration had failed, I did a WHOIS registration check on the domain and found that it had been registered to someone else, the day *after* I had attempted registration, and it had been registered through GoDaddy! What’s going on? Even if I had received the email the night before, the key wording “retry” indicated to me that GoDaddy was going to do what they could to get the domain registered for me. They should have at least given me a timely notification that they had given up trying to register the domain for me.
I spent a long time on the phone with customer support at GoDaddy; first with a support rep and then with a manager; the manager told me that it wasn’t their fault that their software was flawed and didn’t give the domain to the first customer that had attempted to register but had happily gone on to issue it to another customer. The manager blamed the circumstances of the situation on a practice of other registrars (namely NetworkSolutions.com) had of temporarily locking any domains that are unregistered that are the targets of a WHOIS inquiry, ostensibly in the interests of “protecting potential customers”. Working backwards in piecing together what happened, the manager speculated that there was a WHOIS search that went through Network Solutions servers, causing the domain to be locked before I had a chance to register it; when GoDaddy’s app tried to register the domain, it encountered the locked situation and was unable to register. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t my WHOIS check that caused the lock (because I’m pretty careful not to use Network Solutions for that very reason) so it may have been the other customer’s WHOIS check that locked the domain, ultimately to his advantage. Fortunately the domain is probably not worth a lot so this was more a lesson for me than anything else, but I post it here as a warning to anyone else trying to acquire domains.
Email timestamps:
21 Feb 2008 23:11:08 -0700 Domain Purchase Confirmation
21 Feb 2008 23:11:42 -0700 Domain Registration Failed; we will evaluate the error and retry (see detail below)
Dear [Customer],
The following domain name has failed to be registered:
[Something].COM
Error: [Something].COM: cannot register - already registered We will evaluate this error and retry the registration if appropriate. If we are unable to successfully register the domain name, your account will be credited accordingly. Please allow one business day for the refund to be processed. Please contact GoDaddy.com, Inc. if you need any further assistance.
Sincerely, GoDaddy.com, Inc.
22 Feb 2008 21:20 An error occurred when your order was placed. We will be refunding the cost of the order
22 Feb 2008 21:50:05 -0700 Refund Notice
22 Feb 2008 21:50:42 -0700 ITEM CANCELLATION CONFIRMATION