Forgot To Renew My Domain And Godaddy Picked It

No, I didn't say that at all, Kay.

I do know, though, from personal experience, that Namecheap and other registrars will give you a domain back easily under some circumstances under which GoDaddy notoriously won't.

I said that GoDaddy (albeit without doing anything illegal or immoral) behaves very differently from Namecheap over several issues involving the potential to get extra money out of their clients. That's my opinion, and you're surely aware from countless other threads that it's the opinion of many others here, too. I recognise and respect that it's an opinion with which you may not agree, yourself, but it's at the very least not an unreasonable or unrealistic perspective, and clearly it's one shared by many.

And I said that in my opinion of GoDaddy, the way they habitually act in some of these regards, when you compare their behaviour with that of other registrars, does make them unethical, according to a dictionary definition of the word "ethics". That remains my opinion and I'm very pleased not to do business with them any more.

I didn't have some sort of "major incident" with them and leave in a huff, or anything like that. I've just gradually realised, over the last 3 years, by comparing them with others, how deeply unpleasant I find several aspects of their behavior, and I've gradually transferred out all my domains, as each was about a month away from the expiration of its registration. Actually I did so mostly following the advice of other trusted and respected members here who have also had their share of problems with GoDaddy. And with hindsight, I'm only sorry that I didn't do so more quickly.

I didn't use the word "social", Kay.

Countless other companies are apparently running registration/hosting businesses without resorting to behaviors of the GoDaddy type. I regard their collective behavior, not GoDaddy's, as the norm for the industry. GoDaddy is one of a group of domain-name registrars whose clients most of us are, and it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable, for these purposes, to compare their behavior with the norm for that group.

That's what I did, as a GoDaddy customer myself, and I decided it often compared really badly; that their routinely typical behavior wasn't even close to "up to scratch" for their "registrars group", and that I could do better elsewhere. And I have done.

In my opinion, over several similar and related issues, GoDaddy's behavior sucks. I don't claim that Namecheap would necessarily have produced a better result to the individual concerned in this specific, isolated incident, of course: that would be neither fair nor reasonable.

Sorry if I shouldn't have posted, on this occasion: I felt (and still feel) that I was able to offer a decent answer to Suzanne's perfectly reasonable question "How does ethics play into that?". People commonly judge "ethics" as if they're simply "morality": call me pedantic but they're actually two different things.

None of us is suggesting that GoDaddy did anything they weren't entitled to do, here. And nobody's suggesting that one has to continue doing business with people whose behavior one finds unacceptable compared with that of others in the same industry.

I'm not sure why this thread turned into a morality play and lectures about what ethics are and what they aren't.

As I said before - and I stand by it - this is BUSINESS only.

You register a domain for one year and pay for it. If you want to keep it you pay again after twelve months to register it for the next year. You can register for multiple years, have auto-renewal of registration, etc.

No domain registration site will hold a domain past the redemption period if someone wants to register it. Why would anyone think a domain service would wait five months for you to decide to pay $10.

I don't care for Godaddy and don't use them for anything - but this is about domain registration and taking care of your business like a business....nothing more. Of course, people make mistakes, change emails, forget to update contact info - it happens. But if you lose something as a result, it's not the other guy's fault.

But that's not the definition that we are all referring to here.


I took your advice, and the findings may surprise you:

http://dictionary.reference.com/


ethics
plural noun
1.
( used with a singular or plural verb ) a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture.

That's the first definition - don't you just love dictionaries? :-)


I don't think I'd be wrong in saying that that when the question is posed "is that ethical?", the default inference is/should be that the "ethics" referred to is that which deals with morality - as opposed to consensus.

I'm pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of people who read this felt that the issue was simply one of "right" and "wrong"; it is only you who decided to indulge in pedantry in a bid to showcase your "knowledge" and thus going off on a tangent.

I'm sure you're well aware that language is not merely "technical" - we follow language also in the "spirit" of what is meant.

This is just Common Sense 101 :-)

No doubt, one can come back with more pedantic points, but the bottom line is that the OP didn't ask the question to be given a lesson in the meaning of ethics; he merely wanted to know if it was right what GoDaddy did. This was all about the moral aspect of "ethics" - not the philosophical aspect you decided to throw in.

I'll leave you to deal with the "definitions" or patronise someone else - and allow others to help the OP.

Enjoy :-)