As Vaskovich explains in this e-mail, the day before Christmas he got a voice mail from GoDaddy saying that they were suspending his domain seclists.org. One minute later he received an e-mail from them that the domain “has been suspended for violation of the GoDaddy.com Abuse Policy.”

Normally, GoDaddy doesn’t respond to inquiries about why they have suspended a domain for a business day or two, but he was able to prod them into revealing that they had shut down the domain because MySpace had asked them to. A list of 34,000 MySpace user names and passwords was posted to the very popular Full-Disclosure list and therefore archived by seclists.org. Instead of contacting Vaskovich, MySpace approached GoDaddy and had them shut off his domain.

Before I get to GoDaddy’s behavior, I must wonder what MySpace’s goal is here. The list of usernames and passwords went out on a mailing list and thousands of outsiders have it already, irrespective of whether the archived version is available. The cat’s out of the bag and MySpace, at a minimum, must void the passwords and force those users to reset theirs. What is accomplished by taking the list down? They only reinforce the reasonable conclusion that they don’t know what they are doing. And why not go through the site admin? As Vaskovich said himself: “I would cancel my [MySpace] account if I was pathetic enough to have one.”

GoDaddy’s Policies

So what’s GoDaddy’s excuse? I can imagine that posting usernames and passwords is reasonable grounds for taking action, but what exactly does their policy say? GoDaddy’s Legal Agreements page has a lengthy list of policies, including their “Universal Terms of Service”. Let’s review some excerpts:

Go Daddy reserves the right to terminate Services if Your usage of the Services results in, or is the subject of, legal action or threatened legal action, against Go Daddy or any of its affiliates or partners, without consideration for whether such legal action or threatened legal action is eventually determined to be with or without merit.

OK, that’s pretty clear. All someone (MySpace for example) has to do is threaten GoDaddy and GoDaddy has the right to cancel your service. But the next paragraph is the one that really caught my eye:

Except as set forth below, Go Daddy may also cancel Your use of the Services, after thirty (30) days, if You are using the Services, as determined by Go Daddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to: activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which You conduct business; activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; activities that are tortuous, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; … [emphasis mine]

Vulgar? Obscene? Embarrassing? Talk about ThePotCallingTheKettleBlack.com! (Predictably, that name is parked and owned by a domain broker.) GoDaddy practically invented vulgarity. Their Super Bowl ads, worthy of a class of 14-year-old boys for their creativity, embarrass the NFL, not to mention most decent people who watch them. I enjoy a good dirty joke as much as anyone, but GoDaddy’s softcore attempts at humor just fail.

GoDaddy also claimed to Wired that they gave Vaskovich “close to an hour” to respond to them, but Vaskovich posted the voice mail and e-mail showing that this claim was false. It’s a “he said-GoDaddy said” thing, but I believe Vaskovich. Even if they had provided an hour, so what? They didn’t provide a phone number, just a generic e-mail address (abuse@godaddy.com) and they don’t claim to respond to it promptly.

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons has a popular blog
in which he doesn’t hesitate to criticize others. He’s been conspicuously silent about the outrage over his company’s actions. I can’t imagine that many people have respect for GoDaddy they are likely to lose as a result of this and security experts are a small market, so maybe Parsons doesn’t care. But we’re still looking for a credible response.

Feature Set:

GoDaddy is not a bad value, but lacks a lot of features that competitors offer for virtually the same price. GoDaddy offers 5 GB of disk space storage, 500 email accounts, 250 GB monthly data transfer, and limited on languages/platform support. Many other web hosting providers offer more for less. All plans with GoDaddy include these features: World Class Data Center, online set-up and instant account activation, FrontPage Extensions, 24/7 FTP Access, best-of-breed routers, firewalls and servers; Web Site Statistics, free setup, daily backups, 24/7 monitoring, 24×7 email, telephone and web-based tech support, 24/7 physical security and secure SSL Certificates (an optional extra) GoDaddy places their emphasis more on technology than on customer support.

Customer Service:

Customer Service is what separates great hosts from the mediocre. GoDaddy offers an array of support options, such as Email Support, Telephone Support, an FAQ Section on their Web Site and access to various user guides. Unfortunately, there are a few items that are definite drawbacks with their Customer Service. If you use their Email Support, you will not get a response for 10 to 12 hours. Too long for most customers! GoDaddy even posts this right on their Web Site. I wouldn’t be boasting about a 10 to 12 hour response time. If you don’t want to wait for an email, there phone support is a little better. The average waiting period we experienced was 30 minutes. This is still too long of a wait and much longer than the wait we experienced with other web hosting companies that we reviewed. The tech I finally did speak with was not well-informed about the products or services offered and not eager to help. Unfortunately, Go Daddy does not offer live chat, a valuable customer service tool that allows you to receive instant help online.

Control Panel:

GoDaddy is not too difficult to use, even without a technical background. Most functions within the Account Management tool are similar to other control panels, but GoDaddy.com’s panel lacks certain features that competitors offer. On the plus side, with GoDaddy.com you can perform account management tasks, email management, web security, database setup and management, manage statistic tools and install FrontPage Extensions (without these supported by your host, you can’t take advantage of all the perks FrontPage offers).

Summary:

Overall, GoDaddy has some catching up to do with the competition. Other than that, they are basically easy to use, reliable, and I definitely recommend them.