I wanted to share some personal experiences that I had with Go Daddy and what I feel about it. I have been using Go Daddy for all my domains for the past 3 to 5 years. I have my own domains there along with some of my client domains. I started my first domain there and that made me purchase all my domains there itself. I did not know that it was a bad option until recently. This year my hosting services and domains are due to renewal in the next 10 days. I was looking forward to picking a good hosting provider to switch over. While doing that activity, I found out that my Whois data for my domain was public.
Before I explain further I would like to give a short description of what whois data is. I know you can find better descriptions and details online about Whois data. I'm not going to tell more about that but a short description that would probably be relevant for this article. There are many websites with which you can check the whois data of a domain. For example, https://www.whois.net/ is one such website that can give you the details. Whois data is the data about the domain owner. It can be an individual or even a company. I didn't know much about how my whois data can be protected. Only recently I paid a little bit more attention to it and identified that all my personal details were exposed publically with my domain's whois data.
I would not abuse much about Go Daddy but after seeing my data going public I realized that I have to add some privacy to my domains. When I checked for that option on the Go Daddy website, I noticed that I had to pay additionally to get domain privacy. This was so lame. I already felt that my annual renewal fee was way too much with go daddy because there were many other competitive domain providers who gave cheap domains. I was paying extra to renew my domains. Additionally, I was not even ready to pay for domain privacy as well.
One good thing about the internet is that we always have alternate options in such cases. When I checked the internet, I noticed that there were many service providers who provided privacy for the domains free of cost. That was the moment I decided that I have to move on by transferring my domains to other service providers. I explored for better options and found out Namecheap to be good. They offer free SSL along with free domain privacy. I initiated the transfer and the transfer is already complete. The yearly renewal fee was also cheap I should say. I paid around 8$ for 1-year registration. I moved 2 of my domains there to experiment and it was smooth. I will be moving my other domains as well soon.
I was also getting lots of spam emails and promotional offers which I never subscribed to. I used to even get calls and messages on my mobile about better website designing options. I didn't know that it was all because of my public domain whois data. After recently identifying the cause, I realized that it should be made private first and hence took this decision. I don't think I will be continuing to use any of the services from Go daddy anymore. The reason is not that they are bad or they are not providing a great service. The main reason is that I get some cheap alternatives elsewhere with better options. When there are cheap options available and if I still pay high, it is definitely not worth it.
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