[SOLVED] How important is it to buy out the .com domain?

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Luke
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Post by Luke »

When I worked at my old job, the only company my boss would use was network solutions, and while expensive ($35/domain name), we never had any problems with them other than small things, and any of those small things were remedied immediately. They had an excellent control panel as well if I remember right.
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

I used them for a time. And never found them to particularly useful. I remember waiting on the phone for them for 25 minutes to try to resolve an issue, then their on-hold message changed from all operators are busy to please call back during business hours since during my hold time they had closed.

GoDaddy answers their phones within a minute usually and all team member speak clean English know what they are talking about for the most part. I like that more than anything.
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Oren
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Post by Oren »

I'm sorry Everah but you are biased :P

Now to Ambush Commander's question... don't use Godaddy - they suck, real real suck.
And if you won't renew before it expires, the moment it will expire they are going to sell it to some other company (which work for them, I'm sure) and this other company will make an auction on your domain with a starting price of $75.
Their support on the phone also suck!

In case someone didn't get the point: GoDaddy sucks!
Wanna proof? Here: http://forevergeek.com/articles/godaddy_sucks.php
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Luke
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Post by Luke »

oren, I'd just like to point out that calling everah biased (incorrect word here) is kind of hypocritical when you are just as opinionated (right word) about this
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

Dude, I just had two domains expire I didn't renew my autobill credit card. I went in three weeks after the expiration, paid for the domains and was back in action in minutes.

I am a little biased, but it is only because I have never had a bad experience with them when it comes to domains. Ever.
alvinphp
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Post by alvinphp »

I am with Everah. Godaddy is top notch. Like he said, their service desk is the best I have seen considering I don't give them all that much money (relatively speaking). The ton of ads you see when you buy a new domain name can be annoying, but there is an option to skip most of it so it is not bad if you know what you are doing.

I did try to buy an expiring domain from godaddy and that was not fun. As soon as it expired there was another wait, then another wait, then godaddy automatically put it on an auction. Luckily I got it for cheap though, but it took a loooong time.
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

GoDaddy is the number two Google hit for "domain name" (second to the Wikipedia article :-D) With such a large customer base, I'm sure there have been good experiences and bad experiences. Its alright: with the help of a quickly typed up "Domain = Valuable Investment" proposal sheet, I have gotten the purchase of both the dot com and dot net domains authorized. Yay! For convenience's sake, I've purchased them through the same webhost, just an extra dollar.
When I worked at my old job, the only company my boss would use was network solutions, and while expensive ($35/domain name)
That seems very expensive! But they also seem to be a quite popular domain name registrar.
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Post by alvinphp »

Forgot to answer the question. I would definitely get the .com. I personally would not buy a domain name unless the .com was also available.
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jayshields
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Post by jayshields »

For the UK users here. I use 123-reg. I have never had any problems.
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dreamscape
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Post by dreamscape »

I'd get at least the .com if available...

.net I'm not sure... maybe, maybe not, but definitely get the .com
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JayBird
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Post by JayBird »

jayshields wrote:For the UK users here. I use 123-reg. I have never had any problems.
Me too!
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TheMoose
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Post by TheMoose »

Oren wrote:I'm sorry Everah but you are biased :P

Now to Ambush Commander's question... don't use Godaddy - they suck, real real suck.
And if you won't renew before it expires, the moment it will expire they are going to sell it to some other company (which work for them, I'm sure) and this other company will make an auction on your domain with a starting price of $75.
Their support on the phone also suck!

In case someone didn't get the point: GoDaddy sucks!
Wanna proof? Here: http://forevergeek.com/articles/godaddy_sucks.php
That article provides no objective reasons as to why GoDaddy is better or worse than any other registrar, other than the fact that the person writing it doesn't want to deal with actually reading things and wants it to be done for him.

As for the auctioning of domains, unless you have proof of it, it doesn't exist. I've had domains expire (forget to set autorenew), and within a few days after they were freely available to register again.

While I agree that GoDaddy tends to try to sell many services at once, it is not a good enough reason for me to deem their low prices and good support as "unworthy" of my business.
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Oren
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Post by Oren »

TheMoose wrote:As for the auctioning of domains, unless you have proof of it, it doesn't exist.
I have a solid proof: They did it to me.
Maybe they had checked your PR before and your domains had 0 or 1 PR. I had a domain with PR 2 and that's what they did.
We tried to talk to them and explain them the situation* but it wouldn't help.

*Situation:

A web hosting company ran a website contest. It was called something like "Site with no images" or something like that.
The idea was to create a website without using images at all - only HTML and CSS.
Anyway, my friend did the design and I coded it and we won second place. Our prize: 1 domain + web hosting for one year.
So one of the workers there registered the domain for us with his details.
After a year, we still wanted the domain, so we waited for it to expire so we can register it before anybody else. We checked few times a day in each of the days before the expiration day... the moment it got released we couldn't buy it since that's their policy: they keep it for another 90 days in which the original registrar can still get it, but it will cost him much more than if he had done this on time.
Now we tried to contact this guy but he simply ignored us. After a long time he finally agreed to talk with us but then he had some stupid excuses such as I forgot my password and other things. So we contacted GoDaddy and tried to explain the whole situation and we told them that this guy would confirm on phone that he gives us the domain (he agreed to help us and do this finally), but GoDaddy just made our life tough and it didn't work. So we thought: "Ok, we'll wait 90 days then get it back then". Again we checked few times a day in the days before the last day... But the moment it got released, some company got it and put it for auction, with a $75 starting price.

Now this is crap, anyone would agree that it was our domain legally and we should have gotten it for the normal price of about $8 - but officially it wasn't our domain because of stupid technical reasons.

Is that a good enough proof?

Edit: Oh by the way, I checked a year later but the bastards registered it for 2 years. Don't worry, they won't get a penny from us - while they had already spent at least $16
:troll:

Edit 2: Maybe the fact that it was a 4-letter-dot-net-domain made them buy it while they didn't buy yours.
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

we couldn't buy it since that's their policy: they keep it for another 90 days in which the original registrar can still get it, but it will cost him much more than if he had done this on time.
Part of this is true, part of it is not. It is true that you have 90 days to reregister your domain name. This is not a GoDaddy policy but an ICANN policy I believe. Any time during that time you can reregister the expired domain for the same regular price of the domain plus any reasonable administrative fees incurred by the registrar. GoDaddy does not add fees to late/expired registrations. I know this for a fact since I just reregistered an expired domain name (2 actually) a few days ago for the exact same price I paid last year.

They are within their rights to charge an administrative fee. I think in your case you suffered something different in that your name was never on the domain. Since you were not the contact name on the domain, you were not entitled to any rights on the domain name which complicated things a bit. That is my opinion as I have no facts to substantiate that part of my statements.

But as for not being able to reregister and expired name and being charged a bunch for it, that is simply not true in all cases as I can verify that I did not incur any of that when I went through that very circumstance just a few days ago.
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TheMoose
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Post by TheMoose »

But how can you hold that against GoDaddy when you have no proof it was their doing? GoDaddy did nothing wrong in your situation (as far as evidence goes). They held the domain for 90 days as is in their TOS, and as soon as it went public, a domain squatter got it. You can't pass judgment on GoDaddy because a squatter registered a domain you wanted.
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