GoDaddy Might Accidentally be Dropping Your Domain

According to a LinkedIn post by Joe Youngblood GoDaddy is currently having what appears to be an intermittent issue with their automatic domain renewal system. Automated domain renewals allow a business owner to buy a domain and set the yearly renewal on autopilot without ever having to worry. What is supposed to happen is that if there’s a problem with your credit card on file the domain registrar (GoDaddy in this case) should email you with enough time to fix the issue and renew your domain.

What Joe and his team have discovered by managing client GoDaddy accounts is that their system is claiming that a payment method failed at random and set a domain to expire instead of autorenew and never emails the owner. Joe says that they just made a domain purchase for a client one day, and the next day GoDaddy posted a message into the account stating that their payment card on file was no longer working and that a domain would be expired if they didn’t fix the payment issue. This would be normal and helpful for a domain registrar to do, except the payment card was fine and the client didn’t recieve any notification email about the issue.

Joe goes on to state that they have been tracking this behavior for several months now and haven’t been able to get GoDaddy to admit the issue or fix it – even saying they have seen in-use domains dropping to the aftermarket likely due to this issue. Joe recommended in his post either logging in to your GoDaddy account at least once per month or even consider moving your domain to a new registrar. He linked to his list of the best domain registrars for 2022 where his top picks are Porkbun, Namecheap, and Name.com in that order. Dynadot also ranks higher than GoDaddy and NameSilo ranks just below them. All would be solid choices if you fnd this issue is impacting you across a lar

Losing a domain could be really frustrating and costly to your business harming your SEO and sales / leads instanteously, requiring a high upfront cost to regain your domain, and causing long-term damage to your business in a variety of ways. When domains drop to the aftermark companies like Huge Domains and others buy them with the hopes of selling them back to your business for anywhere between a 300% and 10,000% markup. Some businesses have spent thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to get their domains back after a failed renewal or hacking issue.

Be vigilant and at least log in to your domain account once a month to check for updates, warnings, or alerts and to avert a future disaster for your Dalllas business.