This week I saw the worst domain situation easily in the last 15 years I have been building websites. The Godaddy support tech helping me said this was the worst situation they had seen in the 7 years he had been a tech. I’m going to try to describe to you how a website ends up in a situation where you don’t actually own it.
gaming ear buds

A few months back someone came to me wanting a website redesign. They owned a store front retail location, and the site looked dated. It was time for a re-design. This is like all the other retail shops I dealt with, so I was on board to help. I built the site in a development area, and when we were ready to launch I asked for their domain and web hosting info. They didn’t have a login for this, and apparently had to call the old web developer. The old web developer had the logins in a reseller account. We couldn’t do a forgot password since this would give us access to his whole reseller account. He agreed to transfer the domain out of the account so my client could login and control their domain. Then right around this time the old developer mentions they need to pay this high renewal bill because the domain will expire in a few days. No problem, we will just login and do that… famous last words.

Apparently mid transfer from Godaddy reseller account to Godaddy new client account, the domain expired. For whatever reason Godaddy couldn’t do anything about this since the main account person was old web developer (who convienently stops responding). My clients current old website that was up goes offline. Remember they are a retail store, and that website though old is still relevant with their location info. Godaddy tells me (the outside stranger) that the current owner (the old web guy) needs to pay some re-listing fee and renewal. All together its like 90 bucks. I would even have paid it if I could. The best Godaddy could offer is to go to some sort of reclaim my domain website and have my client submit scans of her ID and business docs to prove she owned this business.

Thats fine, this is the route we took. I had client scan all the docs and submit them. This process alone took a month with weekly calls to Godaddy from both the client and myself. We couldn’t get a status update or anything. The process was terrible. My client had now been without a website for 3 months and no longer owned the domain name to their store.

THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN! For one thing, Godaddy should have some sort of vetting with who becomes a reseller. For all I know this old web guy was a 19 yr old living in his grandmas basement. Godaddy and other domain companies should watch to catch these domains from terrible reseller accounts to release them to their owners. Web designers go out of business all the time, and this has to happen more often than what I’ve seen. My guess is that people escape with thier domains before something expires.

Let me tell you what I did to save this situation. I paid Godaddy’s backorder price and back ordered the domain name. Hoping to get first dibs on it when it became available. Then I checked the who is info every day for a week and say it was going to be on the open market in 11 days. Sure I could have told client, start trying to buy your domain back, but they have a store to run. At the beginning of this week, I became the proud owner of my clients business domain name. This shouldn’t happen, and think about if someone else had ordered this domain before me.

When you have a website, make sure you have a login to a dashboard with your domain name. Even if your web person is responsive now and does it all for you. Keep a login handy.