Yesterday, GoDaddy sent me an email saying the Whois information on JohnChow.com was invalid and needed to be corrected. The email stated I had five days to correct and respond to the problem.
Dear John Chow,
Please consider this message as official notification that the contact information provided for the domain name registration for johnchow.com appears to be invalid, or incomplete. Please update the information within 5 business days as per Section 3 of the Registration Agreement, which you agreed to at the time you registered your domain name. For your convenience, we have attached a copy of the current contact information listed for your domain name. If the update has not been accomplished within 5 business days, this can be grounds for cancellation of your domain name registration as per Section 6 of the Registration Agreement. Please respond to this email to confirm the changes have been made. Thank you for your cooperation.
Thank you,
GoDaddy.com, Inc.
You would think from reading the above email, I had five days to correct the problem. However, within a few hours of sending that email, GoDaddy disable my domain and redirected it to a page showing the following message.
I was on the road when all this happened and didn’t know that my domain was disable until I started receiving text messages from a bunch of readers. That’s when I logged into my account and found that email. My first thought was, “WTF! It said I had five days to correct this!”
Logging into my GoDaddy account, I found that indeed, the contact info for johnchow.com did had an error. The city of Richmond was missing the R. I corrected the error and responded to GoDaddy. However, their invalid whois team was gone for the day. That meant my blog would be down until they return the next day.
I tried contacting others at GoDaddy (other readers tried as well) but the response was that only the invalid whois team can undo a redirect and they don’t work 24/7. No one was able to provide an answer as to why my domain was shut down before the five day notice expired.
For shutting down my domain on the first day of a five day notice and causing my blog to be inaccessible for a full day, GoDaddy is on my shit list. Until I get a response on how this happened, I will never use GoDaddy again for any domain services and I don’t recommend anyone else use them.