Yesterday, I got a phone call from GoDaddy. It seemed they had ran into some difficulties confirming my new Whois information and wanted me to fax them some kind of document that had my name and address on it. The person on the other end said a hydro or phone bill would be satisfactory. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem but I’m on vacation in California right now and I don’t generally bring my bills with me. However, this didn’t seem to matter to GoDaddy. The caller told me I had 24 hours to produce the documents or my domain would be disable.
Since I was driving during the call, I asked the caller to email me a GoDaddy fax number and I’ll think of some way to get them the documents. The GoDaddy rep said he would email me but of course he didn’t (this is typical GoDaddy customer service). When I got back to the beach house, I called GoDaddy tech support, who was able to give me the phone number of the domain dept but not their fax number. I call up the domain dept but they were closed for the day.
Evernote and ScanSnap To The Rescue
As I’ve stated, I don’t bring my bills with me when I go on vacation and I doubt anyone else does either. However, thanks to a service call Evernote, I have access to all my documents online. All I did was fire up Evernote and search for the documents GoDaddy wanted. I then emailed GoDaddy PDF copies since I never got their fax number. I asked GoDaddy to reply to my email saying they got my PDFs but of course they never replied. I called the domain dept the next morning and they said everything was in order.
Because my office is paperless and all my documents are available online thanks to Evernote, I was able to save my domain from GoDaddy hell. I can only imagine the trouble this would cause for a vacationing blogger who couldn’t access their documents online, especially under a 24 hour threat to produce it or lose it.
If you’ve never tried Evernote before, I highly recommend you do. They are one of the two key components I used to create a paperless office. The other component is the ScanSnap S1300 scanner by Fujitsu. I use the ScanSnap to scan all my documents into searchable PDF files. Those files are then automatically uploaded to Evernote. Scanning your documents and putting them on Evernote means you won’t have to worry about losing your domain while on vacation.
While GoDaddy is on my shit list, Evernote and the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 are on my BFF list.