I wanted to let ya’ll know about those “Domains Priced Right” emails so that the questions that keep coming in will have an explanation we can point to. Yes, they’re legitimate (not a phishing scam), and here’s what’s going on. It’s long because.. well, it’s a blog and ya’ll may as well get the whole overview.

DrakNet opened in 1997 as a separate service to a now defunct non-profit site. In 1998, we had enough people on that adjunct service that we needed a full site for documentation to support them and our client base kept growing on from there. In the 11 years we’ve been doing this, we’ve had a number of adjunct services that we offered, sometimes through other companies (especially when we could get our clients a better deal).

The History of Domain Names

When we first opened, there was Internic. Remember them? That was back when you could still forge a from: email address and move someone’s domain for them if they changed their email address (a major loophole that caught a number of web sites that were the target of protests, including Rev. Phelps, the notorious hate-monger, by surprise.) In any case, there was really one place to get a dot com, and you had to deal with them. Then, the industry was deregulated.

We initially contracted with BulkRegister to provide domain names to our clients. It was, when it opened, a BtoB registrar in that they simply would not deal with you whatsoever and we operated as your defacto registrar because you had to come to us for everything. As domain name registration services evolved, prices came down and people got more control over their registrations to self-manage, an option that (at the time) BulkRegister didn’t offer. We also grew far beyond what we had anticipated, and began wishing that domain name management for people wasn’t something we had to deal with. We looked to move to an option that would allow us to keep domains branded to DrakNet, but gave our clients the ability to self-manage.

Our first reseller foray was with Dotster (remember them?), and we attempted to urge, cajole, and beg people to move their domains over - and, frankly, we really did think that people were going to move over there in droves. To our surprise, they did not. Dotster was fairly expensive, though, and and our primary reason for choosing them had been their no cost reseller’s interface, as well as an interface that we could brand totally and completely to match our site. By the time it was all said and done, we had our domain name portfolio split between the two, with many people purchasing domain names through there who never hosted here. (This “Dotster Interface” continues to be maintained today as it has for years.)

So, we threw our hands up, and offered both.

When we added GoDaddy, and why…

In 2004, people were talking about GoDaddy a lot - they were up and coming, outsourcing support to India was a big thing in the industry (which they swore not to do), and damn, were they cheap. We thought to ourselves “Gosh, maybe Dotster was just too expensive and that’s why people didn’t use it!” and so we purchased (yes, this time, it cost a few bucks) a Super Reseller Account from GoDaddy’s Reseller arm, Wild West Domains, and it became the “Red, White and Blue” site. We prepaid for four full years.

Of course, we still had people with us directly through BulkRegister, and we had people with the Dotster interface. We couldn’t force people with us to move anywhere because we can’t give someone’s credit card to a third party company to charge them, we had no ability to move the Dotster folks to GoDaddy’s interface… so, now we had three places you could have bought your domain name. And frankly, though we could easily tell the difference between them, we forgot that people pay us to know this stuff and not everyone does - when people wanted support, all they knew was they bought their domain name “from DrakNet”. Which, now, could have been through any one of the three, with our access to help being different depending on where it was purchased.

We did, admittedly, create a bit of a mess - our intentions were all noble at the time (save folks money, make less ourselves to give people better deals and more control and clear up the support desk so we could focus more on the hosting end), but in the end, a huge number of people actually preferred to pay higher registration fees so that if they had a problem, they could get support from people they knew, and not multi-national corporations.

This year, we decided to pare down all those choices - we can recommend cheap if people don’t want to buy names here, but since so many do, we gave up on the self-managed options. The confusion wasn’t worth it, and… well, there were other reasons to disengage.

The politics of Bob Parsons

We get a notice about a week ago that it’s time to re-up with WildWest (i.e. feed the GoDaddy fee machine to keep our right to sell their stuff), and that we have two months left on our contract.

GoDaddy’s made some moves that we’ve been vastly uncomfortable with. The millions spent on superbowl ads instead of infastructure were one issue. The whole “boobs sell domain names” GoDaddy Girls were another. All that, though, paled in comparison to some controversy involving GoDaddy’s founder.

In 2005, GoDaddy “Daddy” Bob Parsons made a blog post condoning torture and essentially threatening to post a video of folks jumping off the World Trade Center towers to remind everyone why torturing enemies is a-ok. The blogosphere reaction was swift, he did somewhat retract it, but it was well known, and considering our political stance, we were a bit appalled by our association.

Now, let me be clear - we really do wear our politics on our sleeve here. In that sense, I have nothing but respect for Bob Parsons opinions as a Conservative and a life long Republican (although I have to admit I don’t get the Conservative/Lifelong Republican slant when you take into consideration the “boobs sell domain names/Playboy Bunny becomes GoDaddy girl” thing). I am the very last person, and we are the very last company, to complain about any company taking their company and using it as a soapbox for their political views. I have no problem with it at all.

I also realize in doing so, there are some potential clients who may like everything we have to offer, and will choose not to host here because of the things we say or the type of sites that we make very clear that we support. And that’s ok with me.

Due to Bob Parsons’ posts, though, I felt that having DrakNet affiliated with his beliefs in any way was just the antithesis of our ethical premise. I wish him luck in his endeavors in fighting for more torture and bigger breasted GoDaddy girls, but I just really don’t want to be a part of it nor support it financially in any way.

Which brings us to this week…

It was with all this in mind that I logged into my Reseller’s Interface and clicked through to cancel my two Reseller accounts at the end of my billing period. In doing so, the system gave me an error that it couldn’t be completed at this time and to try again later. I logged out, went back the next day, and tried again - still the same error. So, I picked up the phone and called.

Now, since this is GoDaddy, I was prepared for the hard sell, and I wasn’t disappointed. When I finally divulged the political reason (which I had avoided throughout most of the conversation so as to avoid any conflict), the hard sell ended and I was informed that I was canceled. I asked what date the cancellation would officially take place so I could time announcements to my clients regarding the transition (as I had paid through June), and asked the gentleman to send me information on it. I was told that they couldn’t cancel at the end of the billing cycle and since I was canceling I was just being canceled now. (This despite the fact that the option, though broken, clearly exists on their web site.) I was also told that the shutdown was nearly immediate and letters were already going out to my clients as we spoke.

And so they were - I got one as we argued on the phone.

I have no doubt why they did it, and honestly, I doubt it was political - in canceling early, they made money for two months without providing any service, since I paid them for that reseller interface through June. They have also just kept DrakNet’s next two months of commissions, which would have been several hundred dollars. They also likely see a chance to take advantage of the confusion they instigate to poach clients, since their initial emails included a bold advertisement for web hosting (which could cause great confusion when the reseller they’re nuking is a competing web hosting company). They robbed us of the ability to make a smooth transition for our clients, which irks me quite a bit more than the commission loss, as many of you are emailing the support desk and asking whether the email is legitimate, hence this post.

We’ve had several clients outraged on our behalf, urging us to sue - frankly, it would cost us more in hourly fees to have the lawyer write the letter that GoDaddy would ignore than it would just to eat it and consider it a lesson learned. I suppose with the millions they spend on their boobie campaign, they need to make that money somehow, and if they’re that desperate that they exploit former clients like this, they can have it.

But that is what happened - we apologize to any clients that were confused. We did make the decision with two months transition time, but that transition time was taken out of our hands. If you purchased services through the “Red, White and Blue” site, you are now with “Domains Priced Right”, which is a default GoDaddy reseller account that is directly controlled by GoDaddy/WildWest Domains themselves. Your domains and other services should be maintained the same as they were, and your login information remains the same.

We’re not personally urging you to leave services with them, or take them away from them, based on this information. You’re all adults and have the ability and capacity to make up your own minds regarding who you choose to give your money to. We just wanted to let everyone know the decision we made, and why, and what happened when we attempted to responsibly implement that decision.

We also want to make clear that the information sent out by them to you was inaccurate in its description of the situation - we did not contract with “Domains Priced Right” without telling you, nor does this in any way affect direct services that you have with DrakNet. We have not sold the company, nor outsourced our hosting, nor anything else they may have implied with their email.

If ya’ll have any questions, feel free to give us a holler.

Tags: domain names

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under DrakNet News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.