Category Archives: GoDaddy

Scott Wagner Joins GoDaddy As COO, CFO

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GoDaddy formally announced its new Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Scott Wagner, effective immediately. Wagner was a KKR Capstone Member and the leader of KKR’s portfolio operations team in North America, who stepped in as GoDaddy’s interim CEO last summer. Wagner began working with GoDaddy a short time after KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures made strategic investments in the company in 2011.

“It’s not often you see an operator of Scott’s caliber and experience elect to join the portfolio company he was ‘dropped in’ to assist,” said Blake Irving, who became GoDaddy’s CEO in January. “Scott really kick-started our transformation back in July. He’s helped to develop our strategy and mature our operations – and he shares our passion to change the world for small business. Scott’s decision to join us speaks to both the power of our opportunity at GoDaddy and our people. There’s no better sign of confidence than to join full-time. This absolutely accelerates the phenomenal momentum we’ve created together.”

“It’s pretty simple. I believe in this company and what it can be – this is truly a rare opportunity to build a top-tier Internet company. Blake is an A-plus technology executive, a focused leader and a great guy to boot,” said Scott Wagner. “The overall GoDaddy team is terrific, and we’re building momentum month-to-month. I’m in it for the long haul and energized to be a part of it!”

Since Irving took over as GoDaddy CEO, he has opened offices in Sunnyvale, California and near Seattle, Washington. Irving has also had enormous success with recruiting top-tier tech talent in what is a highly competitive hiring climate. Notable hires include CTO and EVP Platforms Elissa Murphy, who joined from Yahoo! and previously worked at Microsoft; Chief Architect Arnold Blinn, a 17-year Microsoft veteran; SVP International James Carroll, a former executive at Yahoo! and GM at Microsoft; EVP eCommerce Phil Bienert, a former AT&T executive; SVP and GM Hosting Jeff King, who is a 17-year veteran in online commerce, most recently with eBay; SVP Design and User Experience Rick Eames, who worked at both Apple and Microsoft; SVP Vertical Marketing Bob Lund, a former executive with Hewlett Packard; SVP Corporate Development David Popowitz, a former head of Credit Suisse Technology Banking; as well as, VP and GM Site Builder Products Raj Mukherjee, formerly of Google.

Wagner had served KKR for 13 years, working with its portfolio companies as both an advisor and stand-in executive with a particular focus on technology, media and payments. Under his watch as interim CEO from July 2012 to January 2013, GoDaddy launched new products for customers, such as mobile websites and Reseller Hosting and opened an office in Hyderabad, India to serve customers there.

GoDaddy sales hit nearly $1.3 billion last year. The company now serves more than 11 million paying customers worldwide and is the largest Web hosting and domain name registrar on the planet. GoDaddy leverages its award-winning talent and personalized service approach to help small businesses create their digital identity, build websites and harness the power of the Internet.

GoDaddy was honored in the 2012 Fortune magazine’s Best Companies to Work For list and has also been recognized for dozens of other national and local employment awards recently, including Alfred P. Sloan’s Flexible Workplace (6 years) and Valley’s Best Places to Work (9 consecutive years).

GoDaddy has offices throughout Arizona and in Sunnyvale, Calif.; Denver, Colo.; Kirkland/Bellevue, Wash.; Washington, D.C. and Hiawatha, Iowa; as well as The Netherlands, India and Singapore.

Go Daddy Opens Global Technology Center in Tempe, Arizona in 2014 Creating 300 New Jobs

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GoDaddy with Governor Jan Brewer, and representatives from Arizona State University Research Park, Ryan Companies, the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council (GPEC), announced plans for a major Arizona expansion with an unusual groundbreaking for its GoDaddy Global Technology Center in Tempe. The ceremony featured the Governor and GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving “cementing” their footprints at the property as a representation of the tech giant’s “expanding footprint” in the valley and around the world. Their footprints are destined for display in the new building.

The GoDaddy Global Technology Center is a planned two-story, 150,000 sq. ft. facility. It will provide a creative new space for 1,300 employees, including engineers, developers and customer care representatives. GoDaddy currently employs more than 3,400 people worldwide, with a significant portion of the personnel based in Arizona. GoDaddy’s Tempe expansion creates 300 new jobs to start with room for further growth.

“GoDaddy is well on its way to being the largest platform for small businesses around the world,” said CEO Blake Irving. “GoDaddy is changing people’s lives by helping people turn their dreams and ideas into real businesses – and this new facility is a key piece to making that happen. This location in the heart of the ASU Research Park is a sweet spot; it’s in the hub of the state’s technology corridor and gives us the space we need for the years ahead.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer added, “GoDaddy is a true success story. It started out with a handful of people and a dream. Now, GoDaddy is among the largest Valley employers. They are ranked as one of the Valley’s ‘Best Places to Work’ year after year and have expanded each of the 16 years they’ve operated in our state. This is a great example of the type of company we had in mind when we championed legislation two years ago aimed at putting our economy back on the right track. The hard work is paying off and we are proud to have played a role in helping keep GoDaddy firmly rooted in Arizona.”

“Tempe is thrilled to welcome GoDaddy and its talented employees to our community,” said Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell. “They are a great fit for our community, where 20 percent of all jobs are in the technology sector. Tempe is known as a smart, fun and thriving city, and we are happy to welcome GoDaddy into that mix. Tempe and GoDaddy are great partners now and into the future.”

“The ASU Research Park is the perfect location for companies to align with our large number of faculty members at one of the world’s leading research universities,” said ASU Executive Vice President, Treasurer and CFO Morgan R. Olsen. “Collaboration with the ASU Research Park companies offers students the chance to enhance their education and gain skills that can result in jobs for them post-graduation. The ASU Research Park currently houses more than 47 companies and employs 4,600 people. We welcome GoDaddy to our community and believe their presence will be beneficial for all.”

“The fact GoDaddy chose to expand its already prominent Arizona footprint speaks volumes about our competitive business environment and favorable tax structure for corporations,” said Sandra Watson, President and CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority. “The ACA is committed to working with companies around the state, connecting them with every possible resource to help expand operations, invest in Arizona and create quality jobs.”

“As one of the nation’s most recognizable brands, GoDaddy is one of the region’s greatest success stories,” said GPEC President and CEO Barry Broome. “With more than 2,600 employees across 10 locations in Greater Phoenix, including their global headquarters in Scottsdale, they’re one of our most productive economic drivers. We’re proud GoDaddy continues to call Arizona home.”

“This is an extremely important project for Ryan Companies because it continues and strengthens a long-standing business relationship with the ASU Research Park and ASU Foundation as well as begins a new business relationship with GoDaddy,” said Ryan Construction Vice President of Development Molly Ryan Carson. “We are proud to be a part of the continued business growth in Tempe.” Construction on the new GoDaddy facility in the ASU Research Park begins later this month. The center is expected to open in 2014.

Go Daddy opening a Seattle office and hiring executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and eBay

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Go Daddy is expanding again with a permanent Seattle-area office in Kirkland or Bellevue, Washington set to open in June. Several new employees are already operating out of a temporary office near Carillon Point in Kirkland, as Go Daddy is recruiting technologists with great success.

CEO Blake Irving recently hired veteran executives from Microsoft, Google, Amazon and eBay, among others. “The reason to join Go Daddy is simple … you can make a difference at a company that is hell-bent on changing the world,” Irving said. “We have the opportunity to help small businesses in ways no one else in the space is doing right now. This is a chance to change lives in profound ways, to expand the world’s economy by empowering people to start, grow and successfully run their small businesses. I’ve yet to meet a great engineer or developer who doesn’t want to leave their mark on this world in a meaningful way.”

Irving recently hired Chief Architect Arnold Blinn, a tech heavyweight, who spent 17 years at Microsoft Corporation in senior architect roles. “Go Daddy’s mission is to help small business owners and entrepreneurs succeed by helping them leverage the power of the Internet, whether for back-end business solutions, online marketing, SEO or website building,” Blinn said. “We have some fun technical challenges en route to solving our ‘customer needs’ at scale. I jumped at the chance to be a part of what’s going on at Go Daddy right now and I believe other Seattle developers and engineers will be attracted to this opportunity too.”

Go Daddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar. The privately-held company is backed by KKR, Silver Lake Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures and is rapidly expanding both domestically and internationally.

Go Daddy has hired a range of top-tier talent, with a diverse skill set, to work out of its offices in Kirkland/Bellevue, Sunnyvale, Calif., Denver, Colo., Hiawatha, Iowa and its corporate headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.

The new recruits who have joined Go Daddy include:

• Chief Architect Arnold Blinn, 17-year Microsoft veteran, 25 patents issued and another 25 pending in electronic commerce, digital rights management, photo manipulation and other online services. Blinn is the founder and architect of eShop, one of the Web’s first and most successful early eCommerce businesses, which was purchased by Microsoft in 1996. Since then he has served as Partner Architect and incubation leader for some of Microsoft’s most innovative products, including Xbox Live, Windows Live and MSN.

• CTO & EVP Platforms Elissa Murphy was Yahoo! VP of engineering for cloud services and helped lead Yahoo to be a force with code contributions for the latest version of Hadoop. She also spent 13 years at Microsoft and began her technology career in computer security with 5th Gen Systems and the Norton Group, a division at Symantec responsible for Norton Antivirus and other Norton products. Murphy brings expertise in global-scale platforms, big data and predictive analytics. She was recognized as one of the Top Women in Seattle Tech by TechFlash and currently has 14 patents issued, with another 19 patents pending.

• SVP and GM Hosting Jeff King is a 17-year veteran in online commerce. Most recently an executive at eBay, Jeff served in a number of roles over a 10-year span, including Head of Platform Strategy for X.commerce and Senior Director of Product management for the Search, and Trust and Safety teams.

• EVP eCommerce Phil Bienert joins from AT&T, where he led the online marketplace as SVP Consumer Digital Experience. He provides broad leadership and end-to-end customer expertise in product marketing, sales, service, design, strategy, social media, technology and operations. Bienert also led Customer Experience at CitiGroup after spending his early career at Volvo and Ford Motor Company driving brand and consumer product strategies.

• SVP Design and User Experience Rick Eames, worked for Microsoft most recently and Apple previously. He will focus on revamping Go Daddy’s design architecture.

• VP and GM Domains Mike McLaughlin joined from eBay where he helped build eBay Motors into the world’s largest online automotive marketplace. Most recently McLaughlin was COO at Glyde, a leading marketplace for buying and selling consumer electronics.

• Distinguished Engineer Scott Isaacs was a Microsoft developer best known for the development of Dynamic HTML, which is at the core of what is commonly termed Ajax.

• VP and GM Site Builder Products Raj Mukherjee previously led the Google SMB application business, after a successful career at Microsoft. He is overhauling Go Daddy’s website design and eCommerce offerings.

• Head of Commerce Sandeep Grover is a former Amazon Product Lead and now oversees Go Daddy’s eCommerce offerings, including Quick Shopping Cart.

Irving, who took over as Go Daddy CEO in January and marked his 100th day on the job yesterday, is the former Chief Product Officer at Yahoo! and a long-time Microsoft executive. He is evolving Go Daddy’s products and services while making them available to a wider global audience. In February, Go Daddy opened its Silicon Valley office and acquired M.dot, a mobile app that allows users to easily create a website from a smartphone.

.org Go Daddy Project 94 Results: 27 of 42 domains sold for a total of $88,642 (fs.org $9,250, ts.org $9,065)

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From March 18 to April 4, 2013, Go Daddy Auctions offered on an extended 17 day auction 42 rare, valuable one and two character .org domain names. 27 of the total 42 domains were sold in this auction with a total price of $88,642 USD. The average sales price for the 27 domains was $3,283. The top domains were fs.org and ts.org getting more than $9,000 each.

Here is the complete list of the 27 sold .org domains:

Domain: Final Price: Asking Price: Bids:
fs.org $9,250 $1,000 39
ts.org $9,065 $1,000 63
nh.org $8,600 $1,000 50
lo.org $7,400 $1,000 59
bp.org $5,325 $1,000 43
hb.org $5,223 $1,000 65
e3.org $4,900 $10 85
zi.org $3,650 $1,000 41
cq.org $3,300 $1,000 57
qd.org $2,827 $1,000 41
wz.org $2,627 $1,000 32
b3.org $2,550 $10 39
2c.org $2,500 $10 67
nq.org $2,500 $1,000 14
zq.org $2,500 $1,000 45
zg.org $2,175 $1,000 21
7d.org $2,001 $10 74
c2.org $1,803 $10 57
3p.org $1,800 $10 44
xq.org $1,725 $1,000 22
5v.org $1,325 $10 98
i6.org $1,125 $10 35
2w.org $1,026 $10 41
h9.org $1,025 $10 83
7e.org $910 $10 48
k4.org $810 $10 40
6j.org $700 $10 64

One letter .org domains had a starting price of $50,000 and didn’t get any bids. Go Daddy required a $5,000 deposit in order to make a bid and that didn’t make it any easier. Here is the list of the 15 one letter .org domains that didn’t get any bids:

Domain Name Starting Price
a.org $50,000
c.org $50,000
d.org $50,000
e.org $50,000
h.org $50,000
i.org $50,000
k.org $50,000
n.org $50,000
o.org $50,000
q.org $50,000
s.org $50,000
t.org $50,000
v.org $50,000
w.org $50,000
z.org $50,000

Namejet auctions 39 1-2 character .ORG domain names in April – Project 94

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Namejet will auction 39 1-2 character .ORG domain names starting April 6 as part of Project 94. In partnership with eNom, NameJet is now offering this exclusive list of Premium .ORG domains for auction. For more information, see What is Project 94?. The starting bid for all domains is $69 and the 39 auctions close on different dates spanning from the 6th of April up until the 15th of April.

When you place a valid backorder on a Project 94 .ORG domain at NameJet, you will be required at that time to supply additional information that the Registry will use to qualify you as a valid Registrant. Please be aware the Registry will directly review and reject any backorder application that either does not meet the criteria or any that are found to have provided invalid, fraudulent or blank information in the required fields. NameJet does not make the decision on who is qualified and will pass the information provided to the Registry for approval. All bidders are required to answer this question before making a bid:
“How do you intend to use the .ORG domain(s)?”
Please read the “.ORG PIR Usage Statement” below so you know what you should reply.

Project 94 domains are expected to go over $5000 after auctions open, so it is recommended that any qualified participant becomes a Nemejet Verified Bidder previous to the beginning of the auction.

Here is the complete list:

Domain Closing Date
0.org  4/6/2013
0d.org  4/6/2013
0n.org  4/6/2013
31.org  4/6/2013
b.org  4/6/2013
pj.org  4/7/2013
57.org  4/7/2013
5c.org  4/7/2013
8.org  4/7/2013
9.org  4/7/2013
7.org  4/8/2013
d3.org  4/8/2013
j.org  4/8/2013
ur.org  4/8/2013
yk.org  4/8/2013
r.org  4/11/2013
75.org  4/11/2013
6.org  4/11/2013
3g.org  4/11/2013
1w.org  4/11/2013
0p.org  4/12/2013
0t.org  4/12/2013
yo.org  4/12/2013
5.org  4/12/2013
p.org  4/12/2013
o7.org  4/13/2013
z8.org  4/13/2013
4.org  4/13/2013
6g.org  4/13/2013
9q.org  4/13/2013
2.org  4/14/2013
3.org  4/14/2013
zp.org  4/14/2013
r4.org  4/14/2013
u.org  4/14/2013
l.org  4/15/2013
z9.org  4/15/2013
zl.org  4/15/2013
1.org  4/15/2013

As part of Project 94, from March 18 to 28, 2013, Go Daddy Auctions is offering 42 rare, valuable one and two character .org domain names. Starting today, if you want to participate in the auction, you can request approval. The 42 domains have starting prices from $10 to $50,000. One letter .org domains have a starting price of $50,000, 2 letter .org domains have a starting price of $1,000 and the 2 character domains have a $10 starting price.

.ORG PIR Usage Statement

Project94 is the allocation of 94 1-2 character .ORG domain names that have never been released for registration. These names will be made available to registrants who not only reflect the core attributes of the .ORG domain but also reinforce the trust and value of the .ORG brand.

Consistent with the Registry’s mission to provide a trusted platform for the expression of ideas, knowledge, and causes which promote the public good on the Internet, qualified applicants are those whose mission and purpose are consistent in all respects with promoting positive influences for the betterment of society. Subject to these criteria and without limiting the possibilities, the following are examples:

  • Wiki or wiki-like organizations, which provide and promote collaborative education and information forums.
  • Local community groups, who use or intend to use one or more of the Domain Names to foster and promote public good.
  • Educational organizations
  • Sports teams and/or sport-related organizations
  • Non-profit/charity/advocacy organizations
  • Open Source/collaborative project organizations
  • CSR, fundraising, or charity organizations
  • Commercial enterprises that offer non-harmful goods or services to the public on a non-discriminatory basis

Applicant agrees that their intended use is consistent with the mission of the Registry and acknowledges that any improper use of the domains or failure to comply with the stated mission will be a violation of these terms. Applicant must certify that all information provided by the applicant is in the usage statement is true and correct.

Go Daddy’s Project 94 .org auction gets a 1 week silent extension

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Go Daddy’s Project 94 .org auction was supposed to end today. Instead auctions end 1 week from now. Go Daddy decided on a 1 week “silent” extension. There has not been any mention anywhere for this extension and of course no reasoning.

The only reasoning for this decision would be Go Daddy’s greed. The auction was supposed to run for 10 days, from March 18 to 28, 2013, offering 42 rare, valuable one and two character .org domain names. Now auctions will end up lasting a whopping 17 days. The problem is that there have been very few bids and that is a result of Go Daddy’s arrogance. One letter .org domains don’t have a single bid because of the $50,000 starting price and of course because of Go Daddy’s unreasonable request for a $5,000 deposit for  total bids over $50,000.

One letter .org domains have a starting price of $50,000, 2 letter .org domains have a starting price of $1,000 and the 2 character domains have a $10 starting price.

Even total bids of $2,500 to $50,000 require a $100 deposit that you can’t actually use for the auctions. Last time I checked you can’t make a combined payment using both GoodAsGold funds and a different payment option such as a credit card.

Even 2 letter .org domains don’t have many bids. TS.org is leading with $4,000 but another 5 2 letter domains have bids of not more than $1,025.

Will there be any 1 letter .org sales? I don’t think so, unless an end user wants to invest in one of those domains AND they have planned ahead and made the $5,000 deposit risking they don’t win and they never see that money again. Deposits are non refundable. I will certainly will not be making a single bid in this auction.

Here is the complete list of the 42 domains.

Go Daddy and Nominet help teenagers and students

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Two separate initiatives from Go Daddy and Nominet aim to help teenagers and students. Go Daddy is offering 10 students $10,000 each in the Go Daddy .ME Scholarship program and Nominet launched a campaign against trolling and online bullying.

Nominet’s internet advice site, knowthenet.org.uk has launched a campaign highlighting the impact of trolling and online bullying.

Research commissioned by Knowthenet found that 19 year old males are the teenagers most likely to have experienced the problem. The survey also revealed that teens appear to be suffering in silence, as only a third of those suffering online abuse said they would report it to the social network.
The survey asked more than 2,000 13 – 19 year olds about their experiences of online trolling and bullying and shows that whilst 2 in 3 teens have been affected by the problem, hardly any would turn to parents or teachers for support as their first reaction.
A trolling hub has been launched on Knowthenet as part of the campaign, which offers a simple definition of trolling, a video of a victim telling their story, advice for teenagers and parents, and a helpful checklist of what to do if you’re experiencing trolling.

At Go Daddy eligible U.S. students can submit applications at GoDaddyScholarship.me. Each year, thousands of students apply, but only 10 are selected to win a $10,000 scholarship. Applicants need to submit a 500-word essay describing how the Internet or Internet technology has helped them and how they envision benefiting from it in the future. Essays are judged on quality, creativity and originality.

“This year’s applicants are off-the-charts, wicked smart,” said Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving. “We’re seeing compelling stories from conventional technology students, entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners … all looking for a little help with their college tuition. If you’re a college student who is passionate about technology, let’s hear your story. In our eyes, you are our future employees, customers and industry leaders.”

Go Daddy and the .ME Registry created the national scholarship program in 2010 as a way to support students who are aspiring entrepreneurs and technologists.

Matthew Iozzio received $10,000 from last year’s Go Daddy .ME Scholarship. Iozzio is the co-founder of ScholarsForCharity.org,, a non-profit website development group, which insists on charitable donations in lieu of payment. “The Go Daddy dot-ME Scholarship gave me some peace of mind and helped me focus on my education,” said Iozzio. “I recommend students take advantage of this opportunity – it might just pay-off.”

The Go Daddy .ME Scholarship is just one way Go Daddy is enabling future technologists. This week, Go Daddy kicked-off Engineering Week at UC Berkeley with a keynote speech by Irving. Students met with Go Daddy leaders during events and competitions. They also learned about future employment opportunities. Earlier this year, Go Daddy participated in the inaugural “University Hacker Olympics” in San Francisco. College students were selected to meet and compete in a weekend-long hackathon to code with some of the best developers in the world. Go Daddy technologists worked alongside and connected with students who are some of the brightest technical talent that will soon enter the professional market.

Interacting with tech-savvy students is a priority for Go Daddy as it establishes initiatives like the Go Daddy .ME Scholarship. To apply, applicants must be pursuing an undergraduate degree in fall 2013, have a minimum 3.0 GPA and have scored higher than 1,000 on the SAT or 21+ on the ACT.

The application deadline for the Go Daddy .ME Scholarship is March 30, 2013. Go Daddy’s scholarship recipients are scheduled to be announced at the end of April.

How to avoid any WordPress character encoding problems in your blog

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A few days back I wrote how I almost lost my blog while it was hosted on WordPress hosting at Go Daddy. I was lucky and got all my files, and within a few hours I had uploaded all the files and the database to my dedicated server and the nameserver change had propagated so my blog was up and running again.

The only problem I had was that the punctuation wasn’t correct. WordPress was displaying some strange characters instead of semicolons, colons and apostrophes: ĂŠĂĄ. The exported database was fine and had UTF-8 character encoding. The database had the correct “utf8_general_ci” colation. WordPress files were exactly the same as before (with the correct character encoding) so I didn’t know why this was happening. I had the correct settings in my wp-config.php:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8_general_ci');

After some testing I found that this was because I imported the database in unix without setting a character set. I was using the command “mysql -u database_user -p -h localhost database_name < database_sql_file.sql” and that probably imported the database in the default ANSI encoding.

The character set should have been set to UTF-8 while importing the database. Here is how to insert a database in UTF8 character encoding in unix (put it in one line):

mysql -u database_user -p --default_character_set utf8 -h localhost database_name
 < database_sql_file.sql

Everything should work as planned now.

How I almost lost my blog

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On Sunday night I went to write a post on my OnlineDomain.com WordPress blog only to find a blank white page with a “pageok” written on it. That was not OK by any measure! My blog is (or was as you will found out later) on a Go Daddy WordPress hosting plan. I made a post about this a few months back when Go Daddy had a major outage and a lot of domain blogs were affected.

At this point I opened a support ticket with Go Daddy but I wasn’t expecting much.

After a fast Google search I found out that this is a fairly common WordPress problem especially for blogs hosted on Go Daddy. So I logged in my Go Daddy account, went to my account and hosting and click on the options of my plan. A popup window appeared but what I saw wasn’t that helpful so I tried to close the window by hitting cancel. I was a bit upset because my blog was down and that is why I didn’t notice that it said something like “cancel my account”. So instead on closing the window I ended up CLOSING MY HOSTING ACCOUNT!!! Just like that!

I updated the support ticket and asked them to reverse my cancellation. Apparently I am not the only one to cancel a godaddy hosting account by accident. A google search reveals tens of incidents. It is a bad design to have a “cancel” button instead of yes/no options. When you try format a hard drive the options are yes/no or yes/cancel. Cancel in computers means cancel the current operation. Not cancel and delete all my files.

I panicked a bit but I thought: “That is ok. I have the blog backup and I wanted for months to transfer the blog to my dedicated server.” (I had started the blog when I was between dedicated servers and didn’t want to make things more complicated back then in July)

So I went and opened the backup I have setup to get every day by email only to find out that it only had the database in it. Then I panicked a lot. That meant that I would lose all the theme modifications, all the wordpress plugins and settings and all the photos and files I had uploaded. I searched to find another copy of the backup but it seemed that I didn’t have any of the files.

I have triple backups for all my files (2 backups on external storage and 1 on the cloud) but I didn’t have any of my blog files. How stupid is that?

I was looking at some option to recover my hosting plan at Go Daddy when I noticed that I had an ftp account for the Go Daddy hosting. I thought I would try that. I had nothing to lose. Remarkably the ftp account was still working and my files were still there. I started downloading the files. Half way there, I visited my blog only to find out it displayed a message: “error establishing a database connection”. Go Daddy was deleting my account… Ftp transfer was still working with 2000 files still to go. My daughter started crying at 5am because she was hungry so I went to feed her and left the ftp running hoping that it would finish before Go Daddy deleted everything.

I came back 20 minutes later to find that all files had been transferred except for one. A single log file had failed. I tried to transfer this last file and then I realized that my account was gone. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes after I finished the transfer that Go Daddy deleted my whole account.

Within a few hours I had upload all the files and database to my dedicated server and the nameserver change had propagated so my blog was running again.

I must not forget to post the classic Go Daddy response that arrived 18 hours later explaining that everything was gone for ever and included a sales pitch!

“Dear Sir/Madam,

Thank you for contacting Online Support. We cannot bring back the canceled service, you will have to purchase a new hosting account and upload your content to the new account. Hosting offers users much more freedom in the design and creation of their Web sites – but it also requires more knowledge about Web site design and development. Since you’ll design your new Web site from scratch with this option, you may choose to use a third-party design application. For more information on the plans we offer and whether you need Web Hosting or Legacy hosting please use the following links. [...]”

Anyone hosting with Go Daddy should reconsider and move to a different server. It’s not only that my account was entirely deleted without an email confirmation at the very least … My blog was down anyway without making any changes and it took Go Daddy support 18 hours to send the first reply.

Keep in mind that anyone that gets hold of your Go Daddy account can delete all your domains and all your websites within minutes. You will only get an email from Go Daddy after everything is deleted…

.org Go Daddy Project 94 Auction: The 42 domains have starting prices from $10 to $50,000

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From March 18 to 28, 2013, Go Daddy Auctions is offering 42 rare, valuable one and two character .org domain names. For more information, see What is Project 94?. Starting today, if you want to participate in the auction, you can request approval. Click here to read the details.

One and Two-Character Domain Name Auction Dates: 03/18/13 through 03/28/13.

One letter .org domains have a starting price of $50,000, 2 letter .org domains have a starting price of $1,000 and the 2 character domains have a $10 starting price. Here is the complete list of the 42 domains:

Domain Name Starting Price
a.org $50,000
c.org $50,000
d.org $50,000
e.org $50,000
h.org $50,000
i.org $50,000
k.org $50,000
n.org $50,000
o.org $50,000
q.org $50,000
s.org $50,000
t.org $50,000
v.org $50,000
w.org $50,000
z.org $50,000
bp.org $1,000
cq.org $1,000
fs.org $1,000
hb.org $1,000
lo.org $1,000
nh.org $1,000
nq.org $1,000
qd.org $1,000
ts.org $1,000
wz.org $1,000
xq.org $1,000
zg.org $1,000
zi.org $1,000
zq.org $1,000
2c.org $10
2w.org $10
3p.org $10
5v.org $10
6j.org $10
7d.org $10
7e.org $10
b3.org $10
c2.org $10
e3.org $10
h9.org $10
i6.org $10
k4.org $10