.me is mine (or not)
Yesterday, GoDaddy started sales on .me domains. I watched the timer as it ticked down and as soon as it hit 0 I hit go on my two prepared searches for mike.me and mikerobinson.me. They were both available! Or so I was led to believe...
The sheer amount of buyers, squatters and personal alike, trying to grab their domains and get through the checkout brought everything to a slow shuffle. Like many others, I believed that I had secured my domains and just needed to wait for the checkout pages to load. Constantly checking on other sites to see if it was available, I finally made it through the checkout. Cash out my credit card, done deal.
But it wasn't a done deal. When I got home from work later that day I had several emails in my inbox, all related to the domains. I successfully registered mikerobinson.me (301 redirects here)! However, several other emails claimed I had failed to obtain mike.me as it was already taken. Now, I had checked right up until the last second to see if it was free, and it was. So what the hell happened?
Some people have said that GoDaddy put domains in popular demand to auction, which I can understand. Though, if I have been told it is available and my credit card has been charged for that domain then I expect to own it. I've paid for something that was never going to be mine! What's worse is I am not getting my card refunded, I am getting GoDaddy credit. GoDaddy isn't even my normal domain registrar, the awesome Namecheap is as I have never had a problem with them. That credit is completely useless as I don't have any other domains I wish to buy right now, I guess It will just sit there until I do think of something, and when I do I will be quickly transferring it off to Namecheap. That was my first and certainly last personal use of GoDaddy.
So did anyone else manage to snap up a nice domain? Were you led on to believe you had an awesome domain until you received the fail email? Let me know in the comments!
4 Comments
Sam Brown
Hey Mike, got sambrown.me successfully, but the whole GoDaddy process was a complete nightmare, strangely though sam.me appeared as taken from the beginning so that wasn't an issue for me.
Good luck finding a use for your credit, as soon as my regular Registrar picks up on .me domains I'm moving.
Mike
Hi Sam, thanks for stopping by. Good to hear you got your name. As I said on your own GoDaddy post I have to agree that the process is terrible!
Mark Aplet
Sorry to hear that Mike. I have had the unfortunate luck of working with GoDaddy on many projects and never once has it been a good experience. My worst experience was with SSL certificates for a client of mine. He shopped for the best bargain and wound up paying me four times the price because of GoDaddy's poor support. I could go on and on, but I wont bore you to death with my horror stories. I feel your pain. I too will never work with GoDaddy again. I have turned down two projects in the last year because the client wanted to host on GoDaddy. I had to respectfully decline the job.
Idea: Maybe you can sell your credit for a moderate discount on craigslist.org or something?
Mike
They actually refunded my credit card rather than credit for the account, which is better. Though, I had an idea for two domain names yesterday which I was going to use it on....