GoDaddy scam
GoDaddy’s renewal prices are too high for private registrations.
The current wholesale price for dot-com domains is $6 (charged by Verisign), plus an ICANN fee of 25 cents. Companies like GoDaddy sell domains very cheaply (dot-coms for $8.95, and often lower after discounts) and attempt to make the real money off value-added services like private registration. This is all fair enough and I think $2 per year would be a fair price for private registration.
But GoDaddy doesn’t work that way despite their rhetoric:
There are no tricks in what we do, just good, old-fashioned, reliable business principles. Quite often we’re asked if we bait our customers with low rates and then charge high renewal prices. Anybody that expects us to do that will be disappointed. We believe in the old saying, "You can shear a sheep many times but you can only skin it once."
Private registration costs an absurd $8.99. If you can get a discounted price it will cost you a somewhat less ridiculous $4.99. If you register or transfer enough domains at once you’ll even get it thrown in for free. But when it comes time to renew you’ll find that the renewal price for private registration is $8.99, no matter how many domains you renew, and how many years you renew them for. That’s right; trying renewing 10 domains for 10 years and GoDaddy will charge you 100 years of private registration at $8.99. If that’s not a "bait and switch" I don’t know what is. Unsurprisingly, information about renewal prices is awfully difficult to find on the GoDaddy website. GoDaddy claims:
[Y]our renewal rates will be no higher than the rate you paid when you initially registered your domain name, or what our registration rates were when you transferred your domain name to us … the only exceptions would be if the price the registry charges us increased, or if you took advantage of a limited-time, special price.
Sorry, sir, but that’s one cock and bull story that I just don’t buy. If you register a domain with GoDaddy be prepared to be punished at renewal time. It seems the only way to fight this is to transfer the domain to another registrar instead of renewing, and I strongly encourage you to do so; don’t let GoDaddy skin you over and over again.
The other mitigating tactic is to take advantage of cheap registration prices and do multiple-year registrations if you can. For example, if GoDaddy offers you cheap or free private registration and you need to register multiple domains, do it for as many years as possible. You can only hope that GoDaddy will have changed its slimy renewal practices by the time your renewal date comes around. Also remember that domains are definitely not going to get cheaper: as stated in this article already linked to above, Verisign can and probably will be jacking up wholesale domain prices for all registrars by 7% annually. This is not a case in which market forces will drive prices down; domains are one thing on the net that are not going to get cheaper.
Another tip is to search Google for 'godaddy "promo code"' whenever you buy a domain name. In general renewal codes are hard to come by but you can often get a good deal on initial registrations.
Today I purchased a new dot-com domain name. I had no need for any other domains, and renewing my existing domains wasn’t going to help me get a discount thanks to GoDaddy’s policy of punishing existing customers. So my only hope for a good deal was getting a promo code and seeing if I could leverage a multi-year registration. The best codes for me today were gd50bbd90 and HASH3 (found here, use them while they last).
I registered the domain for 10 years: standard price $8.95 per year, special price reduced to $8.50 per year, then the 25 cent per year ICANN fee (unavoidable) and an additional discount of $15.50 over the 10 year period for a total of $72 or $7.20 per year. This is about as cheap as it gets for a dot-com domain; with those numbers GoDaddy is making only 95 cents per year. In addition, I paid $4.99 per year for private registration. Still too much and not as cheap as I’ve been able to get it in the past ($1.95) but at least it’s something I won’t have to worry about until 2016. And that’s where the bandits who run GoDaddy make their money, because the $4.99 per year for private registration is close to 100% pure profit.