Godaddy, secureserver.net, domain suspension and bad communication
It’s almost midnight, and I’ve been awake for more than 24 hours because of the after effects of Friday the 13th. I’m feeling really exhausted and can’t keep my eyes open, but I’m also feeling good for unknown reasons.
Last week I received an email from an unknown sender and domain, “secureserver.net.” The email said it was from Godaddy and wanted to notify me that the email address listed in the whois information for one of my domains was invalid. I was told that I’d 5 days to send an email to an email address listed in the email, if I wanted to maintain the domain name. The email address listed was itself was a generic one and wasn’t from a godaddy.com email account.
I thought the email was bogus, and ignored it. Godaddy, in my view, didn’t send notices without any links to log into the site and check for ourselves. After 6 days, the domain name in question stopped working. I checked everything on the hosting side to see if something had happened; everything seemed fine but the domain name didn’t resolve to anything. That also meant that any incoming email would either have to be delivered again in a few hours, or simply sent back to the original author of the message.
I called Godaddy customer support to ask about the invalid domain. They told me that they had some technical issues and would reset my domain name settings to fix everything. I was given about 24 hours as a time frame to wait for the changes to happen. The domain was inactive after about 12 hours from that time, so I emailed Godaddy just to ask for an update to see if things were progressing. Godaddy responded with the following reply:
Response from Godaddy.com about my domain name being downThank you for contacting customer support. As xxxxx.xxx is currently resolving to a third party DNS, we will not be able to provide further assistance for this matter. You will need to contact the current hosting provider for further resolution of this matter.
Please let us know if we can help you in any other way.
Here I was, stuck between Godaddy and the problem. I manage the hosting myself, so I knoiw I hadn’t changed anything on the hosting side. I did some diagnostics via Dnsstuff.com, which showed that the nameservers for that domain weren’t found online. The nameservers were being managed through Godaddy, which meant that it was Godaddy’s problem that my domain name was down. I emailed Godaddy again, this time explaining to them how the nameservers weren’t loading and how it was Godaddy’s side of the equation. I also told them that Godaddy customer support over the phone had told me before that Godaddy knew the issue and would take care of it.
Godaddy replied to me a few hours later, telling me that the domain had been suspended because some of the whois information for that domain was wrong. I was surprised, as that meant that the original anonymous email that I’d received from a domain called secureserver.net was indeed from Godaddy. Why they would use an anonymous email and no Godaddy links in the email is a mystery to me. I changed the whois information for that domain and responded to the email, telling them that the whois information had been changed, even though the previous whois information was valid also and working well.
Godaddy responded within an hour saying that the domain was working again. Even though the domain is working now, I’m unsure as to whether Godaddy can be relied upon when it comes to communication with their customer support. Both their email and phone support had given me wrong information, and I had to waste time before Godaddy told me what the real issue was. I could’ve simply avoided this situation before it even started, had Godaddy sent an email that contained information to prove that it was a legitimate email.
Good night everyone. Hopefully I won’t have to worry about the whois information for my domain names anymore.
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( January 15th, 2006 at 6:19 am )
Niiiiiice.
So your original whois info was correct, right?
This is what I don’t get, why do they have any right to assume your info’s not correct? Or, why are they picking on you and not sending that to everyone? I didn’t get anything like that.
Confusing.
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( January 15th, 2006 at 10:27 am )
Yes, my original whois information was correct; the email listed in that whois was where they sent the email originally and I read it. I never received a phone call, and I never got anything in the mail either. The only thing I changed in the new whois was my email address, since when the domain name was invalid/suspended, the email associated with it wasn’t working and thus I’d to change it something else, lest they should try to send an email listed in the whois again for verification, and this time it would bounce not because of bad whois but because of the domain being down.
Sorry for the confusion [if you meant my post being confusing[; I wrote the entry late last night and I was almost dead tired and couldn’t keep my eyes open; thus some parts may sound confusing. If you meant Godaddy being confusing, I think someone either reported to Godaddy, saying that my domain whois was wrong and they sent the email as a verification to which I was supposed to respond to, or they’re sending out random whois correction emails as required by ICANN. Not sure; really confusing indeed, and a big headache then.
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( January 15th, 2006 at 9:07 pm )
Ugh…I hate situations like that. Makes me want to reach into cyberspace and strangle the customer service rep at the other end. Yikes…talk about Friday the 13th…
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( January 15th, 2006 at 9:49 pm )
Naw, GoDaddy’s the confusing one. :\ Weird.
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( January 16th, 2006 at 12:32 pm )
Birdie — > haha, yes, reach into and strangle, that’s funny.
Yeah, friday the 13th. =\
Valerie — >
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( May 13th, 2006 at 11:06 pm )
I just went through this myself. I had no clue who secureserver.net was (as I didnt use them), how was I supposed to know that godaddy simply resold through them?
After a few e-mails to my hosting company I got an e-mail from someone who thought to check the who-is info (found registrar lock). I went back through my e-mails and found the one from secureserver.net (I also thought it was a spoof, it even went into my yahoo spam folder). I figure mine was reported (my phone number had changed in the 3+ it had been registered, address was correct, e-mail was correct).
Ya gotta love it.
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( June 3rd, 2006 at 3:05 am )
It is indeed frustrating, specially when the domain goes down and customer support cannot help you, and you know that the entire problem is because of company itself.
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( December 27th, 2006 at 1:10 pm )
The same is happening to me right now. I got the strange mail from secureserver.net, though it a scam, and now my domain has been down for 8 hours. I’ve e-mailed Godaddy, called them 4 times, and they still haven’t taken care of the situation. Now I am holding on the line for a supervisor.
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( January 1st, 2007 at 9:36 pm )
Call them and tell them that you need a solution urgently or you’ll think of switching to another registrar. I hope it worked out for you. Please keep us updated if you can.
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( July 17th, 2007 at 5:56 pm )
Oh no, this thread is only the beginning. And did you know they won’t tell you who they work for? Not even the SALES number would tell me the name of the company. We are currently blacklisted and they won’t tell me why, just send a generic email and tell us to reply to it (we can’t, we’re blacklisted to them) and they will release it. Won’t tell us why, won’t tell us who, won’t tell us who they are. But of course we found out. So why not just say so? I told both the geek and his supervisor that I was sorry they were embarrassed by the company they work for.
Cross your fingers…I just replied to the email using an addy on a different server. It looks like they are processing it and will be clearing us. “Because now you’ve fixed the problem” but of course, we haven’t “fixed” anything, because we don’t know what they want us to fix!!! Who’s on first?
ARGH!
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( July 18th, 2007 at 1:54 pm )
Beth Anderson, thank you for visiting and for leaving a comment; I really appreciate it.
That is very alarming that not only they use an unbranded domain and service name, they do not tell you who they work for. Could they be an outsourced/contracted division, the way many places have debt collection divisions outsourced?
Such things should be brought out in public and publicized more so such companies can realize how some of their different departments or operations may be behaving. A customer being forced to do something, penalized for something and not told what it is, and not told why or who thinks the customer is doing something wrong, and then simply told “It’s all fixed now” without any chance for a customer to find out what is going on: that is unacceptable.
Do you host all your domains with GoDaddy?
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( July 18th, 2007 at 2:01 pm )
I don’t host any domains with GoDaddy. I don’t even use them as a registrar. I use Dotster and my biz partner uses Tucows.
Interesting end to this….for now…is I went ahead and posted a nice, calm, polite request on Bob Parson’s blog (he’s CEO of GoDaddy) and his assistant called me and ultimately fixed the problem for us. For now.
Her take on the “problem” was that we weren’t using an “industry standard” name for our mailserver because it doesn’t have the word “mail” in it. Of course there is no industry standard, but no matter. It’s fixed for now and I have her direct number. So we’ll see.
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( July 20th, 2007 at 3:49 pm )
Beth Anderson, thanks for answering.
That is a very good thing to do, to comment on Bob parson’s blog. Yes, I know his blog: Hot Points by Bob Parsons. Maybe someone can ask you for that number if someone was ever having a grave problem that they were not being helped with?
The industry standard: so you have to use the words mail or else your mail will be blacklisted? I know many hosts do that, rejecting incoming e-mail if it does not have some certain fields in things like the CNAME entry or related dns zone entries for the mail server.
Well, congratulations for solving the problem. I wonder why Godaddy is hiding SecureServer.net and not openly saying that they are related even through a business deal.
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( July 21st, 2007 at 7:40 am )
No industry standard on the name of the mail server. That’s just one of the criteria SECOND level support looks at when deciding if you are worthy to be taken off their blacklist. We apparently got tagged because we had a forward that got dumped on with 2k emails in one short period. We found it, removed the forward, blocked the IP that was doing the sending, tried to get off the blacklist and ended up in tech support loopiness. At one point they were telling me, with great horror, that we had been reported 11x in 90 days as being a spammer. Well, we put through over 10k emails a day off that server, most legitimate, so really, 11 out of 1 million? Not really such a bad record.
As for SS techs not allowed to say they are GoDaddy, she tried to explain that they do tech support for resellers who sell the GoDaddy product under their own names so they don’t want to infringe on them. Yeah, that makes sense…not.
Oh well, doesn’t really matter now, I guess. Until it happens again. If I could get out of the email business but stay in the hosting biz I’d do it tomorrow.
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( July 22nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm )
Beth Anderson, thank you so much for explaining things. This should really help me and hopefully others who may want to know more about this trend.
From what you say, that does sound weird that one short period of spam, where you can show that it was not your doing, can result in a loophole for a customer, which is you, from which it is not easy to get out of.
So the SS techs may also be working for Wild West Domains or something related, since that company is owned by GoDaddy and allows people to resell Godaddy services. Still, if a customer calls and has a problem, the techs should let the customer know who is running the show, whether it is GoDaddy or a reseller. It is not acceptable to keep a customer in the blind, where a customer feels as if some unknown entity has control over their business.
Good luck, and I hope everything stays normal and problem-free from at least the SS techs for your business.
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( November 12th, 2007 at 12:38 am )
I am having a very wierd experience this week, my godaddy account is locked but my sites are all online and I can still login through my PC based FTP. However when i go to login on the GD site I get an account suspended message. They haven’t told me why , I’ve sent support 3 tickets and got no answers. I don’t really want to call customer sevice because im in UK. It would be cheaper to transfer my domains than call overseas for X amount of hours.
I just got a new domain and was going to host it on godaddy but maybe I’ll move the 3 I already have somewhere else.
I might include that in the next support ticket I send.
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( November 12th, 2007 at 7:41 pm )
ricktee, thanks for sharing what is happening to you. That is indeed not good, but all is not lost: you can login, that means something is not right and can be fixed; otherwise, GoDaddy would have completely deleted or suspended your accounting, making it hard or impossible to login.
If I may ask and if it is not a secret or personal or something similar, what were the 3 domains about or were they or their content revolving around a topic that GoDaddy may have considered illegal for some reason? Have you tried sending e-mails directly to their e-mail accounts, or are you trying to submit a ticket through their online ticket system? How many days have you been waiting for an answer?
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( November 12th, 2007 at 11:58 pm )
Finally got a response this morning, apparently I tried to login 3 times(incorrectly) and as a result the account was suspended, would have been nice to have been told thought. The 3 sites are fairly low usage and don’t contain anything which godaddy deems to be against their policies.
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( February 4th, 2008 at 10:00 pm )
Thanks for sharing ricktee. Did they respond to you via the phone or via e-mail? Were the accounts suspended or were the public sites associated with the accounts suspended also?
Were you offered any kind of advice or explanation besides the fact that you tried to login 3 times?
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( March 5th, 2008 at 1:23 pm )
Ok..
So, wait.. let me get this right…..
You got a warning telling you that your domain name was going to be suspended…. you ignored it, and were surprised 6 days later when the domain was suspended? WTF.
Did you think that maybe you should have called godaddy WHEN YOU GOT THE EMAIL?
At worst, they would have told you.. “fuck it, it’s a scam, ignore it”
or.. maybe you would have actually found out that the email was legit…
It’s common knowledge that secureserver.net (as well as domaincontrol.com, and securepaynet.net are all domains godaddy uses for operations)
Also, if you go to the godaddy site… there’s a link for “reseller plans”. I would bet money that the godaddy employees do the technical support for their resellers so that’s why they
don’t say “Hi, welcome to godaddy” since the resellers might get pissed.
If you were paying $200 to run your own “domain business” and you were “xyzdomains.com” would you want someone answering the phone saying “Thanks for calling godaddy”?
Read up on the company, they’ve got christmas parties and such for hundreds of people, so it’s probably likely that they aren’t outsourcing. I’m a customer of theirs and every time I call in, and give my customer #, they tell me they are actual godaddy employees and are in arizona (which I am, too.. ) – They rented chase field for christmas. I’ve seen their building in scottsdale.
I understand that the email on file, according to you, was valid. But maybe for some reason it was being MARKED as invalid.. Wouldn’t a simple call to follow up on the “suspect” email have been a good idea on your part?
Maybe if there was actually a spoof going on, godaddy needed to know it?
Sounds like you just want to place blame elsewhere when you were warned to me.
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( May 27th, 2008 at 2:58 am )
Hi,
I have come here from google while trying to find any info on secureserver.net… thanks for your post.
Emails to one of our partners are returning back undelivered with message that our mailserver’s
IP is suddenly in blocked IP range and to unblock we should post a request on http://unblock.secureserver.net.
When I have looked on http://secureserver.net, it’s full of spam search results and advertisements, no info on company or products at all.
The unblock web looks at least “not very trustworthy”. In your situation, I wouldn’t trust an email from such domain too
and if it’s just “common knowledge” that the secureserver.net is operated by Godaddy, then Godaddy will not be a hosting provider for me.
Petr
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( July 17th, 2008 at 3:48 pm )
Advice to all. Always use a Third-Party to manage your domains. Never host your website with the same person that you have your domains through. This way if they get sloppy or you don’t like them you can easily move to a different hosting company.
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( July 17th, 2008 at 4:43 pm )
There’s nothing “easy” about moving domains anymore. I get that they are trying to “protect us” but if I have valid accounts, know my usernames and passwords, the email addresses are all valid, why do I have to get auth codes that only get emailed and not right away (have waited as long as 2 DAYS!!!)? I’m moving 50+ domains from my ex-partner’s account at Tucows because he can’t put them in subaccounts like I can do with Dotster. If my customer wants their own username and pw to log in, all I have to do at Dotster is create an account for them and move the domain to their account, and then I can support them. He can’t do that at Tucows, we have to jump through this maze of hoops to get anything moved. Really, for $8 apiece? Is my business this important to them to try and hang onto it? I’ll stick with Dotster and pay $12 apiece for a service that has never, ever, failed me in 10 years.
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( August 9th, 2008 at 2:37 am )
You must never host the domain with the same company whare your hosting your website. I use always Namecheap for domains and hosting some where else.
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( August 31st, 2008 at 2:03 pm )
secureserver.net is a notorious search spammer. They create spamblogs and try to increase page-rank of their spam-site: secureserver.net, to stole money from google ads program. secureserver.net website is made of tricky javascript which turns your every click on any link into adsense click.
See source code. These are results of my investigation.
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( February 26th, 2009 at 3:36 pm )
Godaddy is a great company to not only host your website on but also to purchase your URL. I have purchased multiple URLs as well as had GoDaddy host them without ever encountering a problem. Today I purchased another and was stoked to find these codes before checkout:
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( April 9th, 2009 at 7:29 am )
About secureserver.net:
Took over site management that was hosted and had domain registration with godaddy
Domain reg was still active for some time, so just switched out the hosting as the previous webmaster had all that under one reseller account and naturally, did not want me to be able to access all sites she was managing, her own included. Pointed the dns to mine.
About 3 days after the switch, my client got a “unblock” IP request on her new IP from secureserver and she forwardeded that to me. It referenced 3 different email addresses; 2 unique url domain names, and one at yahoo that were bouncing back due to the block via secureserver. These were all longtime clients of hers.
I complied with the request via email but eventually called and talked to 3 different techs. They said the IP block was due to a single spam mail hitting their mail server from one of the several accounts on my hosts server. Gave me a date and mst time so we could review server logs to identify. They would not copy us on mail or the header for more info. They did have me go through a “ping” on port 25 of the IP – and they couldn’t get in.
Eventually, they said they cleared the block and we noted that we were in compliance with all there concerns, but we are still having trouble getting mail to the same 3 emails.
Was this sort of a slap on the wrist for switching hosts? More than a “real” issue with the new servers security?
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( April 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm )
Godaddy.com promo codes:
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( June 2nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm )
Anyone have a GoDaddy account? I need to migrate my shared servers to a dedicated server and not sure how all of that works.
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( June 2nd, 2009 at 3:06 pm )
Hey JIM,
Thank you for the codes. I used “OK1″ !
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( August 18th, 2009 at 11:20 am )
The reasons above are why you should avoid having any more than 1 of the key internet items per company.
Those key things are:
1) Registrar
2) DNS
3) Hosting
Place each of these at independent companies. Yes, it isn’t as easy to setup, and you’ll have to know your stuff to do it properly. OTOH, you won’t have 1 clueless provider breaking everything (just 1 part).
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( September 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 am )
True,very true. I’m glad someone pointed this out.
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What others are saying about this article elsewhere
[...] 5. GoDaddy verifies ‘whois’ information using the domain SecureServer.net. One domain owner received an email originating from that domain and ignored it not knowing it was GoDaddy — which seems resonable given all the phishing scams. However, his site was shut down. [...]