GoDaddy

In late December, I transferred a few dozen domain names to GoDaddy that had been won at auction. The transfers went off without a hitch, and I didn’t think twice about them. Last week, a DomainTools Registrant Monitor alert email for my company name uncovered a big change at GoDaddy that had not been shared with me nor have I seen any mention of it anywhere. GoDaddy is now adding Whois privacy to (eligible) inbound transfers and new registrations. All of my recent .com transfers and new registrations reflect this change.

For a number of years, GoDaddy has been redacting some contact information from Whois records. On my public Whois records, you could see the domain registrant is Top Notch Domains, LLC, but my address, email address, and phone number were redacted from Whois records. On the domain names I recently transferred to GoDaddy and the domain names I registered this week, the registrant name is now “Domains by Proxy, LLC,” the Whois privacy business operated by GoDaddy.

A little over two weeks ago, a security breach involving GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting accounts, was widely reported. The news received coverage in tech publications like TechCrunch, as well as mainstream publications like Reuters. It was important news considering the breadth of the breach and potential impact it could have on GoDaddy customers and even clients of their customers who use Managed WordPress hosting at GoDaddy.

Since the incident was reported and detailed in a SEC filing by GoDaddy, the company has shared updates on what happened and what the impact has been. The company notified its impacted Managed WordPress hosting clients via email and provided some general advice on what actions their clients should take.

GoDaddy posted a job listing that might be of interest to someone who is familiar with the domain investment space. GoDaddy is hiring a Marketing Manager who will work on the company’s Domain Registrar and Investor Business Unit. This is a fully remote role for someone in the US or Canada.

Here’s an excerpt from the job listing outlining the position:

I was chatting with a Chiropractor friend yesterday about domain names. He has been into cryptocurrency trading for several years, and we regularly chat about that despite the fact that my knowledge is generally limited to what I read on my Twitter feed.

Yesterday, my friend asked me about .ETH domain names, and admittedly, I did not know much. He mentioned that he tried to secure one but the gas fee was outrageous. I told him I know very little about the topic beyond the fact that .ETH is not governed by ICANN and you couldn’t easily access a .ETH website. I typed in nic.eth on my phone to show him what I meant, and it returned a Google search rather than a website or error page.

I reiterated that I don’t know much about blockchain domain names and felt badly that I couldn’t share more information with him.

In the domain name management control panel at GoDaddy, there’s a Buy & Sell drop down menu. Within that menu, there is a Domain Broker Service link that takes customers to a status page with all of the Domain Broker Service inquiries received on their domain names.

These inquiries are from GoDaddy’s Domain Broker Service, a premium upsell that costs customers $99.99 plus a 20% commission on a completed sale. When a GoDaddy customer engages the Domain Broker Service for a GoDaddy-registered domain name, the inquiry is listed within this section of the domain registrant’s GoDaddy account.

I first learned about this page after seeing a post about it on Twitter: