GoDaddy

Whenever I receive an email from GoDaddy that does not look like a standard GoDaddy email, it gets my guard up. Phishing and spearphishing are big problems, and I regularly see GoDaddy spoof emails. My email hosting provider catches most of them and automatically marks them as spam / junk, so I don’t see many of them in my inbox.

Earlier this week, I received an email from “GoDaddy Alerts” as the sender with an email address of alerts@godaddy.com. The email was a notification that my nameservers had been updated. I had not received an email from the email address or the sender prior to receiving this one.

Joe Styler is a Product Manager at GoDaddy, but does much more than that for the company. In many ways, Joe is the face of the company to the domain investment community. Have a question or concern about GoDaddy on NamePros? Joe is usually the guy who answers. He is essentially an ambassador for the company to domain investors.

One thing that I think is neat about GoDaddy is that the company appears to encourage its employees to have side gigs. Joe has embraced this, and he has operated TheaterTickets.com for several years. This afternoon, Joe announced the launch of another side gig on a great domain name – SicilianSeaSalt.com:

I’ve heard people complain about visiting GoDaddy and ending up on a foreign version of GoDaddy’s website. The website may be in a local language or show a foreign currency, but it is generally still GoDaddy.com. This has happened to me just a couple of times, but it is disconcerting to visit a website that should be familiar and end up seeing something totally different.

This afternoon, I noticed I was on the GoDaddy India website. I was still logged in to my GoDaddy account, but the logo said GoDaddy India, and the messaging was a bit different than normal. Here’s a look when I navigated to the homepage:

GoDaddy announced some news today that will be helpful to non-domain investor customers. GoDaddy announced a new tool that “makes it easy to sell unused domain names.” Instead of having to list domain names for sale via Afternic or on another platform, GoDaddy customers can more easily list their domain names for sale directly within their account. This should help people sell their domain names.

While this tool is almost certainly aimed at GoDaddy customers who are not domain investors, it could also be very helpful to domain investors looking to purchase inventory. The trouble, for me at least, is GoDaddy’s search functionality is not very good. I can not easily run a search of domain names for sale via GoDaddy that meet certain parameters. For instance, I would immediately run a search for one word .com domain names, and if I wanted to be a bit fancy, I might only include domain names created before 1999.