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GoDaddy’s Alan Shiflett Takes Position at Afternic

Since GoDaddy acquired Afternic in September of last year, I haven’t seen all that many changes at either company. I just learned of a personnel change that will bring GoDaddy Premier Services Supervisor Alan Shiflett to Massachusetts to become Partner Sales Manager at Afternic.

I’ve worked with Alan for a couple of years, and have always found him to be proactive with my account and responsive to my requests (no matter the time or the day of the week). His addition at Afternic will be a loss for GoDaddy, but hopefully they will replace him with someone who is equally as helpful.

I jumped at this opportunity to take on this new role as I feel that the domain aftermarket will continue to grow and am excited to focus in on the sales side of domain investing,” Alan told me. “In this role I will maintain a close relationship with Premier Services as many of their clients are already using Afternic as a sales solution. I will also have the opportunity to foster new relationships with those whom I have had little to no interaction with in the past.”

Although Alan is

Blake Irving to Do Reddit AMA

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According to a tweet posted this afternoon, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving will be participating in a Reddit AMA session later on this week. If you are unfamiliar with what this means, AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything,” and participants can ask Irving any questions they may have. Over the years a variety of executives, entrepreneurs, athletes, and other famous people have participated in Reddit AMAs.

The format of a AMA is pretty straightforward. People can post any questions they have for Irving to answer, and he can pick and choose the questions he answers. Participants can also ask follow up questions and post comments. It should be a pretty good way to learn more about Irving and possibly GoDaddy. I would assume questions about an IPO would be off limits, but who knows. The name of the event is Ask Me Anything after all.

Irving’s AMA will be held on Thursday, April 24 at 9:30 AM PST (12:30 PM EST). I am not sure how long he will be participating, but if you want to learn more about Irving, GoDaddy, or even the business of domain names, be ready with some good questions. The url for the actual AMA thread will be available at the time of the AMA, but you can see the main Reddit AMA page here. I will update this with the actual url of the AMA when it begins.

Possible Fake GoDaddy Coupon Email

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Just a head’s up that it appears a fake GoDaddy coupon email may be making the rounds. The subject of today’s email is “Get 32% OFF your order – no minimum.” When you hover over the links in the email, you’ll notice a Goo.gl url shortener is used for the redirect instead of a GoDaddy.com url, which would most likely be used if the email was legitimate.

I hesitate to call this a phishing email because it seems that the url takes the visitor to some sort of affiliate page within the GoDaddy website, although I didn’t investigate further. My guess is that it’s someone who is trying to get affiliate credit somehow, although I think it’s pretty shady that the “from” field says “Godaddy.com” and the email address is noreply@godaddy.com. It could also potentially be

Update: GoDaddy Auctions Back Up

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If you tried to visit the GoDaddy Auctions website today, you saw that the company experienced some major downtime. According to an email I received from a company representative, the website is now operational.

Paul Nicks, Sr. Director of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy, had this update to share:

“We took our GoDaddy auction website offline earlier today after our monitoring systems alerted us to a potential issue. Once we confirmed the health of our system, we took additional time to reset our auction end dates. Auctions.GoDaddy.com is now up and running. As a reminder, we will be extending any auctions set to end today by an extra day. We are sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.”

I am sure it was a bit of an inconvenience to customers, but I am glad that the issue seems to be resolved. If you notice anything funky, I am sure they would appreciate a “head’s up” about it through the company’s support channels or Twitter feed.

Update on GoDaddy Auctions Outage

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Earlier this afternoon, I reported that GoDaddy Auctions is down. At the time of this update, GoDaddy Auctions is still down and there is no ETA on when the website will be fixed. I did receive an update from Paul Nicks, Sr. Director of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy, and here’s what he had to say about today’s outage and auctions:

“We noticed an issue with our Auctions.GoDaddy.com Web page today. We suspended the auction process temporarily, and are working to restore service as soon as possible. Once we’re back up, we will be extending any auctions set to end today by an extra day. We will update you when service is restored.”

I will share further updates in this article when I receive them.

GoDaddy Auctions is Down

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I was doing some Whois research via DomainTools this morning, and after clicking a “for sale” link, the GoDaddy Auctions website wouldn’t load for me. Upon trying to access it via the main page, I got an error that said “SSL connection error.” I tried to visit again using the non-secure Auctions.GoDaddy.com website and saw the following error message from GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving to let visitors know GoDaddy Auctions is currently down:

“We are experiencing problems. We understand this is impacting some customers and we take this situation very seriously.

Everyone at GoDaddy.com is working to restore all sites affected by this outage as soon as possible.

Please see updates on Twitter.com by following @GoDaddy or on Facebook.

Thank you for your patience.

–Blake Irving, CEO”

Although it’s good that the error message is up on the non-secure website, I think it would be wise to post an error message on the secure website as well, since many people access GoDaddy Auctions via that channel. Hopefully this downtime will be brief.

Hopefully this downtime will be brief. I reached out to Paul Nicks,