Written on 3rd November 2008
7 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The extremely popular Makeuseof.com domainname has been stolen over the weekend. The domain name currently redirects to a standard landing page and the original site is now temporarily hosted on Blogspot: http://makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com/
The owners of Makeuseof.com have some idea of who might have hacked their account and are busy resolving the whole situation:
“The hacker had transferred ownership of the makeuseof.com domain from the GoDaddy account to another web registrar company called NameCheap (the reseller for ENOM). Looking at the emails now we can say that it took him less then an hour to do that. The WHOIS entry is here and you can see that it is an Ali Ferank in Dubai. That’s our bad guy. We have absolutely no idea how he managed to gain access to the account but access it he did. We suspect he might have hacked into the email account tied to GoDaddy but we are still not sure about it.”
They are now in contact with the domain thief who told them bluntly:
Hi there,
I said it very simply and very easily !
2 K !
Deal or not ?!
You own the domain I get the money…
Regards
Apparently Ali Ferank in Dubai found out some of the secret information hidden in their GoDaddy account, then called GoDaddy, impersonated one of the founders and asked GoDaddy to transfer the domainname. After checking the account data with the impersonator GoDaddy complied and moved the domainname to a new host in less than an hour.
The real owners of Makeuseof.com only learned what happened when they couldn’t log into their systems and started making calls to find out what happened. Now they are talking with several hosting companies to get their domain name back, and catch Ali Ferank or the person behind the theft.
Written on 17th October 2008
10 COMMENTS
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
Now, I am not implying that Godaddy.com, the 800 pounds hosting gorilla, tries to steal your money. But due to a software bug in (a third-party Drupal module), which Godaddy offers pre-installed, you might face the nasty surprise of getting a bill which is somewhat higher than you expected.
This happened to Mihai Corlan, a Flex, AIR developer who had his website hosted on Godaddy.
Several days ago he got a notice from Godaddy which said:
Dear Mihai Corlan,
Customer Number: xxxxxxxxxxxx
According to the terms of our agreement(s), we tried to bill your MasterCard card ending in the last two digits XX in the amount of $ 7062.01 for the item(s) below, but our billing attempt failed. This could be for a variety of reasons, including an invalid or expired credit card on file.
Product Name Next Billing Date Qty Price
Hosting Fee – Additional 100 MB – Renewal 10/22/2008 874 $5934.46
Bandwidth/Diskspace for 10/02/2008. corlan.org
Luckily, his heart is in good shape otherwise he might have had a heart attack when he saw that huge bill ($7,000 with penalties). Why did GoDaddy charged him such an astonishing amount?
Fishy deal
Mihai has only three blogs hosted on his Deluxe shared account and paid for a year of hosting in advance. This specific GoDaddy account has a storage limit of 150 GB. He got a warning that he exceeded the quota so deleted some unnecessary files. Then, after a while, BAM! He got that email from GoDaddy.
Of course he tried to find out why he owes that money. GoDaddy wouldn’t tell him. Instead they just blocked his account this weekend without any notice. When he asked which files or folders were so big GoDaddy customer service responded “Sorry sir, but the account is blocked and I cannot tell you about the files”. Isn’t that ironic? Catch 22.
After more talks GoDaddy offered him a “deal”: “$800 for your data, and buy the next hosting plan and we’ll forget about the $7000, even though you technically owe us this money”. Doesn’t this sounds quite.., fishy? They don’t explain WHY they ask that money, they just asked for it. It’s not hard to imagine how pissed off Mihai was. He eventually paid that $800.
Mihai wasn’t the only one
Those who think this is an isolated case are wrong. Adam Fendelman, hosts HollywoodChicago on GoDaddy, was also confronted with a rather impressive bill last month. Adam presumably owed GoDaddy $6,600, thanks to the very same software bug (a third-party Drupal module) that made Mihai’s bill skyrocket. Once again, GoDaddy was “kind enough” to only ask a part of the bill. Adam’s case was settled with 969 dollars.
In comes The Huffington Post
Adam was smart enough to enable the power of the blogosphere and wrote a post about his “GoDaddy adventure” for Huffington Post . Soon enough, a GoDaddy big shot called Adam to say he would get the $969 back (this experience was also translated into a Huffington Post article
So GoDaddy only listen to you when you’re an influential blogger. Just so you know. Adam was kind enough to write an article about Mihai as well, and guess what: Mihai received a call from GoDaddy today. They refunded his money and moved him on the Unlimited plan
GoDaddy will resolve the problem and will try to implement a notification system for who is exceeding the disk quota so clients can take early measures. This was the core issue: GoDaddy didn’t have a early alert system for quota exceeding and wasn’t very flexible – at first – when the user wasn’t to blame.
Written on 27th January 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Three weeks ago we brought you the news about Reddit users making fun of Network Solutions’ domain front running. They checked domains like Networksolutionsisstaffedbyterrorists.com, which the service immediately registered. Although this was funny news, the problem itself isn’t. Last year, CEO and founder of GoDaddy Bob Parsons explained on his blog how big the problem is:
The domain name tasting and kiting industry is alive, well and running rampant. The practice of domain tasting and kiting continues to rage out-of-control. In February 2007, 55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept. With the exception of just a few names, 93.5% of those names were registered simply to see how much advertising revenue – paid by big search firms like our “do no evil” friends at Google – will generate when they are associated with a one page Web site and related links.
As you can read, Parsons wasn’t really fond of the way Google made the practice of domain name tasting profitable. That will change now, and Google will gain some ‘do no evil’ points. Because the number one in online advertising will make it harder for the front running companies to show up in the search results. Over the next few weeks, Google will look up names that are repeatedly claimed and dropped in a five-day period. They will be excluded from the Adsense program, so that they won’t generate advertising revenue.
“We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web,” Google spokesman Brandon McCormick told to the Associated Press.
Fighting side-by-side with Google are Yahoo, Dell and BMW, who have filed federal lawsuits against domain name tasting companies that conflicted with their trademarks. It’s not hard to imagine that all these major companies will be able to ban out the shameless act of domain front running.
And to make the story even better, you can still have fun with the ‘mindless monkeys‘ at Network Solutions.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
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