Helping Customers Successfully Manage Transfers out of GoDaddy

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By: James Koole on September 9th, 2008
Posted in: Reseller Resources
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Comments: 2

Scenario: You have a customer who wishes to transfer their domain name from GoDaddy to OpenSRS (into your Reseller account). Good news! But despite the best efforts of the customer, GoDaddy blocks the transfer and the customer ends up stuck at GoDaddy for another year.

It happens a lot and the reason is a simple one: GoDaddy institutes a 60-day lock on domains if the domain holder makes a change to the administrative email contact. GoDaddy claims to do this for the protection of its users, but the lock policy has the added benefit to GoDaddy of locking the domain down for two months.

So, if a user decides to move out of GoDaddy less than two months before the domain name in question expires, and then updates their administrative email information to ensure that they can receive and approve the transfer requests, they have inadvertently locked themselves into GoDaddy and will be forced to renew the domain with them (which puts another 60-day lock on the domain, by the way).

How to help customers get out of GoDaddy

Education is the key.

Explain the transfer process: Make sure you fully explain the transfer process. Explain that there will be emails sent to the email account of the listed administrative contact that require action for the transfer to succeed. Explain that they should remove the administrative lock before attempting to transfer the domain. Explain how the EPP code works, and perhaps even show the user where to find it in the GoDaddy interface. GoDaddy provides a guide to unlocking domains here.

Explain the GoDaddy lock policy: Be up front and ask the customer if that email contact is up to date. If not, explain to them what GoDaddy will do when they update it. Tell the customer that you are trying to make sure the transfer is successful and ensure that they are only changing that administrative contact if it is absolutely necessary (e.g. they don’t have access to that email account anymore).

What is ICANN Doing?

Tucows/OpenSRS is active in ICANN and we’re strongly in favour of domain name portability. We continue to work at the ICANN level to get this problem solved. ICANN has issued a statement on the practice of putting a lock in place on a WHOIS change saying clearly, “A registrant change to Whois information is not a valid reason to deny a transfer request.”

The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) is studying the issue and should be putting forward recommendations to ICANN shortly.

In the meantime, customer education is the key – make sure you’re doing everything you can to ensure domain name transfers in will be successful.