[Discuss] TLD for Personal Use - Email

[alex at pennace.org (Alex Pennace)]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 11:56:23PM +0000, Edward Ned Harvey (blu) wrote:
> > I registered a domain with godaddy and have purchased their
> > business email package with spam filtering. $6 a month for 5
> > mail boxes on a yearly subscription. 
> 
> Good luck.  Not long ago, I helped a company migrate off of godaddy email because the reliability, featureset, and support were so horrible.

Seconded. My own experience with GoDaddy -- both personally and
professionally -- is certainly not positive. The well publicized
outage last year was one of many significant GoDaddy outages I've had
the (mis)fortune of witnessing over the years.

* Almost monthly, there is some hangup in the GoDaddy email
infrastructure that delays messages by hours or sometimes even
days. I noticed it across a wide variety of senders and
recipients. I noticed it as early as 2006, and as recently as April 27
of this year. I noticed it even on receiving systems that have
explicitly whitelisted email from GoDaddy's SMTP relays. For all
affected messages, the Received: headers point to the delay occurring
on GoDaddy's part.

* GoDaddy's authoritative DNS service is *generally* okay. I do recall
one incident in particular where one of a domain's two authoritative
DNS servers started returning invalid responses to MX queries,
resulting in lost mail. Even the stop-gap measure of disconnecting the
defective DNS server would have been sufficient to solve the problem;
GoDaddy technical support didn't even have the most cursory
understanding of DNS.

* The "last straw" happened after I had moved my personal domains away
from GoDaddy. Initially I was leaving GoDaddy on good terms (the move
was more to patronize DynDNS which employs some friends). At almost
the same time, the Sovereign Bank debit card GoDaddy had on file
became invalid. A month later GoDaddy used some mechanism to get my
new debit card number, and helpfully renewed some services. My polite
demands for an unconditional refund were rebuked by GoDaddy customer
service. (As an aside, Sovereign Bank proved unable to process the
chargeback; thanks to that I am now a happy DCU customer).

What should you take away from this? I'd be extremely wary of
GoDaddy's email services. Their DNS services are okay but not
great. Their registrar services perform decently (but as long as they
don't maintain the registry/TLD infrastructure that should be the
case). I'd also never trust them with a debit card. At least with a
credit card you have somewhat more leverage to get a
less-than-cooperative bank to see your side of a dispute.

-- 
Alex Pennace, alex at pennace.org, http://osiris.978.org/~alex/