Who's Your Daddy? Getting Fucked By Your Webhost

A few months back a friend of ours was fired for blogging. That shook up the local blogsphere and a half dozen of the people we know closed up shop. In either case, we wrote a brief little bit we called Blogging With a Rubber, basically meaning, blog with protection.

We cited as one example, the creator of Foetry.com who in turn found our post and commented on it. Foetry's creator had gone through the trouble of using GoDaddy.com to register his domain hoping they would keep in confidence his identity. Sadly, GoDaddy only needed a letter written by a lawyer -- not a subpeana, not law suit, just a letter-- to reveal to the world who he was. GoDaddy fucked him hard. Who's your daddy now?

In either case, someone from GoDaddy, or claiming to be from GoDaddy, was sent out to our site and Foetry's message board to quell any negative talk. A few things on this:

GoDaddyGuy Writes:
While we are not at liberty to address the specifics of any individual situation, we can say that when our company is contacted about a domain held by one of our customers and registered with privacy, we go through the same process in every case.

Since Foetry.com's creator has said that GoDaddy Failed to contact him before breaching his confidentiality, we figure that GoDaddy will pretty much give up your information to whoever asks. So don't bother paying the extra money.

Further:
Once the complaint is received and processed, we levy an administrative fee against the registrant of the domain

As we understand it, GoDaddy charges extra money from the beginning to keep your information confidential. In essence, a person could file enough complaints with GoDaddy to bankrupt you into releasing your information. If GoDaddy is offering anonimity, they shouldn't be charging per complaint.

Anyway, the bottom line is, don't use GoDaddy, even if their superbowl commercial had a really attractive spokesman.

Instead, we'd recommend registering your domain with a reputable host [we use Dreamhost, and think you should too], just like we did. If you want anonimity, get a trustworthy person, a lawyer, or your own corporation to register the name. Don't trust third parties such as GoDaddy who have no reason to keep your information private.