Why GoDaddy Refunded My $969 (and Will Be Making 'Significant Changes')

GoDaddy's investigation into my inferno of a situation turned out to be a telling investigation into GoDaddy itself.

This follow-up story isn't just appearing in cyberspace because a call from GoDaddy's office of the president came during my dinner a few hours after "Why I Don't Owe GoDaddy $6,579.51 (or $969)" published. Rather, "Why GoDaddy Refunded My $969 (and Will Be Making 'Significant Changes')" is a just resolution to an initially unjust resolution.

A good company makes few customer mistakes, but a company's true spirit is revealed in the resolution of its worst ones.

The caller from GoDaddy's top ranks (for fun, we'll call him Danica) began his missive by mentioning he'd just read my Huffington Post story about GoDaddy. A still-unexplained mammoth amount of data (this is now being investigated by the open source Drupal software community) was deposited into my GoDaddy hosting account.

This kicked GoDaddy's automated system into overage-fee gear. I was blindsided with a charge for $6,579.51, which was later reduced to $969 as a "courtesy" because of a "special circumstance." Danica then immediately proceeded to offer that he wasn't offering a full refund (as seen in the screenshot below) because of the power of the Web pen.

He would have done it any way, he said, even though the countless supervisors I've spent my week speaking with wouldn't, didn't, and told me they couldn't.

Danica commiserated with my situation. He understood and was kind, apologetic and professional. He even offered to call me at another time so as not to interrupt my dinner. (To my friend, Patrick, I do apologize for leaving you waiting at Pizza Rustica by yourself as Danica smoothed the troubled waters.)

As I've been saying all along and wrote in part one of this story on Thursday, Danica agreed that GoDaddy should have processes in place that could have easily prevented this situation. A simple e-mail notifying me that my disk space was spiking and then was at critical risk of exceeding quota, for example, would have been spiffy cool.

He concurred and said it'll be on his suggestion list for next week's innovation meeting. I do genuinely believe that Danica's intentions were sound.

I did feel he takes "part of his job" seriously to proactively seek out publicly documented customer issues (on Twitter, various social networking sites and in the press in general) for the betterment of the GoDaddy customer experience. Still, I question how this situation would have resolved without this particular consumer exercising his hat as a journalist.

That's something we'll never know. What we do know is there are gray areas in GoDaddy's procedures.

Danica would most certainly handle a situation different than, say, supervisor Dale Jr. or supervisor Candice. There also isn't precise clarity on how an emergency situation like mine should have been handled, or if there was a lack of training among the various people who adversely touched my life this week.

While I did feel Danica was honestly straight-shooting me instead of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons begrudgingly ordering the snuffing of a PR fire, I was concerned to hear that ambiguity exists in GoDaddy's billing systems. He said he couldn't tell me with 100 percent certainty that I wouldn't receive another $6,579.51 bill next month because of mysterious intricacies that exist within GoDaddy's systems.

See, my situation was resolved three days into the next billing cycle. Danica couldn't be certain when the company's computers would "flag" my account and determine whether or not to generate another massively unjust bill. While the situation should be averted, a month from now I'd call him directly and I'd have faith it'd be appropriately zeroed.

Another concern in this ordeal is the matter of proof. GoDaddy's security investigation came back conclusively and fingered my Web site's Drupal software rather than GoDaddy itself or an external hacker. That proof, though, couldn't be shared with me because of "security purposes." I was to merely take GoDaddy's word, and after my week with them, my name as Adam became Hella Dubious.

Danica echoed that no-proof sentiment. He said that's because of my status on a shared (cheap) hosting plan. Still, he said GoDaddy would certainly comply with a subpoena should the matter turn into a legal investigation. Then, he said, all documents and logs would certainly be revealed. That surprised me. I never once mentioned anything to him about the concept of suing GoDaddy.

After dinner, I joined a few friends for a drink. When I came home and hopped back online, my full $969 refund had indeed been promptly processed. Yes, Danica did me right. After being fraught for a week over a situation that could have been averted by a single automated e-mail at a company that automates so many other functions, I can finally heal and return to everyday life.

But questions remain.

While GoDaddy's second resolution was the only action that made sense this week, will its billing system pour salt on the wound a month from now? What caused the influx of data in the first place? Was the refund a result of the Huffington Post blog or would it have come without it? Most important, will GoDaddy listen up, learn and install processes to prevent this situation and others like it in the future?

I'm on the fence whether I'll be around to see GoDaddy through to my 2010 hosting renewal date. On Thursday, I said it wasn't a pleasure to meet you, Bob, and I'm sure you can understand why. Now that it's Friday, we've somewhat kissed and made up. Consumers deserve and demand more, Bob, and it'll take you and your machine time to earn back my trust and your credibility.

In the meantime, I know one lesson for sure: If you're in the right and you've been wronged, people hear you so long as you're loud enough.

Update: As I was awaiting editor approval for this post to go live, I received another call from GoDaddy. This one came from GoDaddy's head of hosting. This gentleman (we'll call him Amanda) had some encouraging words about the positive and lasting effects that will result from this situation.

He said there will be some "significant changes" put in place to GoDaddy's overage policies and disk space/bandwidth systems. He said there will be more "proactive" methods and service operating agreements (SOAs) put in place to improve the way GoDaddy communicates back to customers.

He added: "Though this affected you and was highly visible on the Huffington Post, it has been reconciled for you and will be improved for other customers, too. We appreciate you writing about this. This is how we get better. It sometimes takes these types of things to know that they're happening. We have so many moving parts and things don't always get caught in time."

In the end, that's a promise that my stress will help to prevent yours. To conclude our conversation, Amanda welcomed me to write again about future issues so GoDaddy can continue to evolve.

Comments

[HarlDelos]

If you think many hosting companies are bad, I won't argue. However, it goes both directions.

One of my customers opened an account, and kept promising to make payment - and after five months, he finally made payment for a year's hosting by credit card. A month later, I was doing server maintenance, and noticed a file named "amypenet.jpg" in his account. Out of idle curiosity, I took a look and decided that Amy was probably 4, maybe 5. You can guess what was happening.

It's illegal to have certain content on your server. It's also illegal to mail certain content to law enforcement. Because my other customers didn't deserve to have feds confiscate that server, I deleted that particular file, then deleted the guy's account and notified him.

He started phoning me day and night. Nobody else could get through. There were more than 1000 harassing calls. I managed to sell the company, and then turned off the phone, but the folks at Visa charged me $25 in addition to reversing his payment for hosting.

If a genie ever offers me three wishes, I want health, wealth, and the kneecapping of a certain pedophile.

[angrykeyboarder]

Bob Parsons runs GoDaddy. That's enough reason to have a problem with them. He's too right-wing for my taste.

[verbidei]

They got me too. It wasn't the Drupal deal, but it was a quota excess. I cleaned out my account and downgraded to a lower hosting plan. To GoDaddy's credit, they sent me an "excess" email. Unfortunately, when responding, they noted that it wasn't necessarily a state of the actual account usage - it was a "watermark": "It will represent the the highest amount of space used for the period as oppose to your actual usage."
So the old numbers from my original plan are there, but no big deal. Those aren't the actual numbers. Of course they could figure out that I have never exceeded the quota of my new plan.
No such luck.
$1269.73. Really.
According to their records, it's accurate. Alas. Better Business Bureau, here we go.
Needless to say, I've immediately killed my hosting accounts and lost everything with those.

[Brian Ross - Huffpost Blogger]

All server companies have become pirates, low or high end. My magazine has a dedicated server with NTT/Verio. We had to roll over to a newer server as the software on ours was not keeping out the hackers and pirates.

So we changed.

They promised me a "seamless" transfer. There were a number of charges associated with the transfer. We couldn't even see them because NTT's billing system is so old that they had not verified their security certificates, and we have a strict policy about not entering sites whose authenticity systems are not up to date to avoid back door hacks.

When several months went by and we were still being billed above normal, we investigated the auto charges and found out that we had been billed for the old server, which we were told that the "creative" people at Verio would turn off.

Turns out that there was some piece of paper that we needed to sign to do this. Neither my account manager or the "creative" team gave me anything to sign. They have a little gotcha tucked away in their general agreement for the switch that says that you're responsible for turning off the system. I was never given the paperwork though to do that.

Upshot was that we got a bill for six months of the server's use that sat idle. NTT's Billing office told me that the bill was my problem because I didn't fill in the paperwork that I wasn't ever given.

[doctordawg]

People hear you as long as you are loud enough

Must be great to have such a public forum to air YOUR grievances. As for the rest of us, just try yelling "I'm as mad a hell" out your window, and watch how quickly your condo owner association files a report.

GoDaddy should pay you the full amount they BILLED you for, as a fair punitive damages for an egregious attempt at picking your pocket.

[Adam Fendelman - Huffpost Blogger]

HuffPost's Pick

This has now been picked up by The Consumerist (http://consumerist.com/5056063/perhaps-you-dont-owe-godaddy-6579), has exploded on Digg (http://digg.com/tech_news/GoDaddy_Demands_6_579_Due_To_Bug) and has been picked up by Geek.com (http://www.geek.com/articles/news/godaddy-reviews-service-after-657951-customer-bill-20080930/). I am in touch with GoDaddy to follow up on what changes are put into practive.

[NimaJones]

If you want real action post on NoDaddy.com and then post something to Bob's blog. Go Daddy will do just about anything to eliminate negative press.

Don't be fooled Go Daddy has known for years that our manner of charging customers who incur bandwidth or disk space charges is wrong and reactive instead of proactive. It's all about corporate greed. (Bob needs a lot of fancy cars and motorcycles.)

If we can send you a million renewal notices, we can send you "getting close to" or "over" notices for hosting accounts. Go Daddy has chosen to devote their dev time to creating useless products instead of improving what we already offer.

Until we get any real competition in this industry, we can do what we want. People complain but they rarely leave Go Daddy.

[MrFlibble]

Hold on. They screw you and only when the matter becomes somewhat public, and they stand to lose, do they budge. Any you are OK with that!! Easily bought me thinks.

[Spamcaked]

I had a similar experience years back with e-mail backups filling an account faster than I realized (this, back in the day of 5Meg account limits) - my (established many years before) account still had a 5M storage limit, even though new signups at the same cheapo rate had 100M storage limits, I received a bill for maybe $100 for a couple of meg of overage for a couple of months. It took about 2 days, but the hosting provider managed to upgrade my account to the limits that the new customers were getting and reverse the overage charges. Turning off the e-mail catchall function helped reduce the problem for the future, and having 20x storage space didn't hurt, either.

I've had better luck with this smaller provider than GoDaddy - GoDaddy's billing is very intricate and alaCarte, unless you're really running a bare bones site, it's just less headache, and the same money, to go with a simpler plan from the smaller guys.

[Spinfusor]

It's "Go Daddy" or "GoDaddy.com," not "GoDaddy."

[montemalone]

Could you write a story about Comcast. I have something to share...

[Adam Fendelman - Huffpost Blogger]

HuffPost's Pick

You're welcome to e-mail me with your information. My spam-protected e-mail can be found here: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/about#ADAM