Having problems with GoDaddy and other domain companies stealing or reserving names I search… If I don’t buy immediately, they tie up or steal the name and put it up for auction. Getting tired of this.

Found a place to just do searches, THEN go to GoDaddy or 1and! to buy, but now I’ve lost and forgotten where I did this?

Anyone have a safe place to search w/o buying?

This is how ridiculous this has gotten…

To test my suspicions, I searched for something stupid like…

Wisteriagoatcheesebaseballballerinasoire.com

Oh, yeah… they stole the name… later saying it was on backorder or up for auction… yeah, right!!!

Good News, Wisteriagoatcheesebaseballballerinasoire.com is still free.
I noticed the same issue @atlantarobin noticed. Since I use Google.

I buy and use dotdnr.com – the domains are more expensive but you are assured security.  I search there all the time and buy the names I want/need for myself and the client list.  I can point the domain name to any server I want to use and as I have multiple hosting back end companies, this is a must.  Most places do this, but you will find glitches and road blocks as they want you to use their hosting. 

I don’t know how good GoDaddy is as I have never used the “cheapest” out there.

@johnkelly – You are right John – good advice.

Oh, John, but it was GoDaddy who has been my major thief! Lol, they even stole my name.com! Had a power surge in the middle of ordering robincarlisle.com… it was available… but everything crashed… turned everything back on… my name was suddenly up for auction by GoDaddy. I took the .info flavor. They, or their unscrupulous agent, started emailing me and offering me my name.com for an outrageous price. This went on for several months.

I just visited Dawn’s whois.com and searched for it there. It’s NOW available. I could care less now.

Anyway, thanks for the big chuckle this morning over my Wisteriagoatcheesebaseballballerinasoire.com snatching episode. Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh… I’m so relieved THAT is now available again, lol.

BTW, I’ve never had a .com snatched from me while searching the net. Only when searching on GoDaddy. They’re sneaky like that. Love their product, their prices when on sale, and their customer service has been good to me. So by dangy, why do they have to be so sneaky stealy?

@roguecitrus @supereb @richardmclaughlin @ernohannink @johnkelly

@atlantarobin Check out Whois.com, robincarlisle is available (as is batman-carlisle.com). GoDaddy is just ripping you off.

@atlantarobin

I like GoDaddy (elephants and sexist ads aside,) but I have had clients who didn’t purchase their domain names immediately and when they checked again they had been taken.

Whether it’s GoDaddy or a 3rd party service that monitors requests, I always recommend that you have your list of potential domain names and credit card ready when you begin to do research and buy immediately when you find one you like.

Better to “lose” $10 for a year long registration than lose the domain of your dreams. :

Some very interesting posts here – I’m not mad about Godaddy either and wondered about the “not availables” when searching for a domain name. I recently spent many hours over two days searching for a name with “apps” in it and if it wasn’t registered already, Godaddy had a $5000 or “premium name” price on it. I don’t like their technique either with all their add ons so that you have to be so careful and go back delete the things you don’t need. But be careful of Crazy Domains too – they’re hopeless, cheap, but useless, I recently bought a domain with them and needed to have the DNS redirected they don’t answer their phones even though they say phone 24/7 so you have to email and they are inefficient and can’t take clear instructions. 

@atlantarobin I feel your pain, and think GoDaddy is the worst at that. But I hadn’t really considered how pervasive it might be with the big ones, so I will look into some of these other suggestions.

Great topic!