14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, Jordan Reid, the owner of the popular lifestyle blog RamshackleGlam.com, accused GoDaddy and HostMonster of failing to help her recover her hijacked website. GoDaddy representatives have responded to our inquiry to clarify that they’re not to blame for the incident and that the domain could have been easily recovered.
Reid’s website was hijacked by someone using the online name “bahbouh” and auctioned on Flippa.com. Reid initially contacted Flippa, but that didn’t help. Then she reached out to the FBI, which she claims responded promptly and launched an investigation.
Reid also contacted HostMonster, the company that operates RamshackleGlam.com, and GoDaddy, of which she’s a customer. She contacted GoDaddy because her website was transferred to a private GoDaddy account.
She ultimately got her website back, but she lashed out at both HostMonster and GoDaddy for not being better prepared to handle such situations.
We’ve reached out to GoDaddy to hear their side of the story.
The company’s representatives say there have been a number of misconceptions about how the process works. They highlight the fact that GoDaddy was not the “losing registrar” in this case.
Instead, the losing registrar, a term used for the registrar that holds the domain name before being transferred, is FastDomain, HostMonster's domain registrar.
FastDomain could have asked GoDaddy to simply transfer the domain name back, but the company hasn’t made such a request. GoDaddy says it’s highly responsive to such requests, but it hasn’t received one for the RamshackleGlam.com domain from FastDomain.
Furthermore, if after five working days they don’t get a response, losing registrars can turn to the Transfer Emergency Action Contact (TEAC), a contact which each registrar must provide to ICANN. Registrars are required to respond to inquiries made through this channel within four hours, even if the final resolution takes a bit longer.
“Every day, we receive reports domain names have been stolen. In order to protect our customers and other users of the Internet from having domain names maliciously taken, we have developed best practices,” Laurie Anderson, director of domain services at GoDaddy, told Softpedia in an emailed statement.
“Part of these practices include verifying the identity of the complainant. For increased security, we require multiple forms of identification and if we are unable to receive that data, we are unable to provide access to the domain,” Anderson added.
“While this is no doubt a frustration for some people in some cases, it has saved countless domain names from being transferred incorrectly.”