Peo­ple are opin­ion­ated about their web host. I use GoDaddy. I have since I started pig­gy­back­ing off my dad’s account years ago. I’ve never had a prob­lem. It’s been so long that our years of pre­paid ser­vice have started to auto­mat­i­cally renew. I was sur­prised when my Pay­Pal account was charged $4.99 from GoDaddy the other day. It didn’t seem right so I investigated.

It was a charge for renew­ing some busi­ness reg­is­tra­tion GoDaddy offered that we must have signed up for orig­i­nally. I didn’t want to renew for this “reg­is­tra­tion”, but the order had already gone through.

I tried to find the sim­plest way to con­tact GoDaddy about this charge. Any­one who has used their site knows that it’s not the eas­i­est to nav­i­gate, but I’m some­what of a long time cus­tomer so I am used to it. I could either call their phone sup­port which has been very help­ful in the past for other accounts I’ve dealt with, or I could email them. I chose to email them because I just don’t like talk­ing on the phone. Espe­cially to com­plain about $5. I sim­ply wrote:

I was auto­mat­i­cally billed for Busi­ness Reg­is­tra­tion on the domain tombeatty.com. I do not want Busi­ness Reg­is­tra­tion. I have can­celled it. I would like a refund. Will open dis­pute through Pay­Pal but would like to han­dle it through your sup­port staff. Thank you.

And they responded within a few hours say­ing it would be processed. The next day my $4.99 was back in my Pay­Pal account. For as big of a com­pany they are it was a pretty pain­less process.

GoDaddy depends on peo­ple auto-renewing ser­vices. My dad would have never caught the $5 charge, let alone cared about it. Some com­pa­nies would have fought and said I agreed to some renewal terms when I ini­tially signed up and next time around I could opt-out. GoDaddy didn’t. In fact, they processed my claim pretty quickly con­sid­er­ing all of the cogs involved (their sup­port staff, their pay­ment pro­cess­ing, Pay­Pal, etc.).

For all that peo­ple rag on GoDaddy for secu­rity flaws and host­ing prob­lems, I had to point out that they do get some things right.

Good job GoDaddy.