For many years I have been a customer of GoDaddy for domain name registration. All my domains have been registered through them since 2002. I’ve never been a huge fan. However, their online servicing worked, I never needed support and the price was acceptable. So I stayed with them out of inertia. I stayed despite the annoying cross-selling, confusing discounts/offers, and despite the common bad support stories. I wavered a little with the elephant hunting and the support for SOPA (since reversed), but laziness kept me a customer.
I have paid GoDaddy hundreds of dollars. No more. All my domains have been moved to another registrar. The reason? They decided to stop accepting my money. When trying to renew a soon to expire domain, the result was always the same useless error message “Unable to process”. I tried different cards (both of which I had previously used successfully on their site), paypal, restarting the browser, restarting the PC and trying again another day. Always the same error with no indication of how to fix it. I looked to support - nothing in their online guide and with phone support shut, I sent them an email. Over 24 hours later the response was “we don’t know send us more details”. However, during the wait I had checked Google. I was immediately reminded of all the bad things about GoDaddy, plus a few things I hadn’t heard before. I also discovered that their competitors had a better reputation AND were cheaper!
So the solution was simple, take the hour required to transfer all my domains and pay less! I think there is a business lesson here.