Don’t Bother With Buying A .me Domain: GoDaddy Blew It.
This morning was one of those times when I realized what a true web dork I am. I found out yesterday that the .me domain names were going on sale at 11 this morning, and I desperately wanted to get aweso.me. Godaddy had a little countdown timer for the days, hours, minutes and seconds until the names were available to buy.
When there was one minute remaining, I opened a new firefox tab and typed in aweso and set the dropdown to .me. The minute counted down, I hit submit, waited and……
Success! Aweso.me was available. So I bought it for two years and went through the checkout. Seconds later I received the following email:
Aweso.me, right? I was so excited and dreaming up what I was going to do with it. Then I got another email:
Whaaaa? So I picked up the phone and called. What ensued was a circular conversation about how Godaddy was completely unprepared for a “land rush”, how it’s likely that none of the good .me domain names were available at launch anyway, as they were probably “pre-registered”. I asked about the pre-registration process, to which I was told “I don’t have insight into that process, but know it exists”.
So, thank you Godaddy for both making then ruining my day. I’ve always used GoDaddy to register my domain names (20ish), but I’m bummed.
Oh yeah, and this has happened to other people I know today, and yes, Godaddy did charge us all for the domains they said were available then decided they were not. Refunds “should be available within the next 72 hours.”
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I thought I successfully registered insure.me today. Less than 1 hour after I paid $39.98 for that, I got that dreaded email saying insure.me has previously been registered and godaddy can attempt to find out about the error and try again OR refund me my money.
I emailed back asking for a refund. Why bother?
[...] of people have been experiencing problems with the .me [...]
Although GoDaddy did fail to launch correctly, .me domains will still remain strong. The mere marketability and “ego” factor for the general public will make them strong for years to come, or more likely grow over the years, rising the likes of .net potentially.
I do recommend registering at least 1 .me domain, if you want to be part of the next domain boom. Sadly, GoDaddy blew up their own potential for more clients.