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or Our Life With the Thrill-Kill Kult
You may have noticed we've been absent from the Web for almost three weeks, replaced by a strange message telling you to contact our hosting provider. The reasons for this deserve to be recorded for posterity... There are several threads really involved. Firstly, since February last year, I've been working at Go Daddy, the domain name registrar. They give you an employee account in which you can buy products - great, thought I, free hosting. And so I set up hosting for all my domains (which were largely already purchased through Go Daddy), in my employee account.
Among our other activities here is helping out in the local comedy community, and there we've met a lot of great people. These including Randy, a stand-up comic, and his brother Dale, who came to the shows to support his bro', and also take pics of the comedians for their portfolios, as he was also a photographer. Dale asked us to set up a website for him, so we bought the domain name through Go Daddy, and added it to our hosting.
Then, one Friday at the start of August, we were driving to lunch and listening to the radio, when the news announced they'd made arrests in conjunction with the "serial shooters", a series of apparently random attacks that had been plaguing Phoenix for about a year. We were very pleased to hear that...at least, until we heard the names of the people arrested. One of them was Dale. At first, we clung to the hope that it was just someone with the same name, but the more we heard, the less that was credible.
I went into work that afternoon and, of course, immediately told management there could be an issue, with the site being hosted at Go Daddy. They thanked me warmly for bringing it to their attention - but three hours later I was suspended and escorted from the building, and three days later I was told my employment had been terminated. The alleged reason was "improper use of my employee account", but no such policy had ever been explained to me, and according to friends who still work there, no trace of such a policy could be found at the time.
They not only closed down my employee account, but they also locked my long-standing customer account, which prevented me from moving my domains to any other company. Indeed, it was not just locked, but had been erased from the system, to the extent that customer support representatives couldn't even see it. I had to go all the way up to the Office of the President, to find anyone who could locate it, and it took a week before they would even tell me that the legal department had locked the account. Fortunately, the bead business that my wife runs had not yet been moved to Go Daddy - I had procrastinated about that - and so that, at least, survived without interruption.
However, all our other sites, including business sites, non-profit forums and even our charity site, were closed down by Go Daddy, for no real reason. I can see why the contents of the sites might have been of interest to authorities [especially, given the case, the contents of girlswithguns.org!], but there was absolutely no point in preventing us from moving them elsewhere. The legal department at Go Daddy made absolutely no effort to contact us, or explain what had taken place. The whole thing has left us with a very bad taste in our mouth as far as Go Daddy is concerned: we'd been customers of theirs for many years before I ever worked there, but now, we can't get our domains and other services away fast enough.
They finally unlocked our customer account today (August 24th). We immediately moved our domains, including this one, over to another company, where we had already bought and set up hosting. It's great to be back up and running, and we now ponder the lessons to be learned from this event:
- Go Daddy sucks. I liked my job. I was great at my job. I came forward and brought this to their attention. And they still treated me as if I was a serial killer.
- You never really know someone - though Dale still claims he's innocent, and we fervently hope this is indeed the case.
- Always have a backup plan. Think, worst-case scenario, and base your plan off that.
- Keep your work separate from your leisure
Oh, well. Live, learn and move on...
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