GoDaddy

GoDaddy (GoDaddy Inc., Tempe, Arizona, NYSE: GDDY; registrar GoDaddy.com LLC, IANA 146; 82 million domains; owner of 123-Reg, Host Europe, Afternic and GoDaddy Registry) is the registrar everyone has heard of, and in 2026 the product is better than its reputation in some respects. Basic WHOIS privacy has been free and automatic since January 2022 (via Domains By Proxy), DNSSEC is included, 2FA offers authenticator, SMS and hardware keys, transfer-out is fee-free, and the developer platform is unusually complete: a documented Domains and DNS API, a CLI, an llms.txt and an official MCP server. Access was cut to accounts with 10 or more domains in May 2024, which broke certificate automation for small users, and reopened to anyone with one domain in April 2026. UK support is 020 7084 1810 and chat, both advertised as 24/7.

The commercial pattern is the objection. Every UK headline deal (.com, .co.uk, .uk and .io at 1p) requires a three-year purchase, with the additional years at £18.99, £12.99, £12.99 and £64.99 respectively in smaller type; the .com therefore costs £37.99 up front (£12.66 a year, which is the first-year figure we record, since no one-year price is displayed) and renews at £18.99 ex VAT. The cart itself is cleaner than its reputation: a test checkout on 5 September 2026 pre-added nothing, with Full Domain Protection (£7.99 a year), Microsoft 365 email, matching TLDs and Klarna offered as opt-in panels, and Premium DNS at £53.88 a year. But Trustpilot's 1-star reviews (4.4 overall on 142,493 invited reviews, 9% one-star) describe services added without consent that doubled bills, renewals at "twice the normal rate", chat sessions that drop, and nameserver changes that take weeks; even a 4-star review from 5 September 2026 cites "aggressive upselling practices and duplicate charges". On 21 May 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission finalised an order against GoDaddy over hosting security failures between 2019 and 2022 (28,000 customer SSH credentials stolen, 1.2 million Managed WordPress customers' data exposed, no MFA on privileged staff logins until 2020), barring it from misrepresenting its security and requiring independent biennial assessments; no fine. GoDaddy Auctions is separate from the registrar, but the company acknowledged shill bidding in an October 2024 blog post and NamePros threads about it go back to 2019; GoDaddy no longer publishes an Auctions fee schedule. GoDaddy runs an affiliate programme on CJ Affiliate; Saaskly has applied and any link will be disclosed on this page if approved.

First-party: we have bought expired domains through GoDaddy Auctions and found them consistently overpriced against the same names on other marketplaces, with a commission structure that community reports put at around 20% of the sale. That is an aftermarket complaint rather than a registrar one, and we have weighted it accordingly, but it is why we stopped using GoDaddy for anything.