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."
