I’ve moved all my personal domains away from GoDaddy to Name.com awhile back, but I still manage a lot of domains through GoDaddy for work. I tend to use auto-renew so that I don’t have to worry about domains expiring (and we manage quite a few domains). Recently however, despite a domain being set to auto-renew, there was a billing snafu which led to a site being down for part of the day. Apparently, there were several old credit cards associated with the account, and an expired card was linked to this domain that was set to renew. So when the billing failed, GoDaddy put up a parked landing page.

Now, I understand GoDaddy has every right to put up a landing page, but from a customer service perspective this is a little ridiculous. Consider that we have spend thousands of dollars with GoDaddy, and they immediately took down one of our sites because an $8 charge failed. On top of this, it occurred on a Saturday, so my response time was more delayed than it would have been during the week.

Needless to say, I’ve cleaned out all the old expired cards from the GoDaddy account, but I was also informed about a useful feature to avoid such problems in the future. If you use GoDaddy, you should set up an alternate payment method. It will be used as a backup in case there is any problem with the primary card on file.

To setup the alternate payment method, login to your account, click “My Account”, then click “Payment Methods” and finally “Alternate Payment Method.”

Of course, I would recommend even more to transfer your domains away from GoDaddy. They’re advertising is ridiculous, and the checkout process extremely cumbersome. I have been very happy with Name.com.