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Who’s your Daddy? Vbulletin is!
Well if you ever wondered who major registrars bow down to at the end of the day, think the highly popular Vbulletin Forums. Even more specific, the 3rd party fraud control they employ in Croatia. Yes, a simple e-mail complaining of an expired VB license, and echoes of “how high?” ring throughout Godaddy. The following story happened to a friend of mine, with his site being pulled down late last week (and for the record, the license was valid bought on the owned $160 option)
I recently noticed a post by a friend of mine who owns a site called Highstakesreport.com. He was furious, because Godaddy had pulled his site down due to a copyright infringement complaint, issued by Vbulletin. Apparently there was a missing plural on the VB licensed URL so whatever automated process that they run picked it up as
invalid.
For the record, I happen to know it was a valid license as this site was my creation once upon a time before selling it to the MacPokerOnline Network. This is not the issue, however, that should be concerning. What bothered
me the most was how Godaddy would just shut down the site on a whim without so much as contacting the owner of the site in question.
Now, I am a fan of Godaddy and have been for a long time, but I only use them for a registrar these days. They do have hosting solutions that are right for some people as well, but I wouldn’t recommend hosting your site at the same place the domain is registered at. With that being said, I am disapointed with Godaddy’s actions here.
Godaddy’s rash decision negatively affected HSR in 3 ways.
1. The owner of HighStakesReport lost traffic, qualified and targeted, and possibly money making life-time clients.
2. The site may now be adversley affected in the search engines. Any SEO knows how long it takes to gain quality organic search positions and it is hard work, let alone how much harder it is in the highly competitive Poker SEO industry. In my experience f a site is down when search engine spiders try to connect to it, there are negative reprecussions in the SERPS, aka losing rankings. This is because the search engines are in the business of pleasing users, and a user is not
pleased when they hit a blank error page.
3. The site’s branding took a hit, with their loyal readers wondering why they can’t afford to keep up their site which is a common assumption with an error page.
My friend tried multiple times and multiple angles for them to put the site back up, and after exhausting all his options made the post on the forums. The main point is that Godaddy pulled the site without a warning, which gave the site unneccassary downtime.
Why does VB have such clout at Godaddy for? Why wasn’t the owner of HSR notified of the infraction, and given a time period to respond or defend himself? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? These are questions we have to ask ourselves, as webmasters, as business people. If Godaddy is a partner to us, then
they should act like one, and not like big brother plucking sites off the net for no good reason.
If you would like to read the entire first post by the owner of HighStakesReport and continued discussion, visit it here at PAW.
4 Responses to “Who’s your Daddy? Vbulletin is!”
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September 13th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
[...] a much better explanation, please read and Digg Kyle Healey’s article on the [...]
November 1st, 2007 at 1:00 am
I had the exact same problem with them, slow, unresponsive servers on godaddy and they gave me the same lame excuse. Eventually I got tired of them an moved hosts and I am glad to say my problems all went away and I am much happier with my current host.
December 14th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Hello,
I’m Gerry.
Just saying hello - I’m new.
December 22nd, 2007 at 9:50 am
Hey
Just stopping in to say hi to y’all as a new member.
Aaron