I’ve been a GoDaddy customer since 2008, using the service to register and maintain all of my domains. Today, I needed to renew my jeffc.me domain for one year. So, I logged into my GoDaddy account, clicked on Billing and Renewals, added my domain to the shopping cart and tried to remove the one year of full domain protection and privacy because I can’t afford it this year.

Clicking the trash can to remove the privacy protection would end up removing the domain renewal as well. Thinking this was an error of some sort, I tried it again, and then again. Finally, I gave up, thinking that for whatever reason, GoDaddy was treating both products as one. That’s pretty stupid if you ask me, since they’re clearly displayed as two separate products in the cart.

After struggling a bit, I visited the help center which ultimately led to contacting support. The support person was able to remove the privacy protection from my account allowing me to renew the domain. All in all, the process to renew the domain took about 45 minutes.

I imagine thousands of people renew domains every day and it’s one of the foundational services that GoDaddy provides. To experience this much friction in a process that should take minutes from a company that has offered this service for years is baffling.

I don’t know why the GoDaddy cart treated both products as one. Something is amiss. I’ll end my experience by saying the support person I interacted with was a 10/10 and got the job done. I’ll still be using GoDaddy for my domains but damn, I hope it goes a lot smoother next time.