On Aug 10 2010 I bought a 1-year SSL cert from GoDaddy (I know, I know) for $12.99. I installed it and successfully used it on an ecommerce site.
On June 25th I get an email warning me that my cert “is coming up for renewal in 15 days”. June 25 + 15 days == July 10th. Sure enough, this morning GoDaddy auto-renewed my SSL cert. Which I never enabled auto-renew on. And, they raised its price to $49.99.
Pretty impressive, GoDaddy has four levels of scams going on here:
The expiration date on the cert itself is Aug 12 2011. But they try to renew you about a month ahead of the expiration date, effectively shorting you a months worth of your cert’s lifetime.
GoDaddy enables auto-renewal by default. It’s easy enough to opt out of auto-renewal for their domains, but I couldn’t find a way to disable it for SSL certs. I foolishly concluded that meant it wouldn’t auto-renew.
(Instructions are here to disable it, but substitute “My Payment Information” for “Payments & Renewing Items”.)
They jacked my $13/year cert up to $50/year for the same product.
GoDaddy performs tracking so their site will report to you that their $13.99 certs cost $49.99. I was able to verify this by switching browsers to one that didn’t have their cookie and looking at the same page.
I called GoDaddy Support this Sunday afternoon. While it was a long distance call, I only had to wait about a minute to reach a person in their Billing Department. They were happy to refund me the $49.99 after I deleted the cert and sent me the instructions to disable auto-renewals I linked to above.
I really need to get off GoDaddy.
