I don't know Mihai Corlan. It's likely neither do you. He doesn't have the luxury of being a blogger for a highly visible Internet newspaper like the Huffington Post. He runs three smaller blogs.
That doesn't mean he owes GoDaddy the alarming sum of $5,934.46 (which was knocked down to $800) for the same exact reason GoDaddy tried to bill me $6,579.51 (which was knocked down to $969 and then refunded in full following a story here).
My Chicago-based film publication went well over its GoDaddy disk quota due to a software module gone awry. I only learned that GoDaddy tried to bill me $6,579.51 for the overage because the charge bounced from my bank account and credit card. I didn't know the problem had been accumulating for more than a month prior.
The same exact scenario just happened to Mihai only weeks after it happened to me and the story exploded online (on the Consumerist, Digg and on).
Sure, I got my situation resolved fairly as a consumer following a lot of heartache and headache, but the journalist in me doesn't rest. The only reason I wrote about it in the first place was to help to assure that processes would be put in place so it didn't happen to others.
But it did just happen to Mihai.
He paid the cash, too. He even had his hosting account terminated and had to restore everything. That's worse than what happened to me. This is unacceptable, GoDaddy. I know you're large and you have lots of moving parts, but you assured me this particular moving part would move more quickly.
Following the resolution of my situation, I've been in contact with GoDaddy's head of hosting to determine the company's follow through. I want to make sure GoDaddy does what it says and doesn't just pacify the press so the fire goes away.
Moments before I learned about Mihai's case, I contacted GoDaddy's head of hosting to ask the status of the fix. I contacted him then because I had just seen GoDaddy's Oct. 2008 newsletter and I didn't see any mention of hosting changes.
GoDaddy responded with:
We have made some good process changes and defined some business logic changes that will start to be developed soon. In addition, we just launched our unlimited hosting plan, which is targeted to customers that need more resource allocation.
Change, though, didn't come soon enough for Mihai. This will only rest when GoDaddy is a company of its word. Stay tuned.
Update at 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 14, 2008: As I was awaiting editor approval for this post to publish, I stepped in on behalf of Mihai. Just as there was an update in my case, there is now an update with his.
I again contacted the office of the president at GoDaddy as well as the head of hosting at GoDaddy to explain that what happened to me just happened to Mihai. All the while, we still wait for GoDaddy to deploy its fix.
This is GoDaddy's latest communication to me regarding the new resolution for Mihai and where GoDaddy plans to go from here:
Adam,
Thank you for bringing Mihai's situation to our attention. His money is being refunded and the vice president overseeing our hosting operations has already extended an invitation to discuss.
GoDaddy has been working on the logic around overages from a development side, which does take time to fully implement.
We are investigating why Mihai wasn't refunded. We will use results from this scenario in our training process and will be building a system to avoid these kinds of mistakes going forward.
Correcting this is a high priority for us. Thankfully, if for some reason a customer feels like they have not received satisfactory treatment from our support teams, they can and should contact GoDaddy's office of the president.
This communication method is without doubt faster than posting a complaint in the blogosphere.
I have removed the e-mail address for GoDaddy's office of the president to prevent e-mail abuse. Should someone need to contact that office, you're welcome to contact me privately with the request.