Last week I told a story of how GoDaddy's customer service told me I'd forfeited a certificate I'd purchased when I didn't use it in 60 days. On Friday I got a voice mail from someone in "the office of the president of GoDaddy.com". She told me they had restored the certificate to my account. Surely enough, the credit is there.
Things that make you go "hmmmmm". I'm not sure I like the possibility that I get by Weblogging a complaint what I could not get by making the same complaint to customer service. Of course, that's just one possibility. As I hinted in my earlier entry, even at the time of the annoying incident I suspected I was dealing more with a clueless customer service rep (as well as his clueless supervisor) than a true corporate policy of seizing my certificate. I might have called the number right back and reached a rep who sorted out the problem right away. Or perhaps if I'd sent my complaint to the company, rather than posting it, they'd have been as attentive. This sort of thing happens all the time.
My friend David Courtney who related the following story:
I read about your GoDaddy experience. I have to say, I'm rather surprised you were treated this way. I shall have to re-evaluate my opinion of GoDaddy. I registered the ultradesic.com domain with them last year and bought a Turbo SSL certificate. Once my data center issued myCertificate Signing Request, I went to the GoDaddy website to get the SSL certificate. I took that SSL certificate back to my data center only to find out they had used an invalid method of generating the original CSR. They gave me a new CSR. I went back to GoDaddy only to find out that once the key was issued, you couldn't get a new key. I was extremely aggravated at my data center for messing up the process. But in this case, the GoDaddy person I communicated with via [username omitted]@godaddy.com was extremely helpful. He immediately issued me a credit for my certificate so I was able to generate a new certificate from the new CSR.
I had another somewhat similar problem this year. I was sick of dealing with my data center's total disregard for security. (i.e. no ssh access to my domain. I had to use plain text FTP to get anything done.) So I moved to a new data center. Well, because I moved my domain to a new location, I had to generate my certificate all over again. When I went to my account at godaddy.com, I again ran into the problem of "The key has been issued, you can't re-key it." But I again e-mailed [username omitted]@godaddy.com and the problem was resolved very quickly. He credited me a certificate for both my domains, no questions asked.
This is in line with everything I'd heard about the company before last week, so I'll assume I just caught a it of bad luck in the customer service lottery and accept their olive branch in good grace, putting last week's incident aside for now.