Renewing domain name on due date results in Porn site!

[cslactrn]

I am extremely unhappy to have just thrown good money away by renewing with Hostgator!

I renewed my domain name and hostgator accounts on October 2nd at 11:43 MDT and got my receipts from both hostgator and paypal. The domain was due to expire on October 3rd.

So... Hostgator releases my domain name and parks it on a PORN advertising site.

Their response is... oh well your domain expired and enom.com has the right to park it on any site they please. You should have sent an email to sales to tell them that you renewed. That's all your responsibility. Doesn't matter that they got the money.

I'm furious and upset that my customers and clients will be seeing this PORN advertising website until Hostgator gets their collective heads out of their collective butts.

And the whole lack of responsibility thing... upsetting and sad. Pathetic really. Probably no webhost is responsible anymore, but I'm going to be looking.

Figured that any prospective customers need to be aware to inspect the TOS very closely to find out that hostgator can do this to you do. And that they have the capability to set a default dns page for enom.com but they choose to let enom.com park a domain on a porn website. Hostgator has the capability but chooses not to do it. Very telling. And again something that prospective customers need to know.

If you are planning an adult website then Hostgator is the host for you. If you aren't and don't want your domain to be pointed to a porn site, then maybe look elsewhere if such a place exists.

[GatorDHanna]

I’m sorry to hear that you had a negative experience with getting your domain renewed.

To provide a bit of context: Our domain registration and renewal process is one of our most annoying and burdensome processes, which is why we're spending a lot of time and effort into getting it right with our new billing system (which is currently in testing.

Because Enom (the company we use to resell domain names) is a third party company that doesn't really integrate well with our current billing system, we sometimes need the customer to let us know when they have paid for their domain renewal so that we can process it manually. This obviously isn't ideal from us or for the customer, but for domains registered in a certain way (typically those ordered at the same time as hosting), it's the best way to do it.

To address the second issue, what Enom puts on the site is completely automated. The content is somewhat targeted and is based on the actual domain name. If you had a site that was like “houstoncars.com”, the links would focus on cars and not pornography. Even though your site is obviously not pornographic, your domain name contains a word that might trigger some pornographic keywords to come up, which looks like it was the case in this situation. We unfortunately don’t have any control over that.

I know neither of these are exactly ideal solutions that get these problems resolved immediately, but hopefully the additional context and information sheds some light on the situation and shows you that we are working on making things better.

Again, I’m sorry to hear that you had this sort of experience. It’s definitely not the sort of experience we want you to have and I apologize that you had to go through it.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please let me know and I'd be happy to address them accordingly.