Most of you know that GoDaddy’s “free privacy if you register 5+ domains” offer has been around for a long time but it seems that as of this month, the offer is gone. Now as a domainer, using whois privacy doesn’t make all that much sense in most cases but webmasters won’t like this change.

Someone from NamePros (I always read that thread whenever I’m looking for GoDaddy coupons) asked the GD support staff and the staff member confirmed that the offer is indeed gone. Furthermore, he said that as of this point, you have to pay $9.99 per year for privacy.

I like GoDaddy, it’s a registrar end users are accustomed to, pretty much everyone has a GoDaddy account and GoDaddy pushes have made my life as a seller easier on more than one occasion.

But this decision doesn’t make a lot of sense in my opinion.

Offering private registrations is not rocket science, it’s not complicated at all, so pricing this service at $9.99 seems excessive. Sure, there will be coupons but still, they will be driving away lots of webmasters.

I’d recommend changing the price to something like a buck or two per year because again, webmasters will transfer their domains to other companies if they have to pay something like $9.99 per year.

Personally, I don’t care all that much since I’m not a huge fan of private whois services but I keep in touch with a lot of webmasters and a change like this will end up hurting GoDaddy in the long run IMO.

Most domainers probably won’t care but in the development world, whois privacy is a very big deal. As a domainer, you want to be found by potential end users via whois searches but as a developer, you definitely don’t want competitors snooping around.

I hope a GoDaddy decision maker ends up reading this post and implementing changes accordingly because if not, this decision might have a far more negative long-term impact on their bottom line than they thought it would.