That's one of the problems with cheap domains in the sub $5 range. Some gTLD registries (.space included) thought it was a good idea to offer them really cheap, but what they got were mostly spammers which puts you in a bad neighborhood.
It's not that bad anymore. When I arrived 5 years ago the data caps were still terrible with around 10GB. They still exist but are 10x-20x higher now (and there are some unlimited plans) and 100mbit down is not uncommon. There's 4G with decent speed too... I get 27mbit down on my iPhone 5s in Wellington—that's on 3.5G. Some rural areas are not as lucky of course.
It's great to see other companies experimenting with openness in salaries. We've taken a different approach and pay all employees (including founders) the same salary which increases as the company grows. Our team is now 8-people strong and it's working great so far. As long as you contribute to the bottom line everyone's salary goes up automatically. It's totally transparent, no negotiations required, reviews, etc.
Location: Anywhere (we're based in Wellington, New Zealand)
We are a small international start-up (there's 7 of us at present) where creativity, transparency and happiness are the company's core values. Our team is a bunch of geeks who love building the most awesomest domain management service on Earth.
So let's have fun() and play with all the nice stuff you always wanted to play with. We've built a stack here at iwantmyname that is both flexible and fun, and we're in need of another hacker to help us turn it into a beauty.
We're currently using modern Perl, Erlang, Coffee Script, Lua, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, Kyoto Tycoon, Puppet, Vagrant and are looking at a whole lot of new toys to build the best possible experience for our customers.
So if you've run up against company policies around $favorite_toy in production, join us and see it scale or die in flames. If you introduce technology that is not up to scratch yet, put some time aside to contribute back to that project to get it where we need it.
We love open source, we contribute a lot and we want you to be actively contributing to projects or talking at conferences to share your knowledge with the community.
If this sounds like you, fire up a console window and get in touch by doing the following dig lookup:
Wellington (NZ), remote OK, Content Marketer (full-time) at iwantmyname
You love to write. Your content would appear on the iwantmyname blog, guest articles on other sites, marketing copy, emails, or our FAQ. You're a true storyteller and inspire others to be awesome at what they do.
iwantmyname is a small international start-up (there's 6 of us at present) where creativity, transparency and happiness are the company's core values. Our team is a bunch of geeks who love building the most awesomest domain management service on Earth. We are frequently involved with local user groups, conferences/events and have a large following in the developer and design community globally.
I moved from Germany to Australia in 2007 where I was able to save some money from my day job. Then moved across the ditch to Wellington, NZ about 6 months later with ~$10k cash in the bank. I started running out of money after 9 months which was exactly the time our little domain registrar iwantmyname could afford a small salary. Most exciting time of my life (in a good way) with moving countries and starting a company!
Just saying that GoDaddy can't do anything about the restore fees imposed by the registries. If they screwed up it should be carried out at the firm's expense but I highly doubt they would delete a domain without being explicitly told so.
GoDaddy's dashboard might be bloated which can be confusing but I doubt they deliberately delete domains after removing the credit card info from your account (as long as a domain hasn't reached the expiration date of course).
As the GoDaddy representative correctly mentioned, it is the registries who are to blame for any restore fees. It's bad enough that you as a customer lost domains so Verisign, PIR, Afilias or any other gTLD registry shouldn't ask for anything else but the normal renewal fee.
We are not an ICANN accredited registrar but it's something we might consider in the future. Lots of registrars started out as resellers (or still are for ccTLDs, e.g. eNom, Netsol going through a German registrar) so this is not an uncommon thing.
Most of our TLDs are registered through 1API which is a pure wholesale registrar and we're having a very close business relationship with them. I can promise you if there ever is an issue on the registrar/registry relationship part of the business, we will be able to solve it faster than many ICANN registrars.
There are a few others which you may want to avoid according to this report: https://securityintelligence.com/enticing-clicks-with-spam/