… regardless of whether they’re a good deal, their marketing tactics leave much to be desired.
Friday morning at 7:15 am (when I needed as much sleep as possible because I was about to drive 850 miles), my cell phone rang. It was Komodo, wanting to get me to buy an SSL certificate from them instead of from GoDaddy.
They must have some crawler out there, trawling the web for sites with nearly expired SSL certificates. When the crawler finds one, it does a WHOIS lookup on the domain, looks up the administrative contact for the domain, and adds that contact to their call list.
Unfortunately, they have two problems:
- They didn’t verify either my area code (mountain time zone) or my address (pacific time zone) to make sure they wouldn’t be calling so early in the morning. (The sales guy told me their system is only supposed to give them east coast numbers.)
- They didn’t try to find out if my number is a cell phone. It’s illegal to cold-call cell phones; the only reason the call lasted as long as it did is that for a while I wasn’t sure whether Komodo was a subsidiary of GoDaddy or a competitor (they’re the latter). A cell phone number being publicly available (in my case, in my domains’ WHOIS info) does not make it legal to cold-call the number for marketing purposes.
I’m going to file an FCC complaint; maybe lighting a fire under them will get them to fix their system.