When I first started buying domain names like everyone else that was new to the web I had heard of Godaddy
(they do spend a lot of money on TV advertising) and didn’t know of anyone else so that’s who I used.  I noticed right away that their sales process is pretty painful.  In order to buy a domain from Godaddy you have to wade through screen after screen of promotional offers.  Although I still bought the domains from Godaddy the constant nickel and diming during the sales process sent up a red flag.  I imagine it makes Godaddy more money per sale but they probably do fewer sales because of the constant bombardment.

When my domain came close to renewal I spent some time researching Godaddy.  I found that there are many sites on the net that exist for the sole purpose of expressing frustration with Godaddy.  After reading about what other people have experienced I realized that I have been a victim of their practices.

Back in May there was a domain that I wanted to buy, it was owned by a company and was autoforwarded to another site.  I figured that the company would let to domain expire since it didn’t pertain to their company at all (you can check the expiration through Godaddys whois service).  Sure enough the company did let it expire but when I log into Godaddy they don’t let me buy the domain.  I do some research and find out that
there’s a grace period after the domain expires.

So I wait for the grace period to be over (during this time I searched for the domain once every couple days on Godaddy to see if the company that owned it had renewed it).  When the grace period is finally over I try to buy it only to find out that Godaddy had bought it through one of their subsidiary companies (at the time I didn’t know it was a Godaddy subsidiary) and was going to try to auction it off.

This practice is pretty common from what I can gather.  If the registrar (Godaddy in this case) sees a lot of searches for a particular domain they’ll buy it the second it becomes available because they think it’s in demand so that they can sell it for much higher than the regular registration price.  This isn’t necessarily illegal, but it’s certainly a shady and underhanded process.

They tried something similar with me a few months later.  I owned the .net version of a domain.  When the .com version of that domain became available Godaddy snatched it up and offered it to me for the low low price of $614.  I didn’t take them up on their offer, or the three subsequent offers they sent out.  After a couple months I found that the domain is available to purchase for the regular registration fees.  Again there’s nothing illegal about this but it certainly is a shady practice.

So I decided to transfer my domain out of Godaddy and over to Moniker.  Moniker is technically cheaper if you use their private registration (compared to Godaddy plus their domainsbyproxy private registration) and Moniker has a good record amongst webmasters.

In order to initiate the process you need to log into your Godaddy account and go to ‘My Domains’.  There you’ll see a list of all the domains you own currently at Godaddy.  Click on the domain that you want to transfer and you’ll see a list of options.

1: you have to unlock to domain so click the ‘change’ link next to locked and unlock it.

2: if you have private registration through their domainsbyproxy service you need to log into your domainsbyproxy account (Godaddy sent you an email with that account information) and remove the privacy.  This will ensure that any emails sent to the owner of this domain will go through to the admin email account you have listed with Godaddy.

3: you need an authorization code.  Click on ’send by email’ next to authorization and it’ll send an email out to the one you have listed with Godaddy with a long string of characters in it.  Make sure you check your spam folder, my email account flagged the emails sent for this transaction as spam and put them into the spam folder where I didn’t think to look.

4:  sign into your Moniker account and go to transfer domain.  There you list the domain and the authorization code.  Don’t leave any spaces in there.  Ex: ‘domain123,code’ is correct; ‘domain123, code’ is not correct.  Once this is done you should be able to view pending transfers, it will list the domain you want to transfer and the domain will have ‘pending authorization’ on it.

5: Moniker will send emails out to the owner of the domain to authorize the transfer, check your email account (spam folder to) for the emails.  Open the email and click on the link in the email to approve the transfer with Moniker.  You now don’t have to do anything and the domains will be transfered over in 4-5 business days.  You should now be able to vew pending transfers in your Moniker account and it’ll say ‘pending transfer’ now instead of ‘pending authorization’.

6: if you want to make the transfer occur quicker you can log back into your Godaddy account and go to ‘my domains’ again.  There you’ll see a menu for pending tranfers, click on ‘pending transfers’.  It should list the domains you are going to transfer to Moniker.

7: There will be an ‘accept/decline’ button next to the domains you want to transfer, click on it.  There you’ll be able to click either an ‘accept’ or ‘decline’ radio button to finalize the transfer out of Godaddy.  It won’t happen right away but it’ll be much faster than the 4 days it would take if you had done nothing.

Notes:

Godaddy used to have a policy of locking down a domain whenever the contact information for the domain was changed (that means if you removed private registration they would lock your domain down and you wouldn’t be able to transfer it) for 60 days.  They don’t do that anymore.

If your domain is within 30 days of expiring you cannot move it, this is not a Godaddy rule, it’s a rule that all domain registrars have to adhere to.  So if you want to transfer your domain do so before it’s within that 30 day period.  Once a domain is either purchased, transferred, or renewed at a registrar it cannot be moved for 60 days.  Again this is not a Godaddy rule, it’s a rule that all registrars adhere to.  It’s meant to keep people from swapping out domains too often.

If Godaddy is your webhost (where you store the website files) you’ll need to find another one, make sure you have transferred your sites files over to a new webhost before you complete the transaction or you could lose all of your files.

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