I’ve had internet domains with GoDaddy for years now. They were cheap and they usually had pretty good discounts available for renewing so that I could keep a domain for a year for less than $10. But lately the discounts aren’t as good and I’ve never liked their marketing or web interface, so last year I transferred igirder.com to NameCheap, which I had used before their prices went up, but a transfer there was cheaper than GoDaddy’s renewal. I had flashlightwiki.com and flashlight-wiki.com (the old domain which forwards to the newer hyphenless domain) still at GoDaddy but about to expire. GoDaddy is infuriating because of the games with prices and then they try to upsell you with all kinds of things. I heard that NameSilo was cheap, didn’t play all of those games, and had a pretty clean control panel. So today I transferred the two flashlight domains to NameSilo. I’ll probably transfer igirder next. The only thing I didn’t realize was that I had renewed flashlightwiki for 2 years last time, so it didn’t actually expire until November 2014 instead of November of this year. But NameSilo said they would renew for 1 year past the current expiration date, so now flashlightwiki is good until November 2015.
To get the ball rolling, I signed up for an account at NameSilo, then entered the domains I wanted to transfer. They asked for a transfer code, which I went to GoDaddy and got. But then I had to remember to unlock the domains at GoDaddy as well. Then I got emails from GoDaddy asking me to release the names if I really wanted to transfer them. So I went back to GoDaddy to the the transfer control panel and approved them. Everything was good except that at GoDaddy I had set flashlight-wiki.com to forward automatically to flashlightwiki.com and I had to figure out how to do that at NameSilo, which wasn’t too hard (NameSilo sent me an email telling me to do this since the settings were stored at GoDaddy and wouldn’t be working anymore).
The key thing was not to wait too long. Once you get within 1 month of the expiration at GoDaddy, they won’t let you transfer out. But since NameSilo will extend the expiration by one year from whatever it is now, there isn’t any reason to wait. The whole process took about 45 minutes and I don’t know that flashlightwiki.com ever stopped working, but there were a few minutes in there where flashlight-wiki.com wasn’t forwarding.
GoDaddy offers very good discounts for transferring a domain in, so it could be that to get a really good discount next year I could transfer the domains to GoDaddy for a day for $2.36 and then transfer them back to NameSilo, but as long as NameSilo offers a reasonable price (currently $8.99; the transfer was $8.39 each and I had a coupon for a dollar off the order, you can get a discount too by using the coupon tedsblog when signing up) then I will just stick with them.