Nick Sieger

Toward a GoDaddy-Free Life

Posted by Nick Sieger Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:25:51 GMT

Ask ten geeks who their favorite domain registrar is, and you’ll get ten answers -- though I doubt GoDaddy would be one of them. Their heavily-ad-filled, upselling, confusing site makes even the most patient webmaster’s skin crawl, and don’t even get me started about their embarrassingly titillating Super Bowl tease ads.

Along those lines, there seems to be a fair amount of myth around GoDaddy inertia. While not what I’d describe as a pleasant experience, it is possible to extricate yourself from GoDaddy. Here’s the process I took, which took maybe an hour start-to-finish. Maybe I just got lucky and hit the right buttons, so YMMV.

I decided to go with Dynadot as my new registrar based on reasonable prices, some good words from other hackers, available features such as email forwarding (so I don’t have to maintain a Postfix server), and a clean-looking site. So far I have not been disappointed -- the account panel is straightforward and easy to use, the purchase process is quick, and I haven’t had any hiccups with the transfer.

So herewith are the steps I took:

1. Prepare the GoDaddy domains for transfer.
2. Make sure you don’t change the Organization or First/Last Name in any of your domain contact fields! It appears that GoDaddy will put a 60-day lock on your domain if you do so.
3. Cancel any Domains by Proxy private registration. The new registrar needs to be able to fetch an email address from WHOIS that’s under your control.
4. Make sure the domains are unlocked. You can do this in the Domain Manager by selecting the domains to transfer and clicking the “Lock” icon, and selecting to unlock them in following dialogs.
5. Get an authorization code for each domain you wish to transfer. To do this, you have to visit each individual domain in the Domain Manager, and click the link to send the code via email. You should have the codes within 10 minutes.
6. Initiate a transfer or bulk transfer, specify the authorization codes for each domain, and check out.
7. Within another 10 minutes Dynadot initiates the transfer by sending email to the address in the WHOIS record for each domain.
8. In the email, click on a link back to Dynadot and authorize each transfer.
9. Within another 10 minutes Dynadot contacts GoDaddy and initiates the transfer.
10. Receive an email from GoDaddy that they acknowledged the transfer.
11. To speed up the transfer process, go back into the Domain Manager one last time. Under the “Domains” hover menu, look for the “Pending Transfers” item.
12. See the domains listed in the Pending Transfer queue. Select all and click the “Accept/Deny” button, select “Accept” in the prompt.
13. Within another 10-20 minutes, receive confirmation from Dynadot that the transfer has been completed. You can now go into the Dynadot panel and manage your DNS and other settings.
14. Apparently you can’t fully cancel your GoDaddy account, but you can remove all payment methods, services and turn off email notifications.

Bask in the glory that is your renewed life as a website operator!