Pardon my recent downtime. It doesn’t matter how many times I transfer a domain, I always seem to hit snafus in the process. Usually, this isn’t a huge deal, but I feel bad now that I may have lost some sweet ranking on ’swoopo scam’ permanently. Oh well. But you can learn from my error! Here are some very simple tips for transferring away from GoDaddy that may save you a TON of trouble.

1. If you have private registration with domainsbyproxy.com, be sure to cancel your private registration. Otherwise, you’ll get an error telling you the domain cannot be transferred b/c of a “written agreement” expressly forbidding it.

2. Make sure the domain is unlocked. A locked domain cannot be transferred.

3. Ensure your email address is up to date. You will get several emails from GoDaddy confirming transfer and to get an authorization code (they only send it via email).

Follow those 3 steps and transferring should be a fairly painless process. Learn from my mistakes and don’t have 4 days of downtime!

Also, it may be worth mentioning that there is one step that is very confusing in transferring to Dreamhost. When you transfer a domain, if you have a $0.00 balance (which is standard, right?), you will initiate the transfer process and it will take you to a sort of checkout page. You log into paypal and make the $9.95 payment. That doesn’t mean the transfer has been initiated. You have to go back through the transfer process as if you hadn’t done it before and then, when you get to the checkout, this time you’ll have a balance and only then when you click continue with the transfer is the transfer actually initiated. That threw me off the first time I did it.

And as a side note, in case you were wondering about why I’m transferring domains from GoDaddy, 2 reasons:

1. The GoDaddy ‘nickel and dime’ mentality - “how else can we squeeze just a *little* more from this customer (private registration fees, increased pricing after the first year, etc.) where Dreamhost offers flat $9.95/yr registration with no gimmicks and free private reg. and no increasing fees after you initially purchase the domain.
2. I don’t feel like supporting GoDaddy’s smutty advertising with my domain registration dollars.

If you’re thinking about switching to dreamhost, you can use my promo code goont70 to get a year of hosting for $70. Enjoy!