godaddy

Why I am Transferring My Domains from GoDaddy

When I decided to write this post, I did a quick search for the title to see what else came up. Oddly enough, someone wrote a post late last year with a similar, but opposite title. Seems like an interesting site with fairly decent traffic, and based on the comment arguments, he must be doing something right. You don’t get that popular without shaking a few cages. 😉

That site aside, I AM transferring my domains away from GoDaddy. There was no specific nail in the coffin for me, but many little things that bothered me over the years. I seldom make changes like this without some major reason, but I think in this case I’m just ready to move on. Here’s a few of the reasons I have started the process of retiring from using GoDaddy.

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The number of upsells on ordering pages always kind of irked me. I understand you want to sell other services, but I have never seen such cluttered pitching in my life. Every time I purchased or renewed a domain name, I was rolling my eyes on the inside as I went through the process.

The hosting was horribly confusing to me. I bought a cheap hosting account to test a site a few years back so I didn’t care what it had for resources. It was going to be a small sandbox and that is all. I have had hosting at a number of sites over the years, most with cpanel but some without, and GoDaddy was without a doubt the most difficult interface to work with. Within two weeks I emailed them and told them it was awful and I didn’t want it anymore. I paid about $50 for a year up front so they told me they could not refund me anything, but I still didn’t care. I wanted nothing to do with it.

The whole SOPA support thing kind of rubbed me the wrong way. To me that was an indication that GoDaddy did not know their customers. They are just a big dumb money making machine, and there’s nothing wrong with that until you put your foot in your mouth. Being a big company is like being a celebrity. Yes, we know you have political views, religious views, social views, but we don’t want to hear it if it’s going to be divisive. You’re just going to hurt your company/personal image because less people will now be interested in your product. Harsh, yes. True, yes.

While a small price difference might be a concern of someone with a portfolio of hundreds or thousands of domains, I only have about forty, so I’m not going to be realizing any significant savings by choosing a cheaper company. However, at the time of this writing, GoDaddy is over $13 for a .com and NameCheap is under $11. I’m still saving about $80 a year which I can throw towards whois privacy protection.

If I had to pick one thing that pushed me into beginning the migration, it would be the private registration costs. DomainsbyProxy charges $9.99 a year per domain, but at NameCheap I can buy protection in bulk that works out to be only a couple dollars a year per domain. I understand there might be sites that offer this for free, but for the companies I’m using and am familiar with, NameCheap was a no brainer for me.

So, I began the process a few weeks ago and by the end of the year will have my GoDaddy account empty and all swept out. The one thing I read in that aforementioned blog that the writer seemed to be concerned about is the cost of transferring, but transferring domains does not cost a thing. Sure, you have to pay for an additional year on each domain you transfer, but that’s something you would likely be doing eventually anyways, and sometimes you even get the extra/first year for a slight discount. On the other hand, I can’t say I blame him because parting with a grand when you really don’t have to isn’t high on my priority list either. Luckily my annual domain bill has never been that high. 🙂

 

Setting Nameservers for Your Domain

You’ve just purchased a brand new domain name. Now what? You’ll need a hosting account where you can store all your website files. If you’ve already got both of these necessary components, the next step is to set the nameservers for your domain name. I purchase and manage all of my domain names through GoDaddy so I’ll be using them as my example.

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They’re certainly not the only game in town so there’s plenty of other places to go to order your domain name. They’re just the biggest. Here’s a list of the top domain name registrars by market share and domain name count if you’re interested. Where ever you go, you’ll just have to familiarize yourself with their site and figure out where to go to set the nameservers.

Here’s the steps I take to set nameservers over at GoDaddy. You probably would never have guessed this first step in a million years, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Step 1: Log in.

Step 2: Click “Manage”.

Step 3: Select your domain by clicking on it, then click “Nameservers”.

Step 4: If your hosting account is not at GoDaddy like mine, here is where you would select “I host my domains with another provider” and then add a minimum of two nameservers.

So where do you find what nameservers you should be using? To find the correct nameservers, you would need to find out from your hosting provider. This is why I like HostGator because they list the nameservers in the left hand menu of your cpanel account.

I’ve used some other hosts that don’t make it as easy, so depending on where you go for hosting, you may have to hunt around the site a bit to find the appropriate nameservers if they’re not included in your welcome email.