This is a cautionary tale.

But some history first. I have had my own website for years, since I signed up with earthlink.net in the early or mid 90s. But I didn’t have much space there, so I found I was putting up pages at various places and linking to my zaconline.com domain name. A couple of years ago I decided to pay for a ISP account and register my name as a domain. Initially I had space on a local web company’s site but they were not a registrar, so I registered with the popular ISP Go Daddy. Later, I hosting to a company called Hostmonster, which gives me unlimited space for my website and has a good reputation for technical support. This month I realized that my registration was up for renewal, so I thought I would consolidate my accounts. I knew that this could be tricky, since registrars don’t like losing the business and can block a transfer. But certainly Go Daddy was to big and well-known to play this kind of game. I started the process December 17, 2 weeks before expiration.

I was always very happy with Go Daddy as a domain registrar, even if I thought it was a funny name. Would this process make me unhappy and be fought with funny games?

The process starts with the current registrar. You go there and unlock the domain, remove the privacy restriction and request an email to authorize the release of the domain name for transfer. Then you go to the new registrar request that they take over the registration. You have to punch in the authorization code at this point. Then they say it can take a number of days to be completed.

My problem started when I thought I had taken the privacy restriction off of my two domains – ninazacuto.com and ninazacutophotography.com – before I started the transfer process. Turned out I had unlocked it, but not taken off the restriction. So I got an email saying that the request was denied. I removed the restriction, called domainsbyproxy, which had sent the denial. I called Go Daddy and the new registrar to tell them what had happened and asked what needed to be done now. Everyone said the transfer was still in process, it would take a few days to complete. Ten days later I discovered that the transfer still hadn’t gone through. This time when I called Go Daddy support, they said everything had been done on their end and that it was in the hands of the new registrar.

The new registrar said no, Go Daddy had still not okayed the transfer. The only thing they could do was reverse the original request and have me start the process again. Which I did. But they told me that it might not take effect before my registration expired at Go Daddy in 3 days. They said that Go Daddy should have a way of manually releasing the domain name. So I called back Go Daddy. Nope support said very politely, nothing Go Daddy could do and it might take a week.

During my time on hold, I had been exploring the GD domain manager site and I found a page which listed my pending transfers and had an “accept or deny” button. When I asked what that was about the support tech said, “well you could try clicking it, it might speed up the process.” I did that, clicked accept and within minutes my domain names had disappeared from GO DADDY and I got an email from the new registrar Hostmonster that the transfer was complete. Sure enough my account at Hostmonster reflected that they now were the registrar of those domains and my new renewal date would be in 2011.

I realize that no company wants to lose business, but in this case I had wanted the registrar and host to be the same and it is cheaper for me since I get a free domain name registration through the host.

When I started the process, I would have recommended Go Daddy to others. Now I feel as though Go Daddy either purposely did not tell me that I could manually accept or decline the transfer or that the support people are not given enough information about the process to allow them to adequately help the customer. In either case, it is bad business.

I am now a unhappy, dissatisfied, but more informed customer. I pass on what I learned in case you are ever in this situation.