So I recently heard of Hover.com. It is a Tucows service (and Tucows have been around forever, although I hadn’t really thought of them much in the last decade) and I since I have been doing a lot of work modifying DNS files recently I have come to really loathe the GoDaddy website. It has been a lot like having to deal with the proverbial used car salesman every time I need to do something with a domain.
Hover’s biggest feature is simply that it doesn’t try to mess with you. I’ve found all the domain management stuff to be sufficient, although not amazing – but at least it just lets you work instead of screwing around trying to upsell you on things. Additionally, Hover’s website is nice and clean and refrains from having NASCAR Driver Supermodels offer you AMAZING DEALS on .biz domains.
(Side note: Don’t ever buy a .biz domain. You might as well have your domain at .spam.)
My long term thought is that I want to move the various saaspire domains away from GoDaddy where they’re mushed up with domains that I personally own. But I’ve actually never tried to move a domain from one registrar to another, so I thought I should give it a dry run with something that was real (i.e. not parked) but not mission critical:
This website right here. Antipatter.
The procedure turns out to be simple. First you have to “unlock” the domain at the current registrar. I believe there are restrictions on the unlock (perhaps preventing you from changing registrars just before you have to renew – just when I want to change the most). Then you need an “authorization code” from the current registrar, and you must give it to the new registrar.
Then you have to make damn sure your administrative contact into is up to date. Now – here’s a secret: I didn’t want to pay GoDaddy’s surcharge for not publishing my info, so I’ve given them really stale info to work with. If you ever have run a WHOIS on any of my domains, well, I haven’t been in any of those places for awhile now.
Hover offers privacy built into their pricing model – there’s no option to NOT have privacy for your WHOIS info. Note that their one year price is a little higher than GoDaddy’s, but the extra $5 is totally worth it to me.
Once the auth code is provided the request is sent to the current registrar, which then asks permission from whoever is the official administrative contact email recipient. You reply in the affirmative.
Then they sit on the whole thing for about a week, during which nothing happens. It reminded me a lot of a bank clearing a check.
In the end the domain transferred and I got a maudlin “Aw, we’re sorry to see you go” message from GoDaddy. Pretty clean. I did manage to screw up on not updating my nameservers fast enough, which is why Antipatter (*cough*) went off the air briefly yesterday. However it wasn’t too painful of a process, so I’ll probably start moving other domains over.
