I have been a relatively happy customer of GoDaddy for some time. I’ve built up a collection of 48 domains, all hosted by them. One of the things that I didn’t like was the maze of menus and choices I had to maneuver in order to make my purchase. They recently provided a box to expedite the checkout process, but it is not prominently displayed and there then some after sale offers to reject before the sale is final.

But what really got my goat was the way GoDaddy promoted their CashParking money making scheme for monetizing inactive domains. I wrote about the experiment with CashParking and the fact that after 2 month and the expenditure of $7.98, I made the grand sum of $0.18 with CashParking which was not paid because I was under the minimum for payment.

GoDaddy’s renewal rate of $8.95, unless you get some special offer, is more than many other registrars charge. Granted, they do provide some additional features like an email address, and an instant blog for each domain. But who needs 48 email accounts, or has the time to construct and maintain 48 blogs.

So I shopped around and found 1and1. For a fee of $5.95 you can transfer a domain to them, with a one year automatic extension of your term. The fee for registering a new domain is also $5.95. I am presently in the process of transferring all of my domains to 1and1, and have completed all except 5 which were renewed by GoDaddy within the last 60 days. At the expiration of the 60 day period, the latest being December 15, all domains will be at 1and1.

I was pleasantly surprised during the transfer process to learn that I could specify that the DNS pointers remain pointed to the same host as shown on GoDaddy. That meant that there was no re-editing of the individual domains, making the process totally painless. It also meant that my websites would not be offline at any time during the transfer.