Fun with Domain Transfers

I have — or rather, I had — three domains registered through Google, that I had set up a few years ago. At the time, that seemed like the quickest-and-easiest way. But behind the scenes, those domains are registered through GoDaddy — and I do not want to do business with them. I've been putting off transferring them, mostly because I had too much else to do — there's almost always something more important than a domain transfer that needs to be done — but they're all up for renewal in the coming weeks, so "now" seemed like as good a time as any.

Geez, what a hassle it is to transfer your domain out of Google.

First, you have to go to GoDaddy and make sure they're no locked (they probably are), but don't do anything else — even a simple change to your account records will lock you in for another 60 days! From there, you have to go to DomainsByProxy — turns out, this company I had never heard of, they're managing the contact information on each of my domains for some reason, and I'll need to go through them to turn off "Privacy." Of course, having been unaware that this service was being provided to me, I had no login or password to access the account (I have an account?), so I had to go through several steps to change the password I had never (to my knowledge) set up in the first place. Then, I could turn off "Privacy."

On good advice, I decided to bring the domains over to Hover. They have lots of information and useful tutorials on their site to guide you through the process of transferring a domain specifically from Google, as it isn't for the faint of heart. If not for the minor point that there's nothing (anywhere on the site!) to clue you in that your user name needs to be all lowercase when you set up an account, why, the transaction, it might have been just about perfect.

(I'm sure there will be all kinds of jiggery-pokery required to complete the transition, but that shouldn't be too difficult.)