I just transfered all of my GoDaddy domains to http://www.enomcentral.com/. A good friend of mine has had a merchant account with them for years with no problems. Their interface is is pretty good too.
Transferring out of GoDaddy is a challenge though (but it feels great once you finally rip your domains out of their cold, dead hands). They make the process convoluted and confusing, hoping you'll give up. But don't give up (never give up!). Here's what you have to do:
- log in to GD and go to the domain manager. Go to each domain individually and check to see if the domain privacy proxy is turned on. If it is, it means that your whois info is being proxied by http://domainsbyproxy.com/ (it seems to be a sister site to GD). You need to find your account number for DBP which they would have sent to you when you reg'd the domain. You need to login to DBP and disable the proxy for all of your domains.
- Go back to GD and you'll notice the proxy is now off (magic!). You now need to unlock each domain and get an Authorization Code for each one by clicking the send Auth Code By Email link on the domain screen. Most (all?) registrars will request this when you initiate the transfer.
- Go to your new registrar and initiate the transfer (this is where you'll need the auth code).
- The new registrar will send an email to the administrative contact for the domain(s) confirming the start of the transfer. You may have to wait up to a day or so to get this.
- GD will send an email confirming the transfer is started. You can also check GD periodically because eventually they will display your domains as Transfer/Pending. Go to the My Domains page, mouse over the Domains tab and click pending transfers. Select all of your domains and click the "Accept/Decline" icon (it's a very confusing icon) and choose accept (obviously) and be sure to click all the Okays.
And you're done! If you use GoDaddy's DNS servers you may have to reconfigure your DNS and mail settings (maybe someone else has experience with that?). If you already use a 3rd party for DNS and mail then the transfer shouldn't affect your site/email.
I transferred one domain name from network solutions to godaddy a year ago to help out a client. Sure, transferring from godaddy seems very frustrating, but the sheer number of network solutions customer support and retention folks who were wasting my time was unbelievable. I only called since their domain tools were next to useless and for some reason would not send me the auth code. They were extremely reluctant to do what I asked, threatening me with the possibility of domain sniping and registrars fucking up and me losing the domain in the process. Not only did they love trying to scare me into staying with them, they were seriously inefficient to the point that it took days to eventually get the auth code, obliterating any chance that I would have caved into one of their ridiculous discounts for another year.
Actually, given how much they've tried to make me stay with their overpriced offerings, I'm surprised they were acting like such idiots. Somewhere during my third or fourth call to them to get said auth code, I ended up spewing a ton of jargon-laden, thinly veiled threats of a legal and technical nature at the retention lady who instantly shut up, emailed me the code and just said goodbye really fast.
Time spent with godaddy including wait times to ask about the finer intricacies of whois information accuracy and how it impacts domain transfers (basically network solutions had two different email addresses on file for the admin): 5 minutes with competent person who knew what I was talking about. Time spent with network solutions trying to get a dinky auth code from several different people including time spent on hold: over 3 hours for something that should have taken minutes at most.
Anyone suggest a different registrar? One that will not steal your domain or shut your down because someone complains?