Domain transfers: 1and1 to GoDaddy

Frankly, I’ve got more domains than sense, but I have an abiding interest in evaluating online services. Domain registrars are among my favorite targets. I have registered probably dozens of domains for myself and others over the years…and keep transferring them between registrars to keep my overhead costs low.

I’ve already written a column about the information you need to collect before transferring a domain from one registrar to another. Here are the steps I went through to transfer two domains I had at 1and1.com to GoDaddy.

Day 1

The first step is to go to the registrar you want for the next year. You pump in your domain names and they’ll tell you the domains are already registered. There’s usually a link that reads “I’m the owner of these domains and I want to transfer them.” If not, there’ll be another link that reads “Transfers” where you can put in one or more domain names you want to transfer.

In this round of transfers, GoDaddy offered transfers at $6.99 with a one-year renewal on the domain, so I signed up to transfer two domains, a .info and a .com, currently registered at 1and1.com. The order confirmation comes through in a confirmation note almost immediately. I’d clicked like lighting to get the transfer registered, and repented at leisure. Two domains at $6.99 equals $13.98, right? Wrong.

..............................................................

QTY ITEM PRICE

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1 .INFO Domain Name Transfer - 1 Year $7.19

1 .COM Domain Name Transfer - 1 Year $7.19

$7.19 each? Not $6.99? Darn GoDaddy. I forgot they slap on an “ICANN fee” surcharge of 20 cents. They make it sound like a tax. It’s not a tax. It’s GoDaddy being mealy-mouthed about passing on their cost of doing business to their customers. A few other registrars do the same, and it always ticks me off because it’s basically a dishonest way of making your prices look lower than your competition’s. But GoDaddy’s a bit of a cowboy operation that way. From their blustering CEO downwards, GoDaddy seems like an operation that’ll do whatever it takes to get customers—in good or bad taste, honest or deceptive--as long as they stay basically legal. But they offer a pretty good price and set of features, so I’ll stick with them for now.

Minutes later, I get another e-mail:

To complete your recently requested transfer, we must receive approval of the administrative contact currently associated with the domain name(s) below, which we have determined to be proxy1237839@1and1-private-registration.com. A request for approval has been sent to that address. If you believe the email address is not correct, you must visit your current registrar and have it updated.

I’d forgotten something else. My .COM domain was registered anonymously with 1and1. It’s a great free feature of theirs. I thought I had to change the Admin content, but minutes later, I get another e-mail from GoDaddy:

DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER - Initial Authorization for Registrar Transfer

Re: Transfer of .COM and .INFO

Dear Oneandone Private Registration,

GoDaddy.com, Inc. received a request on 3/3/2009 for us to become the new registrar of record.

You have received this message because you are listed as the Registered Name Holder or Administrative contact for this domain name in the WHOIS database. If you are not the Account Holder, or you are transferring the domain to a new owner, please forward this email to the appropriate Account Holder so that they may complete the transfer process.

1and1 apparently forwards to their anonymous account holders. Excellent…and less work for me. (Why did I choose GoDaddy over 1and1, I began to wonder).

The next step is for me to follow a link in this email to a transfer acknowledgement page run by GoDaddy. It contains a request for an AUTH code, which 1and1.com keeps secrete on the domain administration page for the domains I’m transferring. I log in there, get the code, pump it into the transfer acknowledgement page and my work is done. All I need to do now is wait…and wait…and wait…

Day 6

I get another Transfer Acknowledgement email from GoDaddy. Didn’t I do this already? Well … apparently not for my .INFO domain.

So “to complete your recently requested transfer, we must receive approval of the administrative contact currently associated with the domain name(s) below”, so I do that.

And wait…and wait…and wait…

DAY 12

Oh, frabjous day! I get my confirmation telling me that my domains are officially now at GoDaddy. Twelve days for a transfer’s about right. I always give it at least four weeks in case there’s some kind of problem. And there almost always is. Yet somehow, here is how the e-mail started:

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DOMAIN NAME TRANSFER CONFIRMATION

=====================================================

Congratulations! The transfer request for the following domain name(s) has been completed

Could I possibly have got through a domain transfer with no problems? I’ve had lots of them in the past. I’ll blast past some crucial step and find out a week later that the whole process has failed. Then I’ll have to go back at get a credit at the new registrar, and then start the process all over again. It’s a nuisance I’m anxious to avoid.

I read the confirmation e-mail over one more time, just to set my mind at rest. It didn’t. Naturally, I’d forgotten one crucial final step, which GoDaddy reminded me about:

IMPORTANT!

IF THIS DOMAIN IS NOT CURRENTLY HOSTED, follow the instructions below to change your domain name servers to our parked servers. By doing so, you will avoid possible charges from your prior registrar and enable your domain's new features now that your transfer is complete.

Agh! When you transfer a domain from one registrar to another, it transfers the complete record…including the Nameservers that host the domain. I’d had the domain hosted at 1and1 for ten months and not really done much with it. The $60 a year in hosting fees had seemed pretty reasonable, but I’d not actually developed the site at all, so it actually amounted to flushing sixty bucks a year down the toilet. And with the six-month billing cycle coming up, I had cancel the hosting fast.

So I did. And by doing so, I averted a billing disaster.

The whole process, including two days it took to cancel hosting and get a pro-rated rebate on the hosting I’d already paid for was two weeks. My domains were now safely over at GoDaddy, where I turned on domain forwarding so that anyone tapping in the address would be brought straight to an existing web page on another server.

One of the domains comes straight here. Another goes to another blog I run. And it’s using free blog services like these that saves me sixty bucks a year (and countless hours of mucking around in HTML) in developing a Web site to go with each of my domains. So maybe I do have more sense than domains. But on the other hand, I do have quite a few domains.

Buy My Domain, Episode 3

The story so far: I had a domain for almost two years, didn’t use it, and decided to try and sell it. The auction failed, so I kept it listed at GoDaddy’s aftermarket sales site, and waited. And waited. And waited.


The time: Last year
The scene: My e-mail inbox.


Dear Matt Lake,


You have received an offer for Item Number 1XX2O27 in the amount of $250.00. Log in to your account to view the offer.


It took me a couple of seconds to understand what this email was all about. I nearly trash-canned it. Then I cast my mind back 14 months and remembered: I’d put an old domain up for sale. And now, someone was trying to buy it from me. Well, there was a turn-up for the books.


I scrambled to look through my notes and noticed that the bid was considerably lower than GoDaddy’s estimate ($622 or higher). But it was higher than Afternic’s estimate of $200. And it was more than three times more than the $79.95 I’d sunk into the project.


So on one hand, I wasn’t an online entrepreneur of the order of Filo and Yang, Jeff Bezos, or Steve Case. But on the other hand, I’d made out better than if I’d stuck the cash in a money-market, or just spent it on outsized latte drinks at Clusterbucks. So I decided to take the money.


I had 72 hours to respond, so I hied myself over to GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket and started in on the process. Little did I know, it would take a month of waiting around and responding to various emails, and frankly, it was a bit irritating.


Day 1
I accepted the bid. Within the hour, I got the delightful message “Congratulations! The domain name Item Number 1XX2O27 has sold! Please do not accept any transfer requests of this domain at this time!”


I am told to wait and let GoDaddy handle the transaction. They’ll act as an escrow agent to ensure everything goes smoothly. This sounds good to me, so I wait.


Day 3
GoDaddy is pleased to inform me that they have received the proceeds for the sale of my domain. I am to log on and contact the buyer to begin the domain transfer process.


To do this, I must first unlock the domain to allow the domain transfer to proceed. Then I must collect the buyer’s account information to enter into a form somewhere on the site. This I do.


Day 5
GoDaddy sends email to tell me that I have initiated a change of registrant for my domain. I already knew this--I was there after all--but at least they're acknowledging the fact. Two days late, true, but they're acknowledging it.

Day 12
GoDaddy sends me another email with slightly different phrasing to tell me that I have initiated a change of registrant on my domain. If I meant to do this, I don’t need to do anything more. Yep, I did it alright. Nine days ago.


Day 18
GoDaddy tells me that the change of registrant went through. A second email dated one second after the first one tells me I have cancelled my account for the domain. I do a double-take on this one, and then realize that it’s a good thing. So I wait for the next dispatch--and my money.


Day 19
GoDaddy sends me a courtesy note to tell me that the whole transaction will be completed on a date ten days in the future.


Day 24
GoDaddy sends me the exact same courtesy note to tell me that the whole transaction will be completed on a date five days in the future.


Day 29
GoDaddy tells me that the transaction is completed. That’s great.


Now…where’s the money?


Day 34
GoDaddy PayPals me the money.


So there we have it. Nearly sixteen months after I started this process, a polite entrepreneur in Pune, India, paid me $250 for my domain. It wasn’t a coup like the sale of business.com to RH Donnelly in 2007 (that netted more than $300 million), but it was good enough for me.


The question was: Was it good enough for my buyer? What did he want to do with the domain now that he acquired it?


This all happened more than a year ago, so I’ve been tracking the domain ever since. So I know exactly what he did with it. And I’ll share that information with you. A little more promptly than GoDaddy shared the revenue for the sale all those moons ago.



[TO BE CONTINUED]


My balance sheet:


Expenditures: $29 in registration fees; $39.95 in appraisal fees; $10 in membership fees; $12.50 in Godaddy sales commission; various state, federal, and business taxes.


Total expenditures: $91.45 total plus tax

Total revenues: $250


Net gain: $118 minus tax


Total hours expended…who knows? But I’m sure that divided up, I earned roughly minimum wage out of the deal.

Buy My Domain, Episode 2

The story so far: I had a domain for almost two years, but didn’t use it. Instead of letting it expire, I decided to try and sell it. A couple of days of research later, I had an idea of what to do and what to charge. Now read on.

The time: A couple of years ago
The scene: GoDaddy's domain resale site, The Domain Name Aftermarket (now auctions.godaddy.com).

Two days into the auction, I realized that my domain wasn’t going to the center of a bidding war. GoDaddy's certified appraisal system had valued my 11-digit dot-com domain at $622 to $1,617. The market was valuing it at nothing.

I figured I'd try to add to its curb appeal a little to see if I could get close to the appraised price. Step one: Put up a nice little welcoming Web page. Instead of displaying generic "for sale" or "parked" signs, I put up a sample live page demonstrating what the domain could be used for--and, of course, slapped a little "for sale" link leading to the domain auction.


Brilliant though this ploy was, it failed to elicit a single bid at auction. But it did improve the look of the lot, so it seemed like a good thing to do. And so did goosing up the listing a little, though this wasn't as easy. The Domain Name Aftermarket allowed 255 characters to describe an auction lot. Even to someone trained in the noble art of making text fit into highly designed magazine pages, that's quite a restriction.

Then I had a brainstorm: Why not get more hard evidence of my domain’s value? Why not get a second evaluation? At the time, TDNAM was a new kid on the block. Afternic was the grand master of domain name resale—they’d been around for a decade longer than Godaddy’s site. So I threw good money after bad and paid $20 at Afternic for a second appraisal. And it hurt. Afternic reckoned that the current market value of my domain was $200. Ouch! That was less than a third of what GoDaddy had estimated. Afternic reckoned that the domain's potential market value was $1,100—with significant development, of course—and that was about $600 less than the top end of TDNAM's evaluation.


But I’m an honest seller and wanted to look like one, so I cited Afternic's appraisal URL in my auction listing. I thought this made me look like a man with nothing to hide, one who showed due diligence, and one who wasn’t out for a quick buck. Exactly the kind of person I'd like to buy from.

Because it cost me as much as a hardback book, I actually read the advice Afternic sent along with its appraisal. It was generic but it reinforced what I’d already worked out for myself:


· Include the fact that you've had your name appraised. It lets potential buyers know that a third party has assisted in estimating the value.
· Feel free to use all or part of your appraisal notes.
· Always have your domain names pointed somewhere. When someone types in your domain name, have it point to your auction page, your domains-for-sale site, or even a one-page site with your contact information.

Check on the first and third items. I even made a nod to the second item in the one-page site I’d put up. So I'd now followed the best advice of the old lags in the market, and I upped the curb appeal on my little corner of the domain real estate market. I'd done just about everything I could to raise its profile short of taking out an ad in Computerworld.

And all this work increased the number of bids at the auction from zero to zero.


So I shelved the project, but kept my options open. I kept my membership in GoDaddy’s aftermarket site, renewed my domain for another year, and left the domain for sale at Godaddy.


Someday, I reasoned, someone would want to buy that domain.


I was right. But that day wasn’t coming anytime soon.


[TO BE CONTINUED]


My price tag so far:

$29 in registration fees; $39.95 in appraisal fees; $10 in membership fees

$79.95 total

Buy My Domain, Episode 1

A few years back, I registered two domain names for a side business and wound up using only one of them. Instead of letting the other name go, I decided to try and sell it. This is the tale of how I priced it up, sold it, and saw what the buyer did with his investment. It’s a convoluted tale, and it’s going to take several blogs to tell. But stick around: There are dollar signs and a bit of a chuckle at the end of it.

To begin at the beginning: I registered a domain for $15 at Directnic.com, transferred it the following year to Godaddy.com for $7, and sat on it for six months. Then I asked myself the question: Where can you sell domain names? A couple of years ago when this story began, the obvious choices were Afternic and Godaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket (which is now called GoDaddy Auctions). They're still the obvious choices.

A quick look at these venerable domain aftermarket sites taught me two things:

1. People do buy second hand domains
2. People who sell them ask ridiculous prices for them, and seldom get them.

Something about TDNAM.com appealed to me: It had buyers. They were actually paying a couple of hundred bucks apiece for such names such as coffeefair.com, endsuffering.com, and my personal favorite, kungfujesus.com. My domain wasn’t quite as catchy, but it was short and businesslike and well-suited to a real moneymaking market. So I thought it stood a chance of making a modest profit.

To make sure I didn’t price myself out of the market, I needed to set a fair price, and that was the problem: What's a fair pirce? Luckily, most domain name aftermarket venues charge a small fee to analyze a domain name and figure out what the market will bear for such a name. I paid five bucks to get an automated appraisal from TDNAM.com, which shared some good news: This site (a GoDaddy property, remember) reckoned from a superficial analysis that the domain could fetch somewhere between $722.00 and $2,094 on the open market.

But how realistic is that figure? TDNAM.com didn't really explain their calculations--and the range was huge--so those figures could have been plucked out of thin air. However, TDNAM did offer a higher-end "seal of approval" appraisal for $14.95. This certified appraisal gives you the right to flag any domain you sell in their marketplace so that prospective buyers can see the appraised value.

The news wasn't as good this time around. The appraised value of my precious cargo was now $622 to $1,617--a C-note off the low end and almost a grand off the high end.

But at least it gave me a access to their appraisal methods--and these are valuable to anyone who wants to speculate in the domain name market. In a nutshell, these are the important factors:

Short domain names sell well; names with numbers, letters, and hyphens do not.

Words that are in vogue help jack up the price of a domain; generic names less so.

A dot-com domain will sell better than any other extension, such as .net, .org, or .biz.

And that's about it. The rest is in the details.

So there I was with a domain in my portfolio appraised between $622 and $1,617, ready to bring it to market. The question: When the gavel dropped, would it fetch anything near the appraised value?

[TO BE CONTINUED]

My price tag so far:
$22 in registration fees; $19.95 in appraisal fees
$41.95 total

Sites mentioned in this article:

Directnic.com
Godaddy.com

Tdnam.com-now Auctions.godaddy.com
Afternic.com