I own a few domain names, and have helped a few people register their domains. Through the years I've switched registrars a few times, and I'm going through a bit of change now.

Some of it is cost. The new registrar is half the price of the old registrar. The $6 difference in cost is not prohibitive, but since it amounts to a fee to keep them from deleting my entry in their database, it seems frivolous to pay more than necessary.

Some of it is ease of management. I don't do my own DNS, nor do I use any DNS, hosting, or e-mail service offered by the registrars. This means I gotta get in every now and then to manage those things when they change, and the interface and responsiveness of those systems make it a factor in who I keep the registration with.

I've got a dozen-ish domains moved, and a handful left to move. I generally wait until near the expiration of the domain to move them. The transfer usually honors the existing time (to a point) and tacks on another year, but I figure if I pay and then transfer, that the old registrar gets my money for nothing and the new registrar gets nothing for longer...

It happened that this last transfer of a pair of domains got whacked. I had about two weeks left of the registration when I started the process. For some reason, however, the old registrar wasn't sharing the right information (basically the owner's e-mail address...mine) with the new registrar, so the transfer couldn't move along. I contacted the new registrar's support to try to get them to move it along by manually reviewing the domain "whois" information, but they instead offered that I should cancel the transfer and try again later.

The transfer can take a few days, so since the domains were fast approaching that deadline, I renewed with the old registrar.

Of course, today I'm greeted with the e-mails from the new registrar informing me of the next steps to take. I figure that it'll serve 'em right to honor a year that someone else just got paid for since they couldn't make the right (and very simple) step to bump the transfer along with a manual process, so I continued on.

I'm now in the stage of waiting for the old registrar to honor the transfer request. They should; they've been good about it in the past. We'll see how it goes.

If the transfer fails, at least I've got the domain renewed for a year and can try again later; I'll have to get a refund from the new registrar, but that shouldn't be too bad.

If the transfer succeeds, then I don't have to worry about these domains for a couple years.