Wait 45 days, or you'll pay a year's fees for nothing.

A few weeks ago I transferred my domains from Godaddy to Dynadot. Transferring typically adds a year to domain expiration. So imagine my surprise when a whois showed no change for some domains. I contacted Dynadot, and found out about a little-known ICANN gotcha:

http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/advisory-06jun02-en.htm

In short, if you transfer less than 45 days after auto-renewal, ICANN refunds the auto-renewal fees to your previous registrar. Unless you can get a refund out of them, you're paying twice for a single year.

GoDaddy, of course, refused to refund anything, claiming that "I left with the expiration date I had paid for."

This is just an incredibly seedy setup. ICANN doesn't renew when you think it did, GoDaddy gets a nice little cashflow from every exiting user, and registrars in general don't have any interest in this rule being more widely known.

Other mentions from around the web:

http://davezan.com/the-little-known-45-day-domain-transfer-rule.html

https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question.html?aid=34

comments

  
BillSeitz, 2014-01-29: Also note that if you change your contact info (at least at hostingdude, a sub of godaddy), you can find that you've "approved" a 60-day transfer-prevention-lockup. You can nag them into "reviewing" and releasing that, but it's an annoyance and can bite you if you wait until the last minute to transfer...

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