Most of my domains moved from godaddy years ago except for a few ones. I must say though that their admin tools are pretty good.
I ran an agency for years we interfaced directly with nominet and opensrs and even back then domains' cost price to us was cheap. So charging $19.99 like some do (or $35 like nominet does) is a tad silly unless there is a lot of added value (dyndns might have added value)
I currently have many domains in the UK with daily (
http://www.daily.co.uk) which has reasonable prices, reasonably good interface, and actually has support people that come across as people.
I also have a bunch on gandi and I have had no problems with them. Haven't used their hosting or any other services, but domain name registration comes with included minimal blog hosting, kind of cute
. And they are clued up.
If you are moving domains that have active services, be very careful that everything is set up right to avoid loss of access
- godaddy does allow you to have dns set up for domains that arent registered with them, which should allow you to keep the DNS set up there for a while after the transfer. (I am not sure if it needs a hosting account for this to work, but it is probably worth buying 1 month at 4.99 to prevent issues). That way you keep your NS records pointing to godaddy until everything has transfered and you have configured your new DNS
- some transfers are capable of copying the DNS setup automatically but this depends on a lot of factors (your existing DNS allowing the info to be accessed for zone transfers, for one)
- use a third party DNS service to be independent of registrar. For example I use fastmail for email and they can act as DNS for domains. I also use xname.org (with donation!).