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One exception is domains picked up from a GoDaddy auction. I believe you have to pay for a year, which you might not want to waste. Or even a transfer takes a while to complete.

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You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a new registrar.

Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.

You're right. I think my memory was domains where you wanted to prepay for "privacy", so the ownership didnt show during the xfer after the auction.

GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.

Another exception is that at least for awhile (not sure if they still do), Google Domains would farm our registrations to GoDaddy, eNom, etc. So you might not have even realized GoDaddy was in the picture (at least initially).

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