not my finest hour, but somebody may as well get something out of it. took on a small manufacturer in 2022. site was fine, dns was fine, everything pointed where it should. the domain was registered inside the previous developers personal godaddy account, and he was friendly and reachable and it never became urgent, so it sat there.
what forced it was three things landing together: 1. he stopped replying to email, 2. the card on the account expired, 3. the renewal was nineteen days out. we got it moved with about a week to spare and only because he answered a linkedin message in the end.
what i do now instead. check who the registrant is at the registar itself, not what the client believes. get an auth code and move it into an account the client owns, even if that means paying for a year of transfer you did not need. put the renewal in the same calendar as everything else so it is not living in someone elses inbox. godaddy will genuinely sell that client domain privacy and protection and none of it helps when the account is not hers.
the frustrating part is that a godaddy com domain name transfer is easy. sixty day lock aside it is a form, a code and five days of waiting. the hard bit was human and human is the bit i kept putting off.
nobody at the client end ever asked me who owned it either.
Source: r/WebsiteStarters · by /u/fvirtanen