I believe that you can transfer them right away without losing any time on your lease. Meaning if you have 6 months before a domain expires and transfer it to a new registrar and pay for a year, you'll have a year and a half before it expires.

I've never done it myself but I've read it in multiple occasions so it might be worth checking if you're really looking at moving away.

Correct. And some domains can be tough to transfer once you get too close to renewal time, so I'd recommend transferring sooner rather than waiting for the renewal date to come up.

Yes this is correct. You don't lose any time when switching. And actually any time a domain is switched 1 year is automatically added to the expiration date (.com/net/org/info).

Curious, where have you been moving your domains to ?

Namecheap. Seems to be the favorite among the HN crowd. Also, they donate to EFF.

Oh, and gandi.net for TLDs I can't get from namecheap, like .io, .cx.

http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/29/25000-eff-don...

Same here. Namecheap for the common domains, Gandi for the slightly more exotic ones. I've been happy with both.

I also have one domain at networksolutions (it was worth a $100 difference over five years vs gandi), but I definitely would avoid them in the future. As soon as I ordered, they started calling once per day attempting to sell further services. They are on my avoid list now.

I started the transfer process for a .im to Gandi last night. I just wish Namecheap handled that TLD so I could manage everything in one place.