Looking for anyone who got the free domain and kept it

Contabo ran a promotion in 2023: free .com with annual VPS. My monitoring caught the renewal notification yesterday. $35. The status page for "billing transparency" was green the entire time. I checked my original order confirmation. "Free domain for life of service." No asterisk. No mention of promotional pricing expiring. : my VPS uptime is 99.97% over 24 months, so the "life of service" clause is being fulfilled on their end. Has anyone successfully transferred out before renewal? I want the domain, not the $35 lesson. About my alert fatigue on this provider.

https://my.contabo.com

I kept mine from 2024 but I run IIS on it so maybe they forgot about me Active Directory integration with the domain actually made the billing system think it was a "business critical asset" Seriously though check if youre still in the grace period, transfer auth codes usually take 5 days and you need Active Directory levels of patience with their support

Transferred mine to Vultr last month, took eight days.

I reviewed Contabo's current TOS and their 2023 promotional terms.

Section 7.3 defines "free" as "complimentary first-year registration." The 2023 landing page (archive.org snapshot) used "for life of service" but section 12.1 states "promotional definitions are governed by the TOS in effect at renewal."

Critical distinction: "life of service" refers to the promotional period, not your actual service duration. This is a defined term in section 4.7.

Acceptable use of the transfer policy: ICANN allows outbound transfer any time after 60 days from registration. No provider can block this per ICANN rules, though they can delay up to 5 days.

Warning: section 15.2 imposes a "transfer out fee" of $15 if done within 14 days of renewal invoice. Not legal advice.

Yesterday I buy domain already from them lah, I check my account already and I see I have domain from 2021, I never pay for renewal, maybe I lucky already. I use for my server-server personal project, very small traffic only. I think they forget me already, I dont want to open ticket and remind them. You can try to wait and see, maybe they forget you too

The ticket said "customer claims domain was free, wants to know why $35"

The abuse report was for "domain squatting on valuable digital real estate"

I am not making this up. The ticket said that. I had to escalate to billing because abuse doesn't handle "emotional damage from invoice shock"

We gave them the auth code eventually. Took four days. The ticket said "please rate your experience" and they rated it "I will remember this in my will"

WARNING: transferring a domain exposes you to hijacking!

What could go wrong:

• Your email gets compromised during the 5-day window
• Registrar lock "accidentally" reapplied
• Auth code intercepted by MITM
• New registrar has worse WHOIS privacy
• Auto-renew fails at new registrar and you LOSE EVERYTHING

I recommend:

• fail2ban on your mail server if self-hosted
• Firewall rules blocking all non-essential ports during transfer
• Screenshot every confirmation screen
• Enable 2FA on BOTH registrars before starting
• Consider keeping it and eating the $35 as OPSEC tax

The graphs don't lie but the registrars do

I need to correct myself. I went back to the 2023 snapshot. Section 4.7 defines "Promotional Period" separately. "Life of service" is not defined as a promotional term there. It appears in the marketing copy but is absent from defined terms.

What IS in the TOS: section 12.1 lets them update terms unilaterally with 30 days notice. The 2024 TOS revision added the "promotional definitions" language. So they retroactively redefined your domain.

This is different from what I posted above. The 2023 TOS did not contain the escape clause. They added it later.

That tracks. My original confirmation email is dated March 2023. The PDF attachment has no version number on the TOS. I just checked.

My monitoring caught the price change but not the terms change. I have a gap. I need to fix my alerting for contractual drift, not just uptime and billing.

Does anyone have the 2023 TOS PDF archived? I want to compare side by side before I open the transfer ticket.

I self-hosted my own TOS archive for exactly this reason. PDFs go into Paperless-ngx with OCR, I diff them with a cron job.

Not helpful to you now, but for the next provider: docker-compose a TOS watcher. I use changedetection.io on their legal pages.

For your immediate problem: Namecheap transfer with privacy protection is running about $12 first year right now. I moved three domains last month. Their API is decent if you want to automate the DNS cutover.