In Pakistan the banking make difficult for international transfer. I use Cloudflare Registrar for my domain because they bill in PKR equivalent and no markup. But they only sell at cost, no promotions.
For Contabo I think the problem is they bill domain in EUR and VPS in EUR but exchange rate is different day by day. My invoice last month was 0.03 EUR different from estimate because of this. Small but annoying for accounting.
Member
I am administrating the Linux from 2012 year and I see this problem before with OVH. They give free domain with VPS, then after two year the domain is 15 EUR. I transfer to Hetzner, they have no free domain but the price is honest.
For Contabo I think the Nuremberg datacenter is good, I have VPS there from 2021, uptime is good. But the billing is separate system from hosting, the billing has more problem.
Member
12ms to Munich Contabo, 180ms to their billing support.
I transferred a .de from them in 2022. Auth code took 6 days. Their registrar partner is Key-Systems, not Contabo directly, which adds a middleman. Key-Systems sends the code, Contabo just requests it.
If you are in EU: you have 14 day withdrawal right on distance contracts. But domain registration is exception in German law, once the name is registered the service is consumed. I checked this when I had same problem.
Member
Rotterdam to Nuremberg is clean. Rotterdam to Contabo billing is via St. Louis, apparently, because their whois lookup and their payment portal resolve to different ASNs.
I ran traceroute. Not relevant to domain transfer but explains why their status page says green when payment portal times out. Different infrastructure.
For transfer: start at new registrar first, get their process. Some want you to unlock first, some want auth code first. Vultr was painless for me last year.
To be clear: I was the abuse desk, not billing. The billing ticket crossed my queue because the auto-classifier saw "domain" and "squatting" and routed it wrong. I sent it to billing with a note that said "this is not abuse, this is a customer who can read."
The "emotional damage" line was my joke in the handoff. The "valuable digital real estate" was the actual classifier output. I have a screenshot. I collect these.
I stand by the checklist but I want to add: the 5-day window is not always 5 days. If the losing registrar does not respond to the transfer request, it auto-approves after 5 days. If they DO respond and reject, it stops. Contabo rejected one of mine in 2022 for "outstanding invoice" that was already paid. Took another ticket to resolve.
Screenshot your zero-balance page before starting.
Member
Okay that was a joke but I actually checked and my domain is still showing $0.00 renewal. 2024 promo. Maybe they batch-process renewals and mine is later in the queue. Or maybe the IIS thing is not a joke and their automation skips Windows boxes because the telemetry breaks.
Either way I am not touching it until it breaks.
Member
I check my account again today, still $0.00 for domain from 2021. I think maybe because I am Indonesia and they have no good payment method for small amount, the cost to process is more than $35. So they forget me. I am happy with this.
But I also not use the domain for anything important, just redirect to IP. If you have business use, you should not rely on "maybe they forget."
Member
I rewrite everything in Rust including my DNS resolver. Contabo's nameservers respond to AAAA queries with broken truncation. I reported it, they said "use IPv4."
For domain transfer: I moved to Gandi. They support DNSSEC pre-transfer, which most don't. If you have DNSSEC enabled, disable it before transfer or the new registrar can't sign the zone until the DS record propagates out. 24-48 hour blackout.
This is the kind of thing that matters if you actually use the domain.
Member
Update: Vultr just emailed me about "suspicious transfer activity" because I moved three domains in one month. They wanted ID verification. Took two more days.
Not a complaint, just data. Their fraud prevention is aggressive. Have your ID ready if you're moving multiple.
