I have about 125 DN's that I want to move away from GoDaddy and a handful at a few other places as well. I'm really sick of spending $9 a shot and would just assume start moving them as they come up. The only thing that is important to me is that the new registrar keep the old DNS and contact information during transfer, and I want to find somewhere inexpensive. Preferably somewhere that can hold a lot of different TLD's. .com .net .org are a must, but also ones like .cc .co.uk etc. Thanks in advance.
I'd recommend Moniker. They're very widely used by professional domain investors, they have a great system, secure, great customer service, good interface, etc. No registrar is perfect, you'll always find something that isn't ideal, but Moniker is pretty close. As for pricing, I think their current price is $18.99 - but of course you're not going to pay that If you're a member of DNForum.com then you need to send a PM to Monte, he's the CEO of Moniker and he'll set you up with a discount account - around $7 for new reg's, renewals and transfers. But as for your question about maintaining DNS and contact info, I'm not sure - you can ask them.
ipowerweb.com has $2.95 registration/transfers for the first 50, for the first year. They go back up to $8 the next year but a decent discount. Of course you get what you pay for and they have a pretty bad reputation...but then again, you could save $300 for a year on 50 domains so some people might think it's worth it. I've used them and they are the last place I would register an open domain that I wanted to get quick because they can be slow as hell. But to store/park domains I already have or for something that noone else might grab then they are ok I guess. I believe they keep dns/whois during a transfer but don't remember for sure.
Every top-level registrar pays around $6 per domain - nobody can get cheaper than that, it's not possible. So if a registrar is offering domains for less than $6 then they are making a loss, it is unavoidable - they are planning on getting revenue from add-on services like hosting etc. No problems with that, it can work. But then, if you sell a site and want to transfer the domain to the buyer - that's where the problems begin. Because these registrars will generally do everything possible to not lose a domain - they will ignore your emails, hang up on your telephone calls, ignore your complaints via official channels - it can be next to impossible to transfer the domain. Often they won't even allow it to be internally transferred to another account with the same registrar - they're just extremely arrogant. It's illegal, but it's difficult to get action and you can be left with a lot of hassle. Of course that's a generalization, you can get lucky and have no problems - but these problems are very common with many of these cheapy registrars....
@Scilynt About 5 years ago I had them for hosting and they were actually pretty solid. However, I find that their company website is down a decent amount now - so that worries me. @A1SiteNames I went ahead and contacted Monte over on DNF and am now just waiting for his reply. Thanks for the heads up.