Bluehost Domain Renewal Cost Increase

I went to renew one of my website urls the other day only to find that the price had gone up to $13.99 for a year. It used to be like $10.  I am pretty annoyed by this.  They get you to sign up with them for low prices and then once you are hooked, they boost the prices on you.

I plan on transferring my domains to another company that has more reasonable offers for domain renewals.  Is anyone else bothered by this renewal increase?  Does any one have any advice for transferring a domain from Bluehost to another company?

Update: 2-9-13

I got another reminder from Bluehost to renew a url for $13.99 and this time I decided to do something about it.  I did a little research on domain transfers and found that GoDaddy will transfer and renew your domain name for as little as $7.99.  With fees and privacy enabled whois, I got the domain transferred and renewed for only $8.66 for the year.  That's about $5 less than Bluehost was charging annually. 

Overall the process was not exactly easy, but not too hard either.  You just have to follow the directions and complete the steps to enable the transfer to go through.

If you are fed up with paying these high renewal fees for Bluehost or any other host for that matter, check out GoDaddy or at least do some research and find a reasonable offer out there.

Update: 5-23-14
Ok so the renewal fee for GoDaddy is outrageous.  They want to charge $23 for a 1 year renewal on the domain. No way I am paying that.  I did some research and there are a ton of other domain registrars out there.  It is hard to tell which ones are good and which ones are not.  After doing the research I settled on NameCheap.  They seemed to be very highly recommended from  unbiased reviews so I decided to give them a try.  The transfer with 1 year and privacy settings was about $9.  Not too bad.  We will see how it goes.

Update: 6-1-14
Still working on getting he domain transferred.  GoDaddy denied it because it has privacy protection enabled.  So I had to figure out how to disable that.  It was not easy at all.  You have to go through some 3rd party website which I never even registered on in first place.  So I had to go though a long process of "forgot user name", "forgot passowrd" when I never even had one to begin with.

So then I had to contact Namecheap to cancel it and restart it again. Finally I was able to get the domain name transferred.  Namecheap had a lot of good reviews, but so far I have not been very impressed.  On the outside, the interface looks good, but internally it looks very outdated and is not very user friendly.  I am currently looking for a new free hosting service to replace 000Webhost because my website with them is no longer working.  They sure do not make this stuff easy.