Transferring to a New Domain Registrar
Transferring your domain to a new registrar can be frustrating if you miss any of the necessary steps. Here I will outline steps that should apply to most registrars. I’ve used the same steps with GoDaddy, Name.com and Namesilo.com. The whole thing can go very quickly – in as little as 10 minutes or so assuming both registrars respond quickly.
- Go to the “winning” registrar:
a) Setup an account (if you haven’t already).
b) Find and record their recommended name servers. - Log into the “losing” registrar (the one you’re leaving) and:
a) Make sure you like the email address that the Registrant, Billing, Technical and Adminstrative email addresses are set to because they’ll need to communicate with one or more of these during your transfer. To be safe, switch them all to your current email address.
b) Turn off Forwarding (if it’s on)
c) Turn off Privacy (if it’s on)
d) Unlock the domain
e) Ask for a transfer “key” which may be called a key, transfer secret or authorization code. You’ll need this at the winning registrar. The loser provides it to you on their website or emails it to you. - Go back to the winning registrar:
a) Request the transfer. You’ll input the domain address and the authorization key-code-secret. - Watch your email. The winner will send you an email asking you to verify that you want to transfer in. Watch for this email and verify yes.
- Next you need to log back into the losing registrar and ask them to expedite your transfer. GoDaddy has a way to do this online, where Name.com asks you to email their support team. In any case, most of them are very quick to respond because if they aren’t – they are leaving your domain in a dangerous state of no privacy, no forwarding, etc. I’ve seen this happen in a matter of a few minutes after making this request.Here’s the GoDaddy instructions for getting them to accept a transfer out: GoDaddy Accepting-or-declining-a-transfer
If you’ve chosen a decent registrar, they should have a progress page you can go to to see your progress. They may also email you some kind of confirmation of progress. - After the transfer, go into the settings and remove the old nameservers. Make sure all the dns settings are correct. Reset up your forwarding and privacy settings.
As far as which registrar to choose – I ended up at Namesilo.com because they offer great service, are super inexpensive, and offer free Whois privacy with every domain. Name.com was also very good – just not as inexpensive. GoDaddy is fine – just very pricey.
In closing, here are some great dns tools you can use to check your domain:
network-tools.com/nslook
www.dnsinspect.com