How To Transfer a Domain Name Safely
Oct 28th, 2007 by yigber
HostGator has a nice write up here on how to smoothly transfer your site from one host to another. I recently had to do that but unfortunately didn’t follow their exact guidelines so I paid the price of 7 days of downtime !!!
HostGator haven’t stressed a few things worth mentioning:
- It may take the company from which you bought the domain up to 10 work-days to do the transfer, for no good reason. This has nothing to do with the amount of time it takes the new DNS settings to propagate through the Internet.
- New domain names can be moved only after 60 days have passed from the domain purchase date.
I had to transfer a domain from Yahoo after I’ve decided to ditch them.
Not knowing these two factors left me hanging with a canceled account on one hand, and waiting 9 days to pass until Yahoo finished “processing” my request. I called Yahoo’s support to get things moving faster, but it made no effect on the guy. These delays depend on the company from which you bought the domain and will vary depending on their nastiness.
In any case it’s a good idea to separate your domain management from your hosting provider.