Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

I’ve been running websites for over 10 years now and in that time I’ve owned dozens of domain names but I never had a need to transfer my domain registrar. In fact one of my first domains, singletracks.com, is still at Network Solutions where I continue to pay $35 a year to renew my domain registration just because I was never entirely sure how difficult a transfer would be.

Over the past couple of years I’ve generally used Yahoo! or 1and1 to register new domains and today I probably have about a dozen domains with each company. Regular readers will recall my recent rant about Yahoo!’s domain renewal price increases that went in effect July 1, 2008, effectively raising prices 350% from a year ago. With some of my domains I wasn’t too concerned - I figured I would just cancel them once they came up for renewal since I wasn’t using them anyway. But then my company domain name (bluespruceventures.com) came up for renewal and I knew I had to do something.

So, I started the mysterious “domain transfer process” between Yahoo! Domains and 1and1. Yahoo! actually makes it easy to unlock your domain in the online control panel and even gives you the transfer code you need to initiate the move. 1and1 provides good documentation for transferring domains as well and after adding the domain to my cart just as I would a “new domain,” I was asked for the transfer code. Now at this point, the process was a bit surprising: 1and1 requires you to further verify you are the domain owner by responding to an email sent to the address on record with your domain registration. Fortunately I still had access to this address and was able to complete the verification.

After about 5 business days 1and1 confirmed the process was complete and I was able to update DNS settings to point the domain to my server. The great thing is that during the whole process I was able to keep the name servers going with the correct info so there was no drop in availability for my site (as far as I know).

So if you’re getting the business from your domain registrar with renewal price increases, don’t fret. Just transfer your domain - it’s easier than you might think!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 7:53 am and is filed under The Internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.