Moving a domain away from whoever registered it for you

You have decided to move a domain — away from the agency that registered it, away from a host that bundled it with a plan, or simply to a registrar you would rather deal with. The mechanics are well worn and take about ten minutes of actual work.

There is one way to get it badly wrong, and it is the thing most people instinctively do first.

The mistake: fixing the owner details before you move

The domain is in somebody else's name, so the obvious first move is to correct that — put your own name and email on it, then transfer the tidied-up domain to your registrar. This is exactly backwards.

Since December 2016, ICANN policy requires registrars to apply a 60-day transfer lock whenever the registrant changes. Correct the owner first and the domain becomes untransferable for two months. The lock is a registry-level state, not a setting: your registrar cannot shorten it, support cannot override it, and paying does not help.

The lock exists for a good reason. It is an anti-hijacking measure: if somebody breaks into a registrar account and rewrites the owner, the 60 days give the real owner time to notice before the domain can be moved beyond reach. It is protecting you, on a day when it is inconvenient.

Do it the other way round and nothing locks. Transfer the domain first, then change the registrant once it is sitting in your account. A registrant change made after a transfer does not retroactively lock the transfer you have already completed. The order is the entire trick.

What counts as a registrant change

Not every edit triggers it. The lock applies when the identity of the owner changes at the registry, which registrars read as a change to:

• the registrant's first or last name
• the registrant's organisation
• the registrant's email address

Updating a phone number or a postal address does not trigger it. Neither does correcting the capitalisation of a name. Everything else about the domain — nameservers, DNS records, renewals, contact phone — can be changed freely without affecting your ability to transfer.

Some registrars offer an opt-out from the lock, presented as a checkbox at the moment you submit the change. It is almost always off by default, and it can only be chosen before the change, never afterwards. If your current registrar offers it and you must edit the owner before moving, that checkbox is the one thing on the page worth reading carefully.

The other sixty-day locks

Registrant change is not the only thing that blocks a transfer. A registrar may refuse one when:

• the domain was registered less than 60 days ago — this one is near-universal and catches people who buy a domain somewhere cheap and immediately want it elsewhere
• the domain was transferred less than 60 days ago
• there is money owed on a previous registration period, including a chargeback
• the domain is in clientTransferProhibited, which is the ordinary lock you turn off yourself in the registrar panel

Only the last one is yours to clear. The others are waiting games, which is the argument for moving a domain on a quiet Tuesday rather than in the middle of a dispute.

The order that works

1. Write down the DNS zone first. Every A, CNAME, MX and TXT record, before you touch anything. A transfer can change which nameservers are authoritative, and a zone that does not travel with the domain takes the website and the mail with it.
2. Confirm you can read the registrant email address. The approval message goes there and nowhere else. If it is a departed employee's mailbox or an address on the very domain you are moving, fix that before you start — accepting the lock if you have to, and waiting it out.
3. Unlock the domain at the losing registrar: turn off clientTransferProhibited.
4. Get the authorisation code, variously called the auth code, EPP code or transfer key. Some registrars email it; some show it in the panel; some make you ask.
5. Start the transfer at the gaining registrar and pay. The fee almost always includes a year's renewal rather than being a charge for nothing, so you are not losing the time left on the clock.
6. Approve the confirmation email. Transfers commonly complete in a day or two, though the registry allows the losing registrar up to five days to release it.
7. Now change the registrant to your own name. The 60-day lock applies from here, and by this point it costs you nothing.

Keep the old registrar account open until you have confirmed the domain resolves correctly from its new home. The records a small business needs is a reasonable checklist for what to verify afterwards.

When the domain is not in your name at all

Everything above assumes you can log into the account holding the domain. If an agency, a web designer or a host is the registrant, you cannot start any of it: the unlock, the auth code and the approval email are all theirs.

That is a contract problem rather than a technical one, and the technical layer offers no way around it. What helps is asking early, while the relationship is still a good one, and asking for a specific thing — the auth code and the domain unlocked — rather than for cooperation in general. Who actually owns your domain covers how to find out where you stand before you need to.

Country domains play by their own rules

The 60-day lock is ICANN policy, which governs .com, .net, .org and the newer endings. Country-code domains — .de, .co.uk, .fr and the rest — are run by national registries that set their own transfer rules, and most do not use auth codes the same way. A .de transfer, for example, runs on a different authorisation token and a different timetable.

If you are moving a country domain, read that registry's own transfer page rather than a generic guide. The principle still holds: move first, tidy up afterwards.