Transferring a domain without downtime

A transfer moves who bills you for the name. Done in the right order, nothing about the live site changes at all.

Transfer is not the same as delegation

You can point a domain at Canvas today and leave it registered elsewhere forever. Transferring only changes the registrar of record. Confusing the two is why people expect a transfer to break their site. It does not touch DNS.

Get the prerequisites out of the way

Registries refuse transfers in some common circumstances, and all of them are avoidable.

• The name must be more than 60 days old
• It must not have been transferred in the last 60 days
• The registrar lock must be off
• WHOIS privacy may need pausing to receive the approval email
• The admin contact address must be one you can read

Copy DNS before you start

Recreate every record on our nameservers first and let both sets serve identical answers. Then the transfer is a billing event and nothing more.

After it completes

We add a year to whatever time was left, so nothing is lost. Re-enable privacy, put the lock back on, and check that auto-renew is on: a lapsed domain is far more damaging than a slow one.