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How to transfer your domain smoothly

If you have a domain hosted with another internet service provider and want to transfer it to Bytemark, here’s how to do it.

I’m assuming you want to transfer both the billing relationship from your old provider (so that Bytemark handle future renewals for the domain) and the DNS service (so that we handle the network services necessary to make your domain work).

Let’s asume you’re going to transfer example.com to Bytemark – you can follow this procedure for as many domains as you want at once.

Step 1: Set up the DNS service at Bytemark

Before you do anything to your domain, make sure that Bytemark’s DNS servers are set up and ready to handle it.

You should read our content DNS server documentation to find out how to do this, but you should upload at the very least a file like this for any domain you are transferring:

.example.com::a.ns.bytemark.co.uk
.example.com::b.ns.bytemark.co.uk
.example.com::c.ns.bytemark.co.uk
+www.example.com:1.2.3.4
@example.com:1.2.3.4:a:10

You should replace example.com with the domain in question, and 1.2.3.4 with the IP address of your hosting with Bytemark.

Step 2: Tell your old provider that you’re moving

Many providers will have a control panel to facilitate moving domains in and out. Before Bytemark can kick off the domain transfer process, the old provider must know it’s about to happen.

For almost all domains: The procedure is generally to ask your previous registrar to unlock it, and to ask them to inform you of the auth code. Once they’ve confirmed that these things have been done, you can proceed.

For domains ending in .uk: These behave differently to the rest – your old ISP “pushes” the domain to us. You should ask them to change the domain’s tag to TUCOWS-CA (they should know what this means even if you don’t!).

Step 3: Tell Bytemark to initiate the transfer

You should now email admin@support.bytemark.co.uk and advise us transfer in the domains that you have just prepared.

We will then initiate the transfer process which will cause two emails to be sent in sequence – one to the domain’s owner and one to the domain’s admin contact. Both must confirm the transfer, the latter using the domain’s auth code (which you should have obtained from your previous registrar, see step 2!)

Once this is done, the domain should transfer to us without problems. That means that:

• Bytemark’s DNS servers will be completely responsible for serving your domain’s data; and
• you will need to instruct Bytemark to renew your domain when it falls due, and if you need any contact changes making.

Co-operation from your old registrar

The smoothness of this process relies on your old registrar co-operating with two important duties:

1. Giving you the auth code and unlocking the domain (or changing the tag). If they won’t help you, your domain is stuck. We cannot expedite the process through any back-channel.
2. Continuing to serve DNS – for a few days after the transfer, DNS requests will still be coming to your old provider for at least a few days. If they stop serving your data at the instant of a transfer, your DNS will malfunction for a short time. Again we cannot help if they don’t help in this regard.

While you have no control over the DNS side of things, you should always be able to go directly to the top-level domain administrator to get these changes made. Providing you can prove your ownership of the domain, and sometimes pay a fee, you can get these changes made without their co-operation.

• For .uk domains