Easy™ Domain Transfer

Introduction

At high level, domain transfer, the process of moving the management of your domain from one registrar (say Gandi, hereafter SRC) to another (say OVH, hereafter DST), is easy™:

1. Make sure the domain is transferable at the SRC registrar
2. Request domain transfer at the DST registrar

Theory

Provided all transfer pre-conditions are fulfilled¹, the transfer effectively proceeds as follows:

1. Initiation:
   1. you retrieve the transfer authorization code from the SRC registrar.
   2. you initiate the domain transfer at the DST registrar using the authorization code
      • what that means is: you search for the existing domain on the the DST registrar’s website and click the transfer button to start the transfer process. Let’s talk about billing later.
   3. the DST registrar notifies the register (say AFNIC for .fr) which in turn notifies the SRC registrar.
   4. a confirmation email is sent, by the SRC registrar², to the domain owner specified in the domain contact information 😁
2. Hesitation. At this point³ you have multiple options:
   • confirm the email and thus accelerate the transfer
   • reach out to the SRC registrar’s support to cancel the transfer
   • wait and do nothing which will automatically lead to the actual transfer after a fixed period (usually 5 days).

That’s it! Easy™ no? So what can possibly go wrong?

Practice

Billing

Well first of all how does billing work? Simple: you start paying at your new (DST) registrar once the transfer is complete. Your contract with the old (SRC) registrar remains valid until its end. It’s thus more beneficial to transfer at the end of the old contract.

Really important considerations

When initiating the transfer, you have the availability to check and adapt some important aspects.

Managing owner

PAY CLOSE ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THAT (I didn’t). I double-checked my contact details, but ACCOUNT CONTACT DETAILS ARE DIFFERENT FROM WHOIS CONTACT DETAILS 😡 That’s annoying because mine were obsolete so I didn’t receive the email asking for confirmation… And so I contacted both the SRC and DST registrars’ support teams to figure out what was going on. The SRC registrar’s support answered first, within 24 hours, explaining that an email had been sent to the (wrong) contact email address. And we eventually decided on letting the grace period expire.

DNS servers

This one is very important for service continuity.

You want your domain DNS configuration to remain the same on the DST registrar (modulo the DNS servers). So that for example mail for your domain continues to be delivered to the correct mail servers, or your web server is still reachable by its name, etc.

But you won’t be able to configure your zone at your DST registrar until the transfer is complete. So your reaction delay poses the risk of interrupting your services.

On the receiving end, registrars thus usually offer the ability to keep the previous DNS servers for the new zone definition. Which is ideal because…

…in practice, your SRC registrar’s DNS servers will remain active and valid until the end of the contract⁴. This leaves you time after transfer completion to quietly port the DNS domain configuration to the new registrar.

And guess what? Yes, DNS servers were not ported over! And so, as expected I lost some emails. Fortunately I was behind my computer when I got the confirmation email, so I could react fast. I’m not 100% sure what happened. The DST registrar’s support confirmed I selected the wrong DNS servers. Although I remember paying close attention and inputting the SRC DNS servers instead. Maybe I got confused by the UI somehow.

Closing words

This was the last step of my exit from Gandi. 😢

Other things I learned during this experience are:

• There is an underlying standardized protocol for operations between registrars: Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP).

• There is a standard for the DNS zone syntax. I was wrongly thinking they would be vendor-specific, or maybe BIND had become a de facto standard. This comes handy as I can keep my zone files under version control and easily import them to registrars.

• Wikipedia actually has a more technical and accurate description of the process.

Overall domain transfers feel a bit like jumping into the unknown. But I feel slightly more comfortable now.