Registrar transfer · Auth codes and locks · 15 minutes, up to 5 days to complete
How to transfer a domain — Moving a Name to Another Registrar Without Losing a Day
The transfer itself is uneventful; what catches people is the zone that was quietly hosted at the registrar they are leaving.
The short answer
A registrar transfer changes which company administers your name at the registry. It does not change which nameservers answer for it, so a correctly run transfer is invisible to visitors and to mail — unless the losing registrar was also hosting your DNS.
The work is fifteen minutes: unlock, take the auth code, start it at the new registrar, approve the messages. The wait is up to five days and is set by the registry, not by whoever is helping you.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
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Transfers stall for four reasons and four only: the lock is still on, the code is wrong, a sixty-day rule applies, or an approval email is sitting in an inbox nobody reads. Everything in this walkthrough exists to rule those out in advance.
Nothing here touches your website or your mail. If they stop during a transfer, the cause is DNS rather than the transfer, and the section on the zone explains why.
What a transfer moves, and what it leaves alone
It moves administration: the company that holds the registration at the registry, bills you for it and applies the lock. It does not move the delegation. The NS records the registry publishes stay exactly as they were, so the same nameservers go on answering throughout, and visitors see nothing at all.
That separation is why a transfer and a hosting move are two different jobs and should be done on two different days. Change registrar first, confirm everything still resolves, then change where the site lives if you are changing that too. Do both at once and no symptom will have an obvious cause.
The zone that dies with the old account
The important exception: if the registrar you are leaving was also answering DNS for the name — their nameservers in the delegation, their panel holding your records — then closing that account after the transfer takes the zone with it. The name transfers perfectly and stops resolving a fortnight later when somebody tidies up.
Deal with it before you start. Either move DNS to the new provider first, wait for it to settle, and transfer afterwards; or export the zone, keep the old account open until the new zone is live, and only then close it. Either order works. Doing neither is the version that ends in an outage nobody can date.
The codes and flags standing in the way
Every generic name carries a transfer lock, shown in a lookup as clientTransferProhibited. It is there to stop somebody else moving your name, and you turn it off yourself at the losing registrar. The auth code — EPP code, transfer key, authinfo, depending on whose panel you are in — is the password that proves the request is yours, and it is generated on demand.
Country codes do not always play by those rules. Several run their own mechanism entirely: .uk names, for example, are moved by changing the tag identifying the managing registrar rather than by issuing an auth code, so the sequence is different and the code you are hunting for does not exist. Read the registry's own transfer page for anything that is not a generic ending.
The sixty-day rules nobody expects
A name cannot be transferred within sixty days of being registered, and generally not within sixty days of a previous transfer. On most generic endings a change of registrant contact also starts a sixty-day clock, which catches people who tidy up their details on the same afternoon they decide to move.
Timing near expiry deserves care too. Starting a transfer a fortnight before the term ends invites the two clocks to collide. Renew first, then transfer: most endings add the year you have just bought to the term after the move, so nothing is wasted.
Where the approval message goes. Both registrars write to the address on the registrant record. Where WHOIS privacy is in force those messages go through a proxy relay, and if nobody has ever tested that relay it is entirely possible for approvals to land somewhere unread until the request expires five days later.
Send yourself a message through the masked address before you start, or lift privacy for the duration of the transfer and put it back afterwards. Clicking both approvals promptly often shortens the standard five-day window to hours.
One account for the name and the thing it points at
Names, DNS and hosting sit behind one login here, so delegating a name, editing its zone and issuing its certificate are three screens rather than three suppliers.
Renewals bill at the rate you registered at, so the second year costs what the first did and nothing sits waiting on the invoice.
- Registry, registrar and DNS host kept apart
- The record named before you go looking for it
- Delegation and zone edits on one screen
- People on the desk at any hour a name misbehaves
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Administration and answering kept apart
The guide is explicit about what a transfer moves and what it leaves untouched, which is why a clean transfer costs no downtime.
The zone trap named first
DNS hosted at the registrar you are leaving is the one way a transfer really can take a site off the internet, so it is dealt with before step one.
The four causes of a stalled transfer
Lock, code, sixty-day rule, unclicked approval — ruled out in advance rather than diagnosed afterwards.
Country-code differences flagged
Not every ending uses an auth code, and the guide says so rather than assuming the generic process everywhere.
Timing set against the registry clock
Sixty-day locks and the fortnight before expiry are both explained, so the move happens in a window that will accept it.
Support while the clock runs
People on the desk at any hour of the five days, including the hour the losing registrar goes quiet.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Settle where DNS will live before anything else
If the registrar you are leaving also answers DNS for the name, move the zone first or keep that account open until a new zone is live. This decision is what separates an invisible transfer from an outage a fortnight later.
- 2
Unlock the name and take the auth code
At the losing registrar, turn the transfer lock off and generate the EPP or auth code. On country codes that use a different mechanism there will be no code to take — follow the registry's own procedure instead.
- 3
Check the calendar against the registry rules
Sixty days since registration, sixty days since the last transfer, sixty days since a registrant change, and more than a fortnight until expiry. If a renewal is close, renew first: the year you buy carries over into the new term.
- 4
Start it at the receiving registrar and pay
Enter the domain and the auth code at Hosting & Domains, pay, and the request goes to the registry. Most endings add a full extra year to the term you already hold, so the time you have paid for is not lost in the move.
- 5
Approve both messages, then lock it again
Watch the registrant address, including the privacy relay if one is in use, and click both approvals promptly — that often turns five days into hours. Once it lands, put the transfer lock back on and confirm the site and the mail are unchanged.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- Registrar lock and auto-renew both switchable from the client area
- Renewals billed at the figure you registered at
- Full zone control — A, CNAME, MX and TXT — from the panel
- The first year of the name included when you order an annual plan
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old certificate lapses
- Mailboxes that answer at the name you hold
- A daily copy, with restores you run yourself from the panel
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
- No set-up charge at any point, and no joining fee
- Money back within 30 days on hosting plans, 7 on reseller
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
My transfer says clientTransferProhibited. What is that?
It is the transfer lock, set at the registrar and visible in a public lookup. It exists to stop anybody else moving your name. Turn it off in the losing registrar's panel for that domain, wait for the status to clear from the lookup, and start the request again.
My DNS is hosted at the registrar I am leaving. What happens to it?
It carries on working while the account exists and disappears when the account closes, which can be weeks after the transfer completed. Move the zone to its new home first, or keep the old account open until the new zone is answering, then close it deliberately rather than as an afterthought.
Does every ending use an auth code?
No. Generic endings such as .com and .org do, but several country codes run their own mechanism — .uk moves by changing the tag that identifies the managing registrar rather than by issuing a code. Check the registry's transfer page for anything outside the generic endings before you go looking for a code that does not exist.
Do I lose the time I have already paid for?
No. On most endings the transfer adds a further year on top of the term you already hold, so an early move costs nothing in time. That is also the argument for moving names well before renewal rather than in the fortnight beforehand, when the two clocks start interfering with each other.
Keep reading
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