Registrar runbook · Beginner · 15 min of work, up to 5 days to land
How to transfer a domain — Move the Registration, Leave the Zone Serving
You want the registration under one roof without discovering afterwards that the zone was recreated from defaults and your mail stopped.
The short answer
A transfer moves who bills you and who controls the delegation. It does not move your zone, and that is the whole risk: some gaining registrars apply their own default nameservers on completion, and a default zone is not your zone.
So snapshot every record before you start, keep the existing nameservers set during the move, and diff the zone again when it lands. The work is about fifteen minutes; the transfer itself can take up to 5 days while the registries do their part, and nothing you do speeds that up.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
Beginner
Skill floor
Quick
Hands-on time
5
Steps in total
24/7
Support on call
You need access to both registrar accounts and the authorisation code from the losing side. The site and the mail keep serving throughout, provided the delegation is left alone.
The mechanics below are the same at any registrar; what changes is where the unlock switch hides. Where a step has a hard rule behind it — a registry lock, a waiting period — the rule is named rather than hinted at.
What a transfer moves, and what it leaves behind
Three things are in play and they are not the same thing. The registration is the lease at the registry, and that is what transfers. The delegation is the nameserver pair recorded against it, which travels as data but can be overwritten on arrival. The zone is the actual records, and that lives at whichever nameservers you delegate to, entirely outside the transfer.
Keep those separate in your head and the failure mode becomes obvious: a transfer completes, the gaining registrar substitutes its own nameservers, and a brand new empty zone starts answering. The website goes to a parking page and inbound mail stops, and nothing was technically broken.
Locks and clocks: 60 days, 5 days, and the code
Registry rules gate this, not the registrars. A domain registered or transferred within the last 60 days is normally locked against a further transfer, and a change of registrant can start the same 60-day clock. Check the creation and last-transfer dates in WHOIS before you plan a date.
Then there is the transfer window itself: up to 5 days between initiating and completion while the losing registrar's approval period runs. You can usually shorten it by explicitly approving from the losing side rather than waiting for the timeout, and you cannot shorten it any other way.
Keeping the zone identical across the move
Before you initiate, save the whole zone: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX with priorities, every TXT row including SPF, the DKIM selector and DMARC, plus SRV and CAA. Note the current nameserver pair separately, because that is the value you may need to restore in a hurry.
Watch it afterwards with dig NS yourdomain.com. If the pair has changed to the gaining registrar's defaults, set it straight back to the pair you recorded. Then re-run the record queries and diff them against the file, because a default zone can carry a plausible-looking A record while quietly having no MX at all.
What is waiting on this side
If the site is coming here as well as the name, our engineers do the migration, and the existing site keeps serving from its current host while it runs. Once it lands, LiteSpeed sits in front of NVMe storage, PHP versions are per-site dropdowns, and backups run daily with restores you trigger yourself.
Support is staffed at any hour, which matters on this job specifically because transfer approval emails have a habit of arriving at the weekend and expiring on the Monday.
Why the follow-through is quick here
Guides written against imaginary hosting go stale fast. These are written against the real thing: the same panel, the same installer, the same defaults sitting in your account when you log in.
Support is a human being at any hour, and the scope covers the awkward practical questions other hosts bounce straight back at you.
- Registration, delegation and zone kept distinct
- The registry rules named, not hinted at
- Verification commands, not hopeful refreshing
- Engineers on support at any hour
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Three things, kept separate
Registration, delegation and zone are treated as distinct objects, because conflating them is what makes a clean transfer look like an outage.
The real clocks named
The 60-day registry lock and the up-to-5-day transfer window are stated plainly, so you can plan a date instead of guessing at one.
The zone reset flagged early
Default nameservers applied on completion is the classic failure here, and the check for it is in the sequence rather than in a footnote.
5 steps, no padding
Five actions with an observable result each, and the waiting is described as waiting rather than dressed up as progress.
A snapshot you can restore from
Step one produces a file you can diff against afterwards, which turns a vague suspicion into a specific missing row.
Engineers on call
Approval emails arrive at inconvenient hours and expire quickly; support is staffed for all of them.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Snapshot the zone and the WHOIS first
Save every record type from the current nameservers, and note the nameserver pair, the creation date and the last transfer date from WHOIS. Five minutes here is what lets you prove, later, exactly which row went missing.
- 2
Check you are clear of the registry locks
A domain registered or transferred inside the last 60 days is normally barred from moving again, and a recent registrant change can trigger the same lock. The dates in WHOIS tell you where you stand before you spend anything.
- 3
Unlock and collect the authorisation code
In the losing registrar's panel, switch the transfer lock off and request the auth or EPP code. It is usually emailed to the registrant address on file, so confirm that address is a mailbox you can open today rather than one from two jobs ago.
- 4
Initiate from the gaining side and approve both messages
Start the transfer here, paste the code, and then approve it from both directions. Approving explicitly at the losing registrar is the only thing that shortens the window; otherwise it runs its full course of up to 5 days.
- 5
Re-check the delegation, then diff the zone
When it completes, run dig NS yourdomain.com. If it now shows the gaining registrar's defaults, restore the pair you saved. Then query every record type again and diff against your snapshot, and finish by sending a message in and out.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- 99.9% uptime as the target, monitored around the clock
- Money back: 30 days on hosting, 7 on reseller
- SSH with Git and Composer on the developer plans
- LiteSpeed caching in the server, not bolted on by plugin
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP
- A renewal price identical to the one you signed up at
- Staging environments for testing before you ship
- NVMe storage on every tier, not only the expensive ones
- Free migration: our engineers move the existing site
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Does a transfer interrupt the website or the mail?
Not by itself. Serving depends on the zone at your nameservers, and a transfer changes neither of those. Interruptions come from the delegation being reset to the gaining registrar's defaults on completion, which points the domain at an empty zone. Record the nameserver pair beforehand, check it afterwards with dig NS, and put it back immediately if it moved.
Why was my transfer rejected for a 60-day lock?
Because the registry, not the registrar, bars a domain from transferring within 60 days of registration or of a previous transfer, and in many cases within 60 days of a change of registrant details. There is no override to ask for. Read the creation and updated dates in WHOIS, count forward, and schedule the move for after that.
Do I lose the time left on the current registration?
No. A transfer normally adds a year to whatever remains rather than replacing it, so the expiry date moves forward by the term you paid for at the gaining registrar. Check the new expiry date in the client area once it lands, and switch auto-renew on there, because the setting does not travel with the domain.
The old panel will not show the auth code. What now?
The code is issued to the registrant email address on file at the losing registrar, so the usual cause is a panel that emails it rather than displaying it, to an address you no longer read. Update the registrant email first and wait out any lock that triggers, then request the code again. If the domain is genuinely orphaned, the registrant address is the only lever, so fix that before anything else.
Keep reading
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