How-to · Beginner · about 15 minutes of your time, up to 5 days for the transfer to land
How to Transfer a Domain
Move a domain from one registrar to another with the site staying up throughout — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
The job: move a domain from one registrar to another with the site staying up throughout. Time to allow: about 15 minutes of your time, up to 5 days for the transfer to land. Skill needed: beginner.
Below you get the exact steps, the classic snag, and a tip from the support desk. Where our platform handles a step for you, the guide says so rather than making you do the robot's work.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Difficulty level
Quick
Time to allow
5
Stages
24/7
Help at any hour
You do not need to be technical for this. The walkthrough is written for first-timers, tested on our own platform, and honest about which parts are genuinely fiddly and which are merely unfamiliar.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The route, start to finish
From start to finish, you will unlock it and get the auth code, check the calendar rules, start the transfer at the new registrar, answer both confirmation emails and check dns came through intact.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
Where this goes wrong, and how not to
Leaving WHOIS privacy masking the registrant address while a transfer is running. The approval messages go to a proxy inbox nobody reads, and five days later the transfer quietly times out.
Forewarned really is forearmed here. This one mistake accounts for most of the frustration the subject produces, and it is entirely avoidable once somebody names it.
One habit that makes this easy for good
Transfer early in the year rather than in the fortnight before renewal. The free year most transfers add stacks on top of the time you already hold, so moving early genuinely costs you nothing at all.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
What runs by itself here
We have automated the steps that do not deserve your time: certificates issue and reissue themselves, the installer handles application setup, the daily backup covers the what-if, and per-site settings live in a panel instead of a config file. The guide above covers what remains — the part that is actually about your site.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
Why the job is simpler on our plans
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Order an annual plan and the first year of your domain registration is on the house.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
The snag, named early
The classic mistake for this exact job is flagged before step one, so about 15 minutes of your time, up to 5 days for the transfer to land stays about 15 minutes of your time, up to 5 days for the transfer to land.
Scoped honestly
Move a domain from one registrar to another with the site staying up throughout is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets about 15 minutes of your time, up to 5 days for the transfer to land and says which steps the platform absorbs.
Written from real tickets
Our guides come off the support desk, so the snags flagged here are the ones people genuinely hit.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Unlock it and get the auth code
At the registrar holding the domain, turn the transfer lock off and ask for the EPP or auth code. Treat that code as the password that proves you are allowed to move the name.
- 2
Check the calendar rules
A domain cannot move within sixty days of being registered or of its last transfer, and starting one a fortnight before expiry invites trouble. If renewal is close, renew first and transfer after.
- 3
Start the transfer at the new registrar
Enter the domain and the auth code at the destination and pay. On most extensions the transfer adds a further year on top of whatever time you already had, so nothing is lost.
- 4
Answer both confirmation emails
Watch the registrant address for approval links from both sides. Approving quickly turns the default five-day wait into a matter of hours at many registrars.
- 5
Check DNS came through intact
Nameserver settings usually survive the move untouched, but load the site and send a test email anyway. Then put the transfer lock back on at the new home.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- Spam and virus filtering fitted to every mailbox
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- LiteSpeed caching running at the server, not bolted on by plugin
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Does the website go offline while a transfer runs?
No. A transfer changes which registrar holds the name, not which server answers for it. Keep the nameservers the same through the move and visitors see nothing at all. Moving hosting is a completely separate job you can do another day.
My transfer has stalled — what usually causes that?
Four things cause almost every stall: the lock is still on, the auth code is wrong, the sixty-day rule applies, or a confirmation email is sitting unclicked. If none of those fit, the losing registrar has placed a hold and only their support can lift it.
Are backups included, and can I put one back myself?
A backup is taken daily on every plan, and the restore is yours to run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at three in the morning without waiting on a ticket. Keeping your own copy offsite as well is never a bad habit, and nothing here stops you.
Do you shift an existing site across at no charge?
We do. Open a ticket with the login details for your current host and the whole lot comes over: files, databases, mailboxes and configuration. You check the copy before DNS changes hands, and the old site keeps serving customers until the new one takes the traffic, so nobody ever sees a gap.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
How quickly can I be up and running?
Minutes, not days. The account opens the moment the order clears, the domain — free for year one on annual plans — attaches straight away, and the one-click installer puts WordPress or any of 400+ applications on the page before you leave your chair. Already have a site elsewhere? Hand it over and we move it free, usually inside a day.
What uptime do you commit to, and who is watching?
We commit to 99.9% uptime and watch it continuously. That figure is an operational target rather than a poster line, and the alerting behind it usually has an engineer on a problem before the first customer notices anything is wrong.
Read next
How to Force HTTPS on Your Site
Every visitor landing on the encrypted address, with nothing left behind on http — beginner level, about 10 minutes.
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google
Hand search engines a complete map of what you want crawled — beginner level, about 15 minutes.
WordPress Hosting
WordPress looked after for you — LiteSpeed caching, staging copies and daily backups.
DirectAdmin Reseller Hosting
Lighter reseller hosting on DirectAdmin, at a leaner price tag.
Packing up and moving host? Take our checklist.
A plain running order for a move nobody notices: what to copy first, how to carry email across without dropping a single message, when to point DNS, and the two slips behind nearly every hour of downtime we get called about.
Give your website a proper home.
From a first website to a rack of servers, moving up is a change to your account rather than a migration.
See the plans