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The Pain of Transfer

Webhosts learn that the .com rules don't apply for all TLDs, and any unfamiliar domain can have its own quirks, making trading in fringe domains difficult.

[July 21, 2005]

On the ISP-Webhosting list in July, JL asked:

We need to have some domains, transferred into ownership of one of our clients. The losing owner is in full agreement. The gaining owner has hired us to do the work. The top level domains are:

.name
.cc
.tv
.ws

Our registrar, Dotster, tells us they cannot transfer these domains to our client's account. What steps do we have to take?

[JB replied] "Never had this issue, but here's an excerpt from Godaddy's Insider's Guide to Domain Transfers, for what it's worth.

... [Losing Registrar] 2. If the domain is not a .com or .net, the Customer must retrieve an Authorization Code from their current Registrar, which is needed to initiate the transfer with the Gaining Registrar.

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/pdf/TransferInsider.pdf"

[JP misunderstood] "Losing and Gaining are both at Dotster? Then I have a hunch dotster can but will not (don't know never used them just basing this on how our own systems work). Transfering to them to another registrar is an option if Dotster won't help you. Or just login and change all the owner, contact, admin info for the domains and leave them wherever they are and change the access passwords."

[JL responded] "No, losing is not at Dotster. At least some of them, maybe all, losing is at GoDaddy. The problem is the registrars say these top-level domains cannot be transferred between registrars. Domain transfer is exactly what we have not been able to do.

Can't change the info either. My client owns the domains now; he doesn't want them left in the sellers' account, and neither does the seller. And in case you didn't know it, the contact information in whois and in the registry databases seem to mean nothing anymore. It's all about whose account holds the domains these days. If you ever have a domain problem you'll unfortunately find that out the hard way.

Owning a domain name, even with your information in all the fields, seems to give you no rights at all (frown). I see you're an Enom reseller. Can you move currently registered accounts for these top level domains:

.name
.cc
.tv
.ws

into your Enom account? If so, maybe we should open up an Enom account.

[JN asked] "Can't you disable the domain security and then transfer the domain? Most registrars today employ a locking feature to prevent an unauthorized party from transferring a domain to another registrar. You should also make sure none of the domains you want to transfer aren't within 30 to 60 days of their renewal date."

[JL replied] "It's not about security. It's about the fact that as far as I can tell, the top level registrars do not allow these domains to be transferred through any automated transfer process. I was hoping in my post to find someone who knows a way to get it done through some non automated way."

[JP asserted] "There has to be a methodology at GoDaddy for pushing the accounts at least into another GoDaddy account. I understand the nature of diffaculty in transfering the different top level names between registrars, it can be a pain. I'm in Canada and sometimes a .ca can be transfered by innitiating a transfer, other times by updating CIRA information, and sometimes the registrar requires a notarized letter of intent to transfer from the owner's lawyer and more."

[JL concluded] "There may very well be. And as a last resort I imagine we can manage a GoDaddy account. As far as I'm concerned it makes these top level domains worthless, because we cannot set up our own automatic facility for managing them. Unfortunately my client wants these domains. We'll end up charging our client over three times the price to manage these domains for him if we can't move them to our own registrar."

—End