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Problems Transferring a Domain

RapidSystem.NET, or any other hosting company, has no authority over a domain hosted by another company. You, as the owner of the domain name, have more authority to transfer it than anyone. There are safeguards in place to protect you from others taking or transferring your domain name without your consent. There are strict rules that must be followed.

A typical domain record looks as follows:

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Domain name: acme.com

Acme Company Inc.
123 Main street
Anytown USA 12345

Administrative Contact:
Doe, Jane  (JD6543)  jane@thenet.com

Technical Contact:
Domain Manager (DM4460) dm@thehost.com

Billing Contact:
Acme Accounts Payable (AC4598) payable@acme.com

Domain servers in listed order:
(Name Server information of your hosting provider)
NS1.NETSOL.COM   216.168.224.200 
NS2.NETSOL.COM   198.17.208.83

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There are two parties who can transfer a domain via emailing the InterNIC Registrar. They are the Administrative Contact and the Technical Contact.

The Administrative Contact is the person who is really in charge of the web site. This could be somebody who works for Acme, in the above example, or it could be a developer of the Acme web site. We highly recommend that the Administrative Contact be somebody within your company. This will eliminate problems later on if you decide you want to change developers.

If the above does not apply to you because you are not the Administrative Contact or there were other mistakes when your domain was setup originally, please click on the "Email Sales" button below for exact instructions after you have placed your order.

The Technical Contact is the person or persons in charge of the technical operation of the website. This should be the person or company operating the server that hosts the site. The webmaster or Administrative Contact normally has no technical information about the server or the DNS configuration. In some cases the customer is the Technical Contact but generally speaking it is not the best idea.

If the Administrative Contact information is correct for your company, email address, etc., the Name Server information for your domain should transfer without any problems. If we assist you in sending the transfer information to the InterNIC Registrar, the Registrar will email the Administrative and Technical contacts to see if it is okay to transfer the domain. The Technical Contact normally doesn't respond to the request. If either the Technical or Administrative contact say no, the domain will not transfer.

The most direct route to submit a Name Server change is for the Administrative Contact to submit the request directly. In this case, the Technical Contact will not be asked. It's all in the approach. We will be happy to give you some guidance in this area.

Don't sell the role of the Administrative Contact short. The Administrative Contact has more "say so" over the website than the Technical Contact. In fact, the Administrative Contact can transfer the website elsewhere, and the Technical Contact will not know it has transferred until after the transfer has taken place. The InterNIC Registrar will email the Technical Contact telling them that the site has transferred. It's kind of a "heads up" notice to get ready to remove the DNS information for the domain. This is how smooth it goes if the Administrative Contact has kept their information current.

If the Administrative Contact's information is wrong it becomes more difficult to transfer a domain. The Billing Contact, in this case, Acme Company, will have to FAX the request to the InterNIC. This takes time and is the slowest method of all. It is very important for all domain Contacts to keep their information current. If you get a new email address, by all means, before you cancel your old service, notify the InterNIC Registrar by filling out their form to update your information, reflecting the new address. You should do it before-hand because the InterNIC will look for the updated information to come from your (on-file) email address. If the address is different, the InterNIC will have no way of knowing that it is you who is requesting the change.

One of the most common problems in transferring domains is how they were setup in the first place. Many ISP's and hosting companies put themselves as the Administrative and Technical Contacts. This makes it very hard for a customer to leave and they know it. We do not follow this practice. If you set up a new domain on RapidSystem.NET servers, we put your company, or an employee of your company, as both the Administrative and Billing Contacts on your InterNIC record.

To stay out of trouble and keep control of your domain, just remember to keep your Contact information current, and second, make sure that you (the owner of the website) is both the Administrative and Billing Contact. With these things in place you will be able to move the site where and when you want without any problems. If all this seems like a pain, by having to keep all this information current, think of the alternative. Anybody could take your website without your permission and transfer it where ever they liked. Not us or anybody else has the authority to push a registration through. Everything must be in order for a transfer to run smoothly.

There are some other things that you can do to make updating your information a little less painful. There are three ways that the InterNIC can verify that it is you who is requesting updates: (1) Email, (2) Encrypted password, and (3) PGP Email. Email is simple. They just look to make sure that the email came from your email address on-file. This is the most common method and it's great if your email address never changes. Encrypted password is more secure and is more flexible because you assign the password.  It is assumed that you won't tell anyone what your password is, so if you request a change and you know the password, they assume it's you. The third option, PGP, is a bit much for the average user to tackle, so we will skip any explanation.

Visit the InterNIC at http://rs.internic.net (Directory of Registrars) to find the domain name registration service provider you used to register your domain name. The oldest Registrar is Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com/). If you're unsure of the Registrar of your domain name, your current hosting provider might be able to help you.

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