Moving a Domain

Jul 2024

Introduction

When I started using domains, they were cheap, circa £2-£3 per year (for .co.uk) and this meant you could have lots of domains for relatively small amounts of money. These days sadly some domain registrars have become super expensive.
The domain provider I used (LCN) now costs nearly £30 every 2 years for a .co.uk (you can get some introductory offers, but they don't last). To combat this I moved some of my domains to google domains, and let the rest expire. this halved my yearly costs. However, after moving all my domains, in just a few short months google decided they didn't want to do domain hosting anymore (this was late 2023/early 2024) and they gave all of my domains to Squarespace, another really expensive provider.
Time to move all my domains again :( A friend of my recommended a company call Porkbun Porkbun, yes a very odd name but they really are very good.
Porkbun are half the cost of google domains as well, so win win for me, they are under £5 per year for .co.uk as of July 2024.
The issue is that I have to do this periodically, with many years in-between, and I forget how this all works, so I am documenting it here.

Moving a Domain

The process is very simple, but finding the relevant 'pages' on each domain provider could be a challenge, what I am showing here is the process of moving a domain from LCN.com to Porkbun.com. This will differ with other providers, but the steps will be mainly the same.

Step 1 - Porkbun

I am making the assumption that you have a Porkbun account already, so if you do, login to Porkbun now. Just as an FYI, companies love redesigning their websites, so some of these menus might have moved.
Find the account dropdown at the top right of the page.
Select the menu Add External Domain.
This will show the following page:
Enter the domain name you wish to transfer then select Submit and Verify.
You will see a short message about adding a record to you existing domain, this basically stops people stealing domains they have no control of.
Click OK to close this message.
You will be taken back to the page where you entered your domain name - DO NOT CLICK SUMBIT & VERIFY, IT WILL FAIL!
In the red box I have highlighted, there is some text you need to create a record in your current domain provider (LCN in my case).

Step 2 - LCN (or your current domain provider)

The text in that red box is telling you to create a new record in you domains settings on your current domain provider, the domain provider that you are leaving in other words.
As we can see above, we have to create a TXT record with the name bun-verify and a result of 'long string' the string changes each time you attempt a transfer.
Go to the DNS settings of your current provider and create the record, in LCN it looks like below.
Make a note of any existing A/MX/TXT/CNAME etc records, because they don't generally transfer over and once you do the transfer you will lose access to this page.

Step 3 - MXToolBox.com

Open another browser and head on over to mxtoolbox.com
Enter the domain name you are using (nlowe.co.uk in this example) and then click the MX Lookup button.
Now enter the txt record and domain in the first box, so for me that was bun-verify and nlowe.co.uk, this makes up the complte record of bun-verify.nlowe.co.uk.
Set the orange box to the right to TXT Lookup and click that box.
You will now see below the TXT record is verified with the information you entered. This is important because Porkbun will run this test, and if it is not correct the test will fail and the transfer will fail and that long record string will change and you will have to start the process again.

Step 4 - Porkbun

Now you can click Submit and Verify from the page below:
This will add the domain to your Porkbun account.
There are two things to notice here:
1. There is a warning tell you that the domain is not registered with Porkbun.
2. There are no management icons due to this.
=== Step 5 === Back to LCN (or whoever your original provider is) The last step here is to change the IPS tag (or Nominet tag as LCN call it). This will be under the DNS Settings
Click the Change Nominet Tag link.
Enter the new Nominet Tag PORKBUN all in caps (or the tag of the provider you want to use if you are not using Porkbun)
You do have to put something in the Reason for transferring box, I always put something about the cost.
Click Proceed.
You should be done with your old domain provider at this point.

Step 6 - Porkbun