Two Registrars and No Reason

How the split happens

The first domain went wherever was cheapest that week.

The .ca went to a Canadian registrar because the first one did not handle it well.

A campaign domain went wherever the person running the campaign had an account.

Nobody decided to use three registrars, and now there are three sets of logins, three renewal calendars, and three places something can go wrong.

What the split actually costs

• Three accounts to keep access to.
• Three renewal schedules to track.
• Three sets of contact details to keep current.
• Three interfaces nobody uses often enough to learn.
• More places for an old address to hide.

The last is the real risk. A renewal notice going to a former employee's address on one account is exactly how a domain lapses, and the more accounts there are the more likely one of them is wrong.

What a transfer involves

Which is less than people expect.

Unlock the domain at the current registrar and request the authorisation code.

Start the transfer at the new one, paste the code, and approve the confirmation email.

It completes in about five to seven days, during which the site and the email keep working normally.

The cost is roughly one year's renewal, and that year is added to the existing expiry rather than replacing it.

So a transfer is not an extra cost, it is next year's renewal paid to somebody else.

Nothing about the website, the hosting, or the email changes unless you change the name server settings, which a transfer does not do on its own.

The waiting periods

Which are the part that catches people out.

A domain cannot be transferred within sixty days of being registered.

It also cannot be transferred within sixty days of a change to the registrant, meaning the recorded owner.

That second one matters because people frequently want to do both at once: change the owner and move it.

Do the transfer first and the ownership change afterwards, or accept a two-month wait between them.

Nobody mentions any of this until the moment it blocks you.

A worked example

A business had five domains across three registrars.

Two were with a company they had no login for, since the account had been created by somebody who had left.

Recovering that account took a fortnight of identity verification and was the hardest part of the whole exercise.

Once done, moving everything to one registrar took a week and cost about the same as the renewals would have.

They now have one login, one renewal date, and one address on file.

The recovery was the reason to do it and the consolidation was the benefit.

Align the renewal dates while you are there

Which is worth doing at the same time.

Most registrars let you renew for multiple years, so extending each domain so they all expire in the same month is straightforward.

One renewal event a year, on one card, with one notice, is considerably harder to miss than five scattered ones.

Pick a month when you are not busy, which for most trades means the autumn or the depth of winter rather than the spring.

A renewal notice arriving in your busiest fortnight is one that gets left.

That costs the extra years of renewal you would have paid anyway, spread differently.

Two or three years ahead is a reasonable amount of runway to buy, since it also removes the annual risk of a single failed payment.

When not to consolidate

Since there are legitimate reasons to split.

A .ca domain is sometimes better with a registrar that handles Canadian registrations properly, though most major ones now do.

Deliberate separation of a genuinely critical domain from the rest, so that an account compromise does not reach everything, is a real if uncommon argument.

And a registrar you actively distrust is a reason to move away from rather than to consolidate into.

Outside those cases, one account is simpler, and simpler is what actually survives.

Choose the registrar for renewal price

Not the first-year price.

Introductory rates are marketing and the renewal rate is what you will pay for the next decade.

Check the renewal price before transferring, since some registrars are cheap to join and expensive to stay with.

Also check that transferring away is free and that privacy is included rather than an added charge.

Those three questions take five minutes to answer and decide the next ten years of what you pay.

Do not move the hosting at the same time

Which is the mistake that turns a routine week into an outage.

A domain transfer changes who bills you and nothing else, and moving hosting changes where the site actually lives, and doing both together means any problem has two possible causes.

Move the domains first, confirm everything still works for a fortnight, and treat hosting as a separate project if it needs one at all.

The same applies to changing name servers, which is the step that can genuinely take a site down and which a transfer does not require.

Registrars will offer to move your hosting during the transfer, and declining that offer is the right answer for almost everybody.

The counter-case

Transfers carry a small risk.

A transfer that goes wrong, or an approval email that goes to an address nobody reads, can leave a domain in an awkward state for days.

Doing it well before a renewal date rather than close to one removes most of that risk.

And a business with two domains at two registrars, both accessible and both current, has a problem too small to be worth an afternoon.

In that case, note both in the same list and leave them where they are.

Recover access to every account first, then move them to one registrar, and align the renewal dates.

The week

1. Recover access to every account.
2. Check renewal prices before choosing.
3. Unlock and get the codes.
4. Start the transfers.
5. Approve the emails.
6. Align the expiry dates.
7. Do ownership changes afterwards.

Step one is the hard part and the reason to do this at all, since an account nobody can log into is a domain you do not really control.

Getting the dates into one month is covered in renewals that all land in January.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.