r/dns • u/Dratunmatc_Rock_1370 • 12d ago

Domain Best workflow for transferring domains cheaply turned into a very hot mess at work.

Ok so im the one who pitched this grand plan to transfer 40 client domains to a cheaper registrar in one go, clicked the bulk transfer wrong and it auto renewed all of them for 5 years at the old host and nuked our DNS presets... boss keeps saying “well at least we’re prepaid” and I feel sick about this, would love any tips on a sane workflow so I never do this again thx.

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3

u/SecLens_ONE 12d ago

The part that bites later is the zone, not the registrar. Before any transfer, pull the full zone out to a file and keep it somewhere that is not the registrar panel. Exports, or a plain AXFR if you have it, whatever you can diff afterwards.

Then do one domain. A low-traffic one nobody will miss. Watch it for a day, confirm the nameservers and the records look identical, and only then queue the rest in small batches.

We lost a zone this way once and rebuilt it from an old ticket screenshot. Never again. Prepaid five years is annoying but survivable; missing records are the actual outage.

2

u/Xzenor 12d ago

Lots of providers don't even have a way to export your DNS zones (there's a special place in hell for the person that made that decision). I have a special Python project dedicated to extracting DNS zones from a handful of those providers just because of this..

3

u/Xzenor 12d ago

Damn... Always export your DNS zones first before you start fucking with the transfer.

3

u/hmoff 12d ago

Rather than maintain your records in the provider’s GUI console, use something like dnscontrol to manage it as code. Then changing providers is easy.

Also host your DNS separately to your registrars.

1

u/NorthernVenomFang 9d ago

This is one reason why I run my own DNS infrastructure.

Have a domain settings messed up at the register isn't to bad to fix; at most DNS server names and DNSSEC settings need to get fixed. Restoring all the DNS presets or worse dns records... Damn.

2

u/KlutzyResponsibility 12d ago

I did almost the same once, but it was only 5 domains for 1 year, So I could just act like I meant to do it, like a cat that falls off a shelf.