Domains

This guide tells how to save the contact for your domains, and how to make it the owner of a domain.

Save your domain contact

When a deployment registers a domain, the registrar records your contact as the owner of the domain, and sends the complaints about your domains to you. A deployment cannot register or transfer a domain until you save your contact. Thus a domain is never of your hosting provider. A subdomain of your hosting provider does not need a contact.

1. Click your user name to open your account page.
2. Under "Domain contact", click "Change your domain contact".
3. Enter your contact and click "Save contact". This can take some minutes. Before your first save, the form has the name and the e-mail address of your account. The registrar needs a real telephone number and address, and can cancel a domain with false contact data.

Your contact applies to the domains that your deployments register after you save it. A domain that is registered keeps its contact until you change its owner. The panel keeps only the handle of the contact. Your hosting provider keeps the contact, and sends it to the registrar.

To erase your contact, click "Erase contact" on the same page. This removes the contact at your hosting provider and at the registrar. You cannot erase a contact while a domain uses it: first move the domain to a different registrar, or ask your hosting provider to give the domain a different owner.

Change the owner of a domain

When you have a domain contact, and the registrar has a different owner for your domain, the "Domains" page has the button "Make my domain contact the owner". The owner is the registrant of the domain, and has the legal rights on it.

The change does not start a deploy, and a next deploy keeps the owner. The page shows the new owner after the next read of the registrar account. After a change of the owner, the registry can lock the transfer of the domain for some time. The button is not there while an auth code of the domain is out.

If your deployment did not accept the current domain terms, the form has a box for this: you must accept them to become the owner. These terms apply to you as the owner, and can let the registrar approve a change of the owner for you.

Transfer a domain in

When a different registrar has the domain of your deployment, you can move the domain to the registrar account of your hosting provider. Get the auth code of the domain from the registrar that has it now, and remove its transfer lock there. Then enter the code on the "Domains" page, in the deploy controls of the deployment, or with the migration string of a migration import.

A transfer is a real order at the registrar, and it costs money: the registrar charges your hosting provider, usually the price of a renewal of one year. A transfer that the registry refuses can cost money too. Thus each of these places asks you to accept the cost of the transfer, and does not start it before you do.

The transfer can take some days. Until it is complete, the "Domains" page shows that the transfer is not complete, and the DNS zone of the domain stays. Deploy again when the transfer is complete: that deploy uses the domain. If the registry refuses the transfer, the page tells you, and you can give the code again after you correct the cause.