I’ve been the legal registrant of the markwilson.co.uk domain for almost 8 years now and it’s the domain name that drives most of the traffic to this website. Consequently, I would be very upset if I was to lose it and I’ve never been confident enough to move it away from the ISP whom I first registered the domain through (PlusNet/Force 9). Even though I have an ADSL line on a separate account, I have kept a dial-up account open with them for many years, just to maintain the webspace and domain name. In recent months, however, I’ve been getting close to the bandwidth limit on that service and they have been pretty poor at responding to my queries about what will happen once my traffic gets too much (I even offered to pay more money). Support from PlusNet/Force 9 has always been variable (excellent or poor – nothing in between) so I decided that it’s time to move on and my friends at ascomi are able to provide me with a very reasonably-priced hosting service with plenty of headroom.

So, it was with some trepidation that, this afternoon, I finally changed the IPS tag from FORCE9 to FASTHOSTS and transferred the domain name to my account at UKReg. That was it. Easy. Once the transfer had taken place, I could update the DNS server details to point anywhere I like (although at the moment they are still pointing exactly where they always have been, just until I get the new website up and running on my server at ascomi).

I was amazed at how efficient the process was – so much so that I raised a paranoid support call with UKreg, just to make sure that they will re-register my domain when it comes up for renewal.

I appreciate that for many people this is a very simple process and why does it justify a blog post? Well, it was a very big deal for me and I’ve been putting it off for years (literally). I just wanted to be sure that anyone who has similar issues and who stumbles across my ramblings can have their concerns laid to rest.

Further information on UK domain name transfers can be found at Nominet.