I made a choice to move my site’s domain and hosting from company X.  (I will not name the company.) The new home I picked is with ihelpers.net.  I followed the instructions to do a transfer except for one step. I never set up domain privacy for my url with X so I chose to not unlock it.  Instead I went ahead and requested the authorization code from X to do the transfer.

The code popped into my e-mail’s Inbox and  I passed it on to ihelpers. Sometime later the transfer process started to my surprise an e-mail from X arrived about the transfer: denied.  Skipping ahead…I phoned X and learned something surprising if domain privacy is not set up; a transfer gets denied.

So I went into X and did the steps to activate domain privacy and after three days removed it   I thought after that the transfer to a new host would go smoothly, it did not.  Instead I triggered a new authorization code.

I thought I goofed but I didn’t really instead what happened the “old” code got attempted and when it failed hours later the same thing happened with “new” code.  I then received an e-mail from ihelpers.net to let some days pass and then try number three would happen.  One Monday, January 31st company X allowed my url to move to Ihelpers.

Here are the lessons I have learned –  If I ever move a website again I will call the company and affirm transfer steps.  If there is a function to unlock and I did not set it up, I will need to find out if having skipped it, will it hinder transfer.  If the company like X representative did answers yes, I will ask what I have to do to resolve this problem.  I will then double-check that the resolution will indeed make transfer happen.

And most importantly I will go back to my blog and look for this post before I get started.

Changing Web Hosting: The Hitch