Domains · Moving one in
Transfer a domain name to Karyalay: unlock it where it is, get the code that authorises the move, hand it over, and we do the chasing. Most people put this off for one reason — they think the site will go dark and the mail will stop while it happens. It does not. A move changes who the name is registered through. Where the name points is a different setting altogether, and it is the one we look after.
The fear, first
There are two separate things going on and only one of them is the transfer. The paperwork changes hands. The thing that decides whether your website answers and your mail arrives is not carried along with it.
Where a name is with us we hold the records behind it, which means we write them rather than sending you a list and wishing you luck. For business mail that is the whole difference between a mailbox that works on the first morning and one that quietly lands in everybody’s spam for a fortnight.
What it actually takes
A switch at their end, a code you have to ask them for, and then a long stretch where the honest answer is that there is nothing for you to do. Here is that run with our column filled in beside yours, because the empty half of your column is the point.
What you doGive us the name. That is the whole of your first move — you do not have to have anything ready, and you do not have to have decided.
What we doWe check what its ending allows before anything else happens, and tell you if it is too soon to move it. Better learnt now than after you have spent an evening on it.
What you doWherever the name is now there is a lock on it, holding it where it is. Turn that off in their control panel. It is usually one switch, and it is yours to turn.
What we doIf you cannot find it, tell us what you are looking at and we work it out with you. We would rather spend ten minutes on the phone than send you a guide.
What you doAsk whoever holds the name for the code that authorises a move — most of this trade calls it an auth code. They have to give it to you. Some put it on the screen and some make you ask twice.
What we doWe take it from you and use it once. We never need the password to your account anywhere else, and we will not ask you for one.
What you doThis is the part people brace for, and it is the part with nothing in it. You do not have to chase anybody and you do not have to sit by the phone.
What we doWe put the request in and keep checking on it until it lands, and we tell you where it has got to rather than leaving you to wonder. We will not give you an hour it will be finished by — the far end is not ours to promise, and a date we made up is worse than no date at all.
What you doNothing again. There is no morning you have to be at your desk for, and nothing to switch over.
What we doThe name appears in your account with the records behind it in our hands, and its date goes into the calendar we watch: we start telling you two months out, then at a month, a fortnight, a week, and again in the days before it is due — by email and on WhatsApp. They stop the moment you renew.
The one delay
This is the rule that catches people, so it is better said before you start than discovered afterwards. It is nobody’s policy — not ours and not theirs — and there is no way round it.
The standard is about two months from the day a name was registered or last moved. How exactly it reads depends on the ending, so we check yours rather than quoting you a rule that may not be the one that applies to it. If the wait is on, the honest answer is a date to come back on — and we will hold you to it rather than leaving you to remember.
Not optional, and not ours
The address on a registration has to be a real one, and it has to be proved real. A name whose registered address was never confirmed gets suspended — and a suspended name stops answering in exactly the way an expired one does, on a morning nobody was expecting.
So we treat it as part of moving the name rather than as small print at the bottom of somebody else’s screen. We know which of your names are confirmed and which are not, we show you, and we keep asking until it is done. It costs you a minute and it is the cheapest minute on this page.
If you take one thing from this page and it is not the transfer, take this: go and check the address on the names you already hold, wherever you hold them.
From the morning it arrives
Everything below is a setting you open and change yourself. None of it needs us, and none of it is a thing we could hold over you later.
Automatic or manual, changed whenever you like, and the date always in front of you rather than in an email you archived. One press when you want it done now.
The part nobody puts on this page
A page about bringing a name in is the right place to say how you would take it out, because a company that will only tell you the first half is telling you something.
That the code will be behind a support request. That the lock will take a week to come off, and then another week. That somebody will be very sorry and very slow, because a customer halfway out of the door is a customer worth delaying.
The lock is a switch in your account and you are the one holding it. Your code is shown to you the moment you ask, never withheld and never traded for a phone call — and we keep a note of when it was shown, which is a record that protects you rather than us.
When a name has gone, our records follow it rather than arguing with it. We check what the register itself says instead of trusting our own copy, and where the two disagree a person looks at it — nothing is quietly corrected in either direction, least of all back into our column.
We would rather you left cleanly than stayed because leaving was hard.
We will tell you whether it can move yet, what it costs to bring across and what it costs every year after — in that order, at the same size, before you commit to anything. If the answer is that you should leave it where it is until the wait is up, that is the answer you will get.
We are not a registrar and we are not trying to become one. We sell names because the website and the mail both hang off one, and sending you to a stranger for that helps nobody.
