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OK so you have a domain name like company.com - but you want to transfer ownership of that domain to another person/company. How is this done? Well it all depends on how the person wants to receive/manage the domain name and if they want to pay to renew it now or later.

The first and easiest option is to transfer the domain name to another account within the same registrar. Registrars are companies that one registers domain names through like GoDaddy, Network Soltuions, Dotster, etc. In most, if not all cases, the registrar will allow you to do this transfer for free. All that the receiving person/company needs to do is create an account with that registrar - this is most of the time free - and then give their username to you so that you can transfer the domain ownership to that username.

Now transferring domain names between registrars - like from GoDaddy to Network Solutions for example - is where things can get tricky. First of all, when you’re moving from one registrar to another, the receiving registrar will almost always require you to renew the domain immediately with them. So if I register a domain name for 1-year today with Dotster, and then you request it to be transferred to you at Network Solutions tomorrow, you’ll have to pay the renewal fee or transfer fee to Network solutions, which will renew the domain for an additional year (on top of the year I registered it for - which will automatically be yours as well when the transfer is complete). I suppose you could look at it in this way as getting a domain for 2 years for the price of 1 year - that is, of course, if i don’t charge you for that first year myself :)

So that’s the money portion of transferring between registrars, but there’s also the technical aspect of the transfer. I’ll get to that one next week.