Moving your domain and email without downtime: a DNS migration checklist

Most outages during a provider change are not caused by the new host. They happen because a DNS record was forgotten, mail started arriving at a mailbox that did not exist yet, or the old service was cancelled before the new one was confirmed working. A careful migration is mostly about order and inventory.

Three separate things can move: the domain registration (where you rent the name), the DNS hosting (who answers lookups for it) and the services (website, email). They do not have to move together, and keeping them separate makes each step safer.

Key terms in one minute

Phase 1: inventory (a week or more before)

1. Find out who controls the registrar account, and confirm you can log in. If a former supplier holds it, start recovering access now.
2. Export or screenshot every DNS record in the current zone, not just the website and email ones.
3. Note records for other services: verification codes for search consoles or office suites, CNAMEs for invoicing or booking tools, SRV records for calendars or phone systems.
4. List every mailbox, alias and forwarding rule, and roughly how much mail each holds.
5. Check whether DNSSEC is enabled. If you will change nameservers, DNSSEC needs to be handled carefully, typically by removing or updating the DS record at the registrar, or the domain may stop resolving.

Phase 2: prepare (one to two days before)

1. Lower the TTL on records that will change, such as A, CNAME and MX, to a short value like 300 seconds. Do it at least as long before the switch as the current TTL, so caches pick up the short value.
2. Build and test the new website on a temporary address.
3. Create all mailboxes and aliases on the new email service.
4. Prepare the new SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. During the move, SPF may need to include both old and new sending services.
5. Agree a switch time outside your busiest hours and tell staff what to expect.

Phase 3: switch (the day itself)

1. Update the A/AAAA and CNAME records for the website, or change nameservers if the DNS hosting is moving and all records have been recreated at the new provider first.
2. Update the MX records to the new email service.
3. Add the new TXT records for SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
4. Copy existing mail from the old mailboxes to the new ones, commonly with an IMAP-to-IMAP sync. Run a final sync after the MX change to catch late arrivals.
5. Reconnect phones and mail apps to the new accounts.

Phase 4: verify and wait

• Send test messages to and from an external address in both directions, and check they do not land in spam.
• Open the website from mobile data and from a different network to confirm the new site loads over HTTPS.
• Check that third-party tools still verify and still send mail as your domain.
• Keep the old hosting and mailboxes active for at least a few days, until all mail is arriving at the new service and nothing is missing.
• Once stable, raise TTLs back to normal values.

Transferring the domain registration

Moving the registration to a new registrar is a separate process, and doing it after the services have moved keeps risk low. In general you remove the transfer lock at the current registrar, obtain the authorisation (EPP) code, and start the transfer at the new registrar, which may ask the current one to approve. For many generic domains such as .com, a transfer adds a year to the registration, and registrars may block transfers for 60 days after a new registration or a change of owner details. Rules differ for country-code domains such as .de, .fr or .co.uk, so check the registry's process for yours.

Common mistakes

• Changing nameservers before copying every record to the new DNS host, which silently breaks email or verifications.
• Cancelling the old email plan the same day as the switch.
• Forgetting the SPF record, so mail from the new service is treated as suspicious.
• Leaving TTLs at a day or more, which prolongs the period where some senders still use old records.
• Letting the domain expire mid-transfer because the renewal date was not checked.

Let us handle the move

On radelivery.com, moving your website and email is part of the set-up: we list existing records before changing anything, configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC, create mailboxes and switch at an agreed time. Business email on your domain is included in Professional. Read about hosting and email with us, see package prices, or plan the bigger picture with our brief-to-live launch timeline. If your situation is complicated, such as a domain held by a former supplier, describe it to us first.

Questions and answers

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