Thought and Freedom

I recently ran into a problem transferring GoDaddy hosting from one account in their system to another. It appears that domains must be unique across the entire shared GoDaddy system.  I decided to write a quick article on how to prevent downtime with such a transfer.

So for future reference, it may be beneficial to do this if you need to transfer from one GoDaddy hosting account to another:

1.  Create a new temporary subdomain A record pointing to the new hosting server (i.e. my.domain.com).
2.  Setup hosting on new hosting server for the temporary subdomain.
3.  Setup an apache site on another non-godaddy server for the main domain.
4.  On the non-godaddy server, setup a temporary redirect from the main domain to the temporary subdomain (www.domain.com->my.domain.com).
5.  Modify the DNS record of the main domain to point the non-godaddy server.
6.  After propogation, cancel the original hosting service (or change it to another domain on the account).
7.  After cancellation is finalized (48 hours), modify the main A record to point to the new GoDaddy hosting account.

It is unfortunate the GoDaddy has to enforce uniqueness in hosting names because it forces a massive outage on those wanting to transfer within GoDaddy. As long as your instance is on a different server, it should not matter too much (I know there are technical issues, but it is something that could be fixed with a different setup behind the scenes.