Foreign Perspectives

1and1 have something of a reputation of making it difficult to transfer domains away from them and rightly so as no matter how much you look around their website, you’ll not find how to do it.

It’s actually fairly easy once you find the site that you need to do it from.

1. login to your 1and1 account and unlock the domains that you want to transfer (you’ll find the unlock option on clicking the info tab on your domain management screen);
2. it’s a good idea to change the name servers at this point to point to those of your new hosting service and, of course, to upload your site to it’s new location if you’ve not done that already;
3. if you’re using whois privacy you’ll need to disable that before proceeding; 
4. register the domain with your new registrar and acknowlodge the request when you receive the e-mail (this is sent to the e-mail address recorded for your domain so check that it’s correct by looking up the domain on whois);
5. go to the 1and1 contracts site and cancel the parts of the contract referring to the domains that you want to transfer (set the cancellation options to “as soon as possible” and “on “change provider”;
6. acknowledge the e-mail that 1and1 will now send you.

OK, so it’s a bit convuluted but once you know the address of the 1and1 contracts site at least you can do it.

How long does it take? It’ll take you about 15 minutes to work through all that plus a few minutes per additional domain. The transfer itself can take anything from a few hours to several days.