How do I transfer my hosting service to another Web hosting company?

Very few of our hosting customers transfer their sites elsewhere. But if you do ever decide to do that, we want to make sure that the process goes as smoothly as possible.

On this page:

First step: Pointing your service elsewhere

You can transfer your hosting service to another company and keep your existing domain name. If your domain name is registered with us, do this:

  • Set up your website and email service at the new company (they can help with this)
  • Login to our “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
  • Click Domain Name Options
  • Click Manage DNS Nameservers

You’ll be able to update the DNS nameservers to “point” your domain name at the new hosting company. The new hosting company should have provided you with the DNS nameservers — contact them if you're unsure.

(If your domain name is registered with another company, you should update the DNS nameservers with that company instead.)

Note that updating the DNS nameservers does not cancel your hosting service with us or stop the monthly fee. The instructions below explain how to do that.

However, you should wait at least three days between updating the DNS nameservers and canceling your hosting service. Leaving the service active for three days is the way to ensure a smooth transition, because during this period, it's possible that some of your website visitors or email correspondents will still reach our servers due to "DNS caching". The three day overlap ensures that these visitors do not not see a blank page or an error message saying your account has been canceled.

You should continue reading your email at both our company and your new company during this three day period, for the reasons explained on our "Email During Transfers" page.

Second step: Canceling our hosting service

After waiting at least three days, you can return to our site to cancel the hosting service and stop the monthly fee:

  • Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
  • Click Billing and Contact Information
  • Click Cancel Hosting Service
  • Choose Finalize Hosting Cancellation and follow the instructions

When you do this, we’ll convert your domain name to a normal domain name only account with our company.

There may be a prorated domain registration fee to cover the domain name registration until it expires. For example, if you cancel a .com website after nine months of hosting service, and you want to keep the domain name for use with another Web hosting company, we would charge you one-quarter of the annual domain name only fee to cover your use of the domain name until it expires in three months' time.

By the way, we don't charge any hosting cancellation fees and we don't have fixed-term contracts, so you're free to cancel at any time.

You're welcome to keep the domain name itself registered through Tiger Technologies for as long as you want, even if you use another company for your hosting service. Simply renew the domain name with us when we send you messages saying that it's going to expire.

Transferring the domain name also

If you're going to transfer the domain name (as well as the hosting service) to a different company, we recommend transferring the domain name as the final step:

Doing it in this order ensures that the domain name transfer won't interfere with the hosting DNS nameserver update. If you instead started by transferring the domain name first, the central domain name registry can block any DNS nameserver changes for up to seven days while the domain name transfer is in progress, which would prevent you from "pointing" the website at a new hosting company before the domain name transfer is complete.

What if I really want to transfer the domain name before moving the hosting elsewhere?

If you're transferring both the domain name and the hosting to another company, and you really want to transfer the domain name first despite our advice above, that's fine, too. Just follow our domain name transfer instructions, then cancel your hosting service when you're no longer using our Web or email servers.

Please keep in mind that:

  • Merely transferring your domain name elsewhere does not automatically cancel your hosting service with us and stop the monthly fees. You'll still need to cancel your hosting service as a separate step. We'll send you monthly reminder notices to do so.
  • There may be a period of up to seven days during which you can't make nameserver changes while the domain name transfer is in progress, as mentioned above.

By the way, the reason we don't automatically cancel hosting service for transferred domain names is that customers sometimes continue using our servers for a long time after transferring a domain name. If you've transferred the domain name elsewhere, we can't tell how long you might still need any files, databases and email messages remaining on our servers. For safety, we don't close your account or delete any of your data until you explicitly cancel.

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