Domain portfolio consolidation is often considered when companies or individuals manage their domains through a variety of registrars. This distribution of the portfolio can lead to too much time and money being spent on managing different technical requirements and juggling multiple payment and billing portals. Not to mention that it keeps teams from doing more productive, revenue-generating work. It’s important to have the right partner and expert team in place to make domain migrations as smooth as possible! In this blog post, we will shred light on common pain points and dive into the key steps for a successful domain migration plan.

Domains Matter!

Whether it’s your domain, or those of your clients, domains empower your products and services​ and they connect your customers to the world. In the IT world, a domain is a core component, required to connect hosting products to the world wide web, enabling us to create unique and personalised email addresses, and they become an extremely valuable key factor for branding. Today, we can register a domain name within more than 1,000 extensions, which presents great opportunities to find a good name even for the most specific appliance. This opens up a wide market beyond the core business of IT companies offering hosting and internet services. While domains are important, they’re often a side product, sitting outside the expertise and specialisation of an IT company.

Large Hosting Companies and Domain Registrars manage a lot of accounts and often have beyond 100,000 singular clients. They manage huge volumes of domains, distributed across many domain extensions. Over the years companies grow organically and through acquisitions and mergers, and their domain portfolios become more and more diversified. Different brands use different domain providers or operate direct relationships to registrars.

At some point, the topic of consolidating the domain business arises. The positive outcomes are a reduced number of technical touching points, freeing up resources that can be used on other projects, as well as better buying conditions. Ultimately, substantial savings may be achieved.

Migrations Can Be Overwhelming

Once the idea to migrate domain business intensifies, it soon becomes evident that the project grows substantially. Moving, i.e. transferring a single domain from supplier A to supplier B is simple. If there are hundreds or thousands of domains in a single extension (TLD) to be transferred, it is still manageable, but it becomes more challenging. In particular, when domain owners – the registrants – need to be involved: they need to be informed about the upcoming change and you need to have transfers approved. Typically, there are a number of different extensions involved, in ccTLDs, gTLDs and new gTLDs, there may be hundreds. And if these are scattered across different providers and registries, such a migration can easily become overwhelming.

So, we’re not talking about single transfers, but about migrating multiple portfolios from multiple suppliers. All of this should align with your distinct specifications.

Find here a report about one of our Migration Success Stories. It is about the largest bulk transfer between registrars in the .au namespace to date, and one of the largest worldwide. Our team played a key role in this migration of more than 477,000 .au domains.

Pain Points

Let’s take a look at common pain points that emerge in companies and company groups managing a lot of domains.

Too Many Suppliers and Registries

Domains could be so easy, but unfortunately the approaches of suppliers and registries always differ. Having to manage different agreements and commercial contracts leads to increased efforts to ensure proper business. And of course financial aspects come into play – the price per unit is lower with higher volumes. This creates a demand to increase efficiency and introduce unified handling to rationalise vendor relationships.

Working with Multiple Systems with Different Handling

Handling different domain suppliers and registries leads to the challenge of handling their different methodologies and processes While some may be easy to handle, others turn out to be more complex, and having to adapt to individual technical requirements leads to increased efforts in development and day-to-day operations.

A portfolio consolidation to reduce costs & standardise services is a logical step to internally unifying supplier channels, streamlining order processes. Instead of having to maintain contractual relationships and technical connections to multiple providers and registries, concentrating on few suppliers or even only one provider becomes attractive.

Lack of Experience with Domain Migrations

Large scale domain migrations seldom happen in daily business. Getting a quote from a supplier is fairly easy, but designing a project to migrate the entire domain business requires a lot of preparation. Often there is little to no experience with such projects, thus expert knowledge is key. A partner having the expertise and experience in compiling and performing such a migration is essential for a successful migration.

Take a Deep Breath! We’ve Got You Covered

We are here to guide and serve. Our dedicated domain migration team consists of skilled domain experts working in the domain industry since many years, bringing together the expertise and knowledge required to plan and operate even the most complex migration. Having successfully realised numerous large domain migrations, we’re able to accurately plan every aspect of your migration. Learn more about our Migration Service here.

Success Is All in the Planning​

We do all of this together, tailored to your needs and requirements, your business procedures and you client base.

• Together we analyse your entire domain portfolio: Overview of each TLD and their volume, where they are managed at the moment, carve out essential characteristics and transfer procedures. To provide a full picture of the current landscape.
• Recommendation for domain migration order and process​: Suggestion on where to start with communication and which domains will be migrated when, elaborating out a coherent project plan.
• Compare domain management at current supplier to ours: Overview on different domain life cycles and technical specifications. This will minimise your support and technical workload.
• Work out detailed procedures for every single TLD: Transparent and precisely defined procedures to lower effort, reducing client involvement to the minimum according to Registry and ICANN Policies and Procedures.
• Migrations begin when you’re ready! You sign off the entire project, and we’re here to support you​, followed by ongoing support to ensure full success.

Together, We Perform Your Domain Migration​

• Execute as planned: per TLD​ and per Provider, following the project plan and flexibly adjusting whenever required.
• Post migration analysis: to make certain everything is in place​
• Transparent and consistent communications​: with big focus on the least amount of end user customer communications and involvement​.
• Excellent planning and communication: in advance to reduce clean up post migration​.

Benefit from tons of expert knowledge​ of our domain migration team with many years of experience​ – migrations are a vital part of our daily business!