On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 at 18:37, Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
The one I'm doing at the moment is I'm setting up a zone in the new provider which matches the records in the current provider and then I'm going to update the NS records so that they point to the new provider. Once this is done you can transfer the domain and tidy up any leftovers after.
This is how I would normally do it, but a lot of providers don't allow this which seems very odd; even after the transfer itself is complete (but the NS records still point at the old DNS) they won't let you add records to their DNS.
But if they have an API the delay between "change NS records" and "add records to DNS" can be in the order of milliseconds, which is why the question of whether there would be a propagation delay anyway matters.
If the new provider can't setup a zone before you transfer the domain then I'd suggest you don't use them.
Indeed, but I've not yet found a provider that ticks all the boxes that matter to me (where, I'll be honest, price is one of the biggest boxes, but certainly not the only one). My original plan was to separate domain registration/renewal from DNS, email, web hosting, etc so that domain renewals can be cheap and the others can be reliable. I'm still heading that way so to an extent this whole topic is moot, except that DNS is something I feel I should understand so if I have a misunderstanding I want to correct it.