How to reclaim ownership of a domain name from a shared web host?

Question

When I was signing up for a (shared) web hosting for my web site the company, BlueHost, provided a domain name with it. Now I want to switch to another web hosting company, because of the excessive throttling Bluehost does on my site. (Even though they advertise it as "unlimited", what they don't tell you is that they impose a draconian CPU quota and a quota on a number of the simultaneous database/MySQL connections that makes my site issue errors in the most critical moments.)

My question is, since I got the domain name for my site through them, how can I reclaim it when I switch to a new hosting company?

Answer 1

If you still have an account with Bluehost you can just change the dns information to point to your new host.

You can go to the domain manager tab and then to the name servers tab to change the dns to point to a new host.

You can view their how to transfer video here: http://tutorials.bluehost.com/transferaway/

If you are getting throttled by Bluehost you will get the same treatment from other shared hosting accounts. It's happened to me.

The good thing is your site must be doing well. You probably need your own server or a partially dedicated server. I went to Amazon AWS, but then found Rackspace cloud where I could get a partial server for an hourly rate. http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/

Answer 2

If you are listed as the contact in the domain whois information, you can move your domain to another domain registrar. This would take a couple of days at max.

First thing I'd do is check the current whois information and make sure that your email is listed as the registrant. If not ask bluehost to change that information (or see if you can do it through their administrative interface). You can then go to another registrar's website and initiate a domain transfer. This would automatically renew your domain for an additional year.