Ask Slashdot: Smartest Way To Transfer an Old Domain/Site?

An anonymous reader writes "Back in early 95 I registered a domain name and built a website for a hobby of mine. Over time the website (and domain) name have built a small but steady stream of traffic but my interest in the hobby is essentially gone and I've not been a visitor to my own site in well over two years. I'd like to sell the site/domain to a long time member who has expressed interest in taking over and trying to grow the site, however I use the domain for my own personal email including banking, health insurance, etc. How have fellow readers gone about parting ways from a domain that they've used for an email address?" More generally, what terms would you like to include (or have you included) in a domain transfer? Old horror stories could help prevent new horror stories.

Comments

Step 1

[leighklotz]

I'd create a new domain for yourself first...you need to get off the old one.

Maybe

[Anrego]

Disclaimer: I have no experience in this situation this is just my take on this so take with lots of salt (well.. try and keep it under 1500ml if you are watching your sodium.. )

I’d move the site to a new domain name owned by the new guy, keep the current domain name, and just set up a friendly redirect page (with an appropriate explanation to users).

Eventually people/search engines will learn the new domain name (and even if they don’t.. keeping the redirect up forever is probably nothing) and you can start migrating to a new email address while keeping the old domain name “just in case”.

If other people have email accounts or rely on other services on the current domain... then it gets more complicated.

Also I’d personally like to thank you for asking a question that is:

- non-trivial
- can benefit from the vast amount of diversity and experience within the slashdot crowd
- will probably generate interesting stories
- and most importantly, isn’t depressing as hell nor a reminder that everything is falling apart in our industry

This is what "ask slashdot" could be! We really need more of this!

Re:Maybe

[ganjadude]

I agree with this as well. sometime around 2001 I was working with a fairly big niche website, maybe around 25000 users 2500 regular users. and they not only transfered ownership of the site but they changed the name of the site as well. What we ended up doing was buying the new domain and setting up the new site with new logos etc than we simply put a redirect up on the old domain, left it for about 6 months before the traffic to the old domain was pretty much zero and the new domain was flourishing.

Fast forward to around 2008, A turn based web game community I was an administrator for sold out a portion of the community to zynga, thescum of the gaming world. He decided that with a portion of the community gone that it would be good to change the name of the rest of the portion he maintained. He proceeded to change the forum,the 4 different domains and put them all on one domain where before it was a little cluster. Overnight he did this, he killed the original links to everything but the forum. Traffic declined 65% in that first week and it never recovered.

Don't trust the buyer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure he's a nice guy, but migrate everything away from that domain before selling. This means adjusting every account you've signed up for using that email address/etc. Then wait six months and see if anything new comes in. Under no circumstances should you expect to receive any forwarded mail without someone having read it.

Re:Don't trust the buyer

[Anrego]

Sounds reasonable.

Once he's convinced his bank, health care provider, and generally everyone outside an extremely small group of people of this.. he'll be all set! (well, except that this doesn't really protect against the new owner killing his email service outright either).

(All kidding aside, it's a lost cause. PGP isn't simple enough for the masses, doesn't work well with the whole webmail thing (aka how just about everyone access their email these days), and in the few cases where it works, ironically makes non-geeks more nervous (why does this email say something about security, am I being hacked!!!).

Re:Don't trust the buyer

[Anrego]

Actually it's the opposite!

My experience is non-technically inclined people tend to associate different with bad. When an email shows up and has a different colored title, or a weird symbol, or a dialog pops up asking them something about keyrings ... they freak out and get nervous (especially if they see words like "security").

More importantly, most users don't care about this stuff. It's not intuitive for them to think "oh, this means I can be reasonable sure thsi email hasn't been tampered with and was actually sent by this person (or someone with access to their PC)".

The problem is to be successful for the masses, PGP would have to have immediate widespread adoption in email clients, which isn't going to happen.

Re:Keep the domain IMO

[trnk]

Next week on ask slashdot: 'I'm a long-term user of a forum on a domain that the owner is no longer interested in, I've offered to buy from him but instead he's told me he wants to keep it and offered to let me purchase a redirect to my servers instead. I was planning on investing quite a bit of time and money to build up the site and it's brand but I'm worried about him retaining control. Is this a good idea?'

...Well, there's no clean way to ensure the old owner will provide service for your forward to your satisfaction...etc.

Come on, everyone saying 'just keep the old domain' really isn't considering the implications of that for the interested buyer.

Re:Not even that complicated

[Atzanteol]

And most importantly, the submitter shouldn't have needed to even ask this. Dearest submitter, please turn in your geek card on your way out.

Perhaps he does, or maybe simply hadn't thought of it. Either way he's looking for options and advice based on personal experience. What's wrong with that?