Leaving GoDaddy is one invoice and several separate departures. The domain, the website, the mailboxes and whatever got added at checkout are sold as a bundle and have to be unpicked one at a time. Sort the email first, the site second, and the domain last, and none of it hurts.
That order is deliberate. A website that blinks for an hour is embarrassing. Email that blinks for an hour loses you messages you will never know arrived, because the sender never finds out either.
First, read your own invoice
Open the billing screen before you open anything else and write down every line on it. If you are not certain the account in front of you is the one actually serving the site, the three lookups that settle it take a couple of minutes. Accounts we get handed usually hold some mixture of these:
- One domain, or eleven, several of which nobody remembers buying
- A hosting plan, which may or may not be the thing the website is actually running on
- Mailboxes, billed per person per month
- An SSL certificate as its own paid line
- Privacy and protection add-ons attached to the domain
- Sometimes a website builder subscription, which changes the whole job
Every line has its own renewal date. You want to know all of them, because the worst version of this job is the one where a renewal slides past while everybody is busy with the move. Losing hosting for a day is recoverable. Losing a domain is a phone call you will remember.
The email is the part to plan properly
Work out what kind of mailbox you have
Depending on when the account was opened, the mail behind your address is either a Microsoft mailbox sold and billed through GoDaddy, or an older mailbox running on their own platform. Find out which before you promise anybody a date, because the two lead to different work. With a Microsoft mailbox there is sometimes a route that keeps the mailbox exactly where it is and only changes who bills you for it, which saves the copying entirely. Ask that question early rather than after you have spent an evening dragging folders about.
Get a copy of the mail while you still have both
If you are copying, the usual method is dull and reliable. Set up the new mailbox, add both accounts to one desktop mail program as IMAP, and drag the folder tree from the old side to the new one. Large mailboxes take hours and will stall if the laptop sleeps, so start it on a Friday and leave the machine alone. People who do this for a living use a sync tool instead, which can be run twice: once for the bulk, once at the end to catch the stragglers.
Two things routinely get missed. If anyone in the office set their mail up as POP rather than IMAP, years of messages exist only on that one laptop and nowhere on the server, so that laptop needs backing up as its own separate task. And calendars and contacts do not travel over IMAP at all. They export as their own files, and if you skip that step somebody loses six months of appointments.
While you are in there, write down the plumbing: every alias, every forwarder, every catch-all, every autoresponder, and which addresses are real mailboxes as opposed to redirects to somebody’s Gmail. None of that shows up in a mail copy. It has to be rebuilt by hand on the other side, and it is the reason invoices@ stops working three days after a move that otherwise went perfectly.
Switchover day
When the MX records change, new mail starts landing in the new mailbox and everything already delivered stays in the old one. That is why you run one last catch-up sync a day later. Then phones and laptops need reconfiguring, which is the bit that eats an afternoon in an office of eight people, and is much easier if you warn them in advance instead of at 9am.
Leave the old mailboxes paid up for a month afterwards. Turn off auto-renew if you like, but do not delete anything. Deleting a mailbox deletes the mail inside it, and there is no undo button worth relying on.
The website: it depends what built it
If your site is WordPress or any ordinary PHP application sitting on their hosting, it moves the way any site moves: files one way, database the other, test, switch. Nothing exotic.
Sites built in GoDaddy’s own website builder are a different answer altogether. There are no files to take with you, because the pages are assembled by their system rather than stored as a site you can download. You save the text and the images, and the site gets rebuilt somewhere else. That is not a swipe at them, it is how every hosted builder works, and the same is true of the well-known ones. It is just far better to know that in week one than to find out the morning you planned to go live.
Find out which version of PHP it runs on, too. Older sites tend to be stuck on something the rest of the world stopped supporting a while back, and that shapes where they can safely land next.
The domain: move it, or just repoint it
You are allowed to leave the domain registered where it is and simply change where it points. Plenty of people do exactly that and never think about it again. Our preference is to have the domain, the DNS and the hosting under one roof, because it means one login to fix things at half past six on a Sunday instead of three.
If you do want it moved, the mechanics are the same everywhere. Take the transfer lock off in the domain settings, request the authorisation code (you will see it called an EPP code or a transfer code depending on the screen), hand that to the new registrar, and approve the confirmation message. On a .com or a .net the transfer also adds a year to the registration, so you are not throwing away time you paid for. A .uk domain runs to different rules: no code, no added year, just a change of the tag that records which registrar holds it. If your address ends .co.uk, ask your new registrar what they need from you instead.
Two traps. A domain usually cannot be transferred within 60 days of being registered, or after a change of owner details, and that is an industry rule rather than anything GoDaddy invented, so shouting at support will not shift it. And the contact address on the domain must be a mailbox you can genuinely read, not the one you are in the middle of switching off. Approvals arrive at that address and nowhere else, and a mailbox that has already been closed simply swallows them.
A sane order of play
- Inventory the account and every renewal date on it.
- Build the new mailboxes and copy the mail into them, with nothing switched over yet.
- Rebuild the aliases and forwarders on the new side from your written list.
- Get the website working on the new server and check it properly while the public still sees the old one.
- Change the records, mail and web, then send yourself a test message from an address outside the company.
- Wait a fortnight. Then transfer the domain, then cancel, in that order.
In fairness to GoDaddy
They are one of the largest providers in the world and for a lot of people they are perfectly fine. Domains renew, the panel does what it says, and if your website is a handful of pages that never change, you may never need anything they do not offer.
The reasons people ring us are structural rather than scandalous. Renewal prices are not the same as the price on the way in, which is worth reading properly at sign-up rather than discovering later. The rest is arithmetic. A company serving that many accounts has to answer them through a process, so help arrives in a standard shape rather than from somebody who already has your site open in front of them. That is how anything works at that size. None of it matters while the website is a brochure. It matters the first time it goes down in the middle of a working day.
Leaving GoDaddy FAQs
Will I lose my emails if I leave GoDaddy?
Not if you copy them before anything is switched. Mail already delivered sits in the old mailbox and stays there, so it has to be copied across over IMAP into the new one while both accounts are still live and paid for. Keep the old mailboxes running for a month after the move, and never delete a mailbox to save a few pounds.
Can I move my website off GoDaddy but keep the domain there?
Yes, and it is a normal thing to do. The domain registration and the hosting are separate products, so you can point the domain at a new server and leave the registration exactly where it is. We usually suggest bringing the domain across eventually anyway, simply because one login is easier to deal with in a hurry than three.
How do I get my GoDaddy transfer code?
Find the domain in your account, take the transfer lock off, and request the authorisation code from its settings. It may be labelled an EPP code or a transfer code. That code goes to your new registrar, you approve the confirmation message, and the transfer completes. A .uk domain does not use a code at all and moves by a different method.
Can a GoDaddy website builder site be moved to another host?
Not as files, no. Sites built in a hosted website builder are assembled by that company’s software rather than stored as something you can download and run elsewhere, which is true of every builder of that kind. You keep the text, the images and the domain, and the site is rebuilt on the new platform.
What it looks like when we do it
You send us the domain and the logins, and we do the lot. We do not charge hosting customers for moving in, mailboxes included, and we would rather copy the mail ourselves than talk you through it over the phone. Fully managed UK hosting starts at £1 a day + VAT, and if it goes sideways on a Sunday you get Olly, not a queue position.
If you want the mail kept on separate infrastructure from the website, so that trouble with one cannot silence the other, ask and we will build it that way. There is more on how that works on our email hosting page, and the hosting itself is set out on best web hosting.
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