Domain Names Migration to Porkbun
Last week, I transferred my domains from Squarespace to PorkBun. All 12 of them!
Squarespace Billing Nuisance
I was frustrated with the billing page on Squarespace. Their auto-payments didn't work. This was a major risk as I could lose my domains. Part of it was because of RBI regulation in India. But more frustrating part was jumping between the pages finding the "retry" link.
Squarespace doesn't have a single billing page for all your domains. They have a weird concept of "independent billing subscriptions". Each domain has a separate portal for payment. There is no way to see all the billings and pending payments at a single place. You are just one mistake away from losing your whole website built over the years.
Screwing up the transfer
I selected bulk transfer on Porkbun and pasted all my domain names. I initiated their transfer without copying in the DNS records. I just assumed the DNS records are imported.
Domain transfers import only the NS (nameservers) records. Post-transfer, the domains continue to point to same nameservers as earlier. This is okay if we use a third-party tool to manage nameservers, such as CloudFlare. But in most cases, we add DNS records on the domain registrars website only.
Porkbun also didn't show any warnings or caution around this. May be because I was on "bulk" transfer page.
Porkbun has a detailed easy-to-follow guide on transferring domains with little or no downtime. I wish I knew this before initiating the transfer.
Once we initiate the transfer, we cannot change the nameservers on the previous register or the new registrar until the transfer completes.
As soon as I realised my mistake, I wrote to Squarespace to stop the transfer. Squarespace sends a confirmation email after the transfers are initiated. The emails contain a link to stop transfer if needed. I received these emails only for .com domains and not for other TLDs including screener.in. Squarespace's 24x7 support didn't respond even after 5 days. The transfer completed with the old nameservers in this time.
Porkbun's Responsive Support
I was in panic. I didn't want the downtime. I also emailed Porkbun for help. Surprisingly, I received very good responses from them, each time within few hours. No canned responses. No lengthy general guides. Their support team actually understood the issue and replied accordingly.
Though they couldn't do anything as they had no control, they were at least transparent and communicative. They told about WhatsMyDNS to check DNS propagation status. They also linked to guides to update NS records in one click after the transfer. Their website was also much more simpler to use.
There was a downtime ranging from 30 minutes to 4 hours. We got 80% traffic back after 90 minutes.