We frequently take over the domain names of our clients when we take over the management of their site. Normally the transfer progress goes fine. However sometimes we have issues with DNS settings during the transfer progress as the transfer involves moving the DNS records to our registrars nameservers.
It seems to be that the outgoing registrar is deleting the DNS info from their nameservers before we have a chance to manage the domain through our registrar and setup the DNS info on our registrar's nameservers. This obviously leads to a few hours (potentially a couple of days) of downtime for users.
I am wondering if anyone else ever has this problem and if there is a way to avoid it. Is there some kind of a guideline for how long the outgoing registrars needs to keep the DNS info on their nameservers? Or how should we manage this process to never have this downtime occur. As I said this only happens sometimes - and it alawys seems to be with with .com/.net/.org domains but not with .uk domains (we are a UK based company).
We are having the same problem with a .com domain. It only seems to happen when you have domain and hosting in the old provider together in the same pack and when trasferring the domain the hosting is also turned down along with all DNS records. Not all providers behave that way.
I would get a new hosting and change DNS in the whois before ordering the domain transfer, being sure that the new hosting is working.
In our case the old registrar didn't allow us change the whois, so we took the chance and it failed. Once the mess is done, I suppose we can only wait.