What happens to my DNS if I leave
Your domains and their zones are yours. Leaving is a matter of pointing them somewhere else, and nothing has to be recreated from memory if you take a copy of the zone before you go.
What you should take with you
Export each zone before changing anything. A zone file lists every record: the site addresses, mail routing, verification records for third party services, and anything added over the years that nobody remembers adding.
That last category is the reason to export rather than rebuild. Estates accumulate records for services that are still in use, and the fastest way to break one is to recreate a zone from what you think is in it.
The order that avoids an outage
- Export the zones.
- Lower the TTL on the records you will change, a day or two ahead.
- Build the zones at the new provider and confirm they answer correctly when queried directly.
- Change the nameservers at the registrar.
- Leave the old zones in place for a few days while caches expire.
Step five is the one people skip. Deleting the old zone the moment you switch means anyone still holding a cached delegation gets nothing at all rather than the old answer.
If you used private nameservers
Nameservers running on ns1.yourdomain.com are hostnames pointing at addresses here, registered as glue at your registrar. Moving away means repointing or removing that glue, and until you do, those names still resolve to addresses that are no longer yours.
Deal with the glue records deliberately as part of the move, not afterwards. How they work is described in creating private nameservers.
Addresses do not come with you
The IP addresses assigned to your accounts belong to the network they are routed on. They stay when you leave and may later be used by someone else. Any record pointing at one of them must be updated, and anything you documented as a fixed address has to be revisited.
This is worth knowing before building anything that depends on an address staying constant, such as a firewall allow list on a third party service.
Domain registrations are separate
If a domain is registered elsewhere, leaving hosting does not touch it. If it is registered with us, it can be transferred out with an authorisation code like any other domain, and the registration itself is unaffected by the hosting account closing.
Keeping a current record of which domain sits where is what makes any of this quick rather than archaeological, which is the practice described in documenting your estate.
Still not sure which way to go?
Tell us what you are building. If it needs less than you think, we will say so.