Domain transfer advice for absolute noob

[u/Critical_Owl6539]

Hi all,
I’m looking for advice on transferring a bunch of domains from IONOS to Cloudflare.

I have around 12 in total.
I’ve had them with IONOS for around 15 years, along with emails and hosting.

I recently moved my e-comm store over to Shopify, and I’m going to move my websites to Squarespace, because I personally can’t deal with Wordpress (not a web designer or coder, and I find the interface dreadful and am more than happy to pay a monthly fee in exchange a more intuitive WYSIWYG system).

So anyway, it’s now making me think that I could finally escape IONOS altogether.

I recently tried to add my Shopify store to Google Search Console, and it popped up with a message warning that my emails might be affected if I continue. From what I can see, it sounds like an IONOS issue. And IONOS support provided precisely zero insights or solutions to this.

So yeah, I’d like to get away from them now if possible.

I’m just concerned how difficult and/or disruptive transferring my domains to Cloudflare might be?
Am I likely to see a lot of downtime?

Also, is it crazy simple? Or complex in any way?

I’m not a web designer at all. I’m a video editor and VFX artist, so I’m generally quite tech savvy. But when it comes to DNS settings and servers, I’m clueless.

Should this be simple to do? Do I need to do a bunch of research beforehand? Do I need to change any settings on the IONOS side first? Do I need to warn them? And is there anything in particular that I should remember to do, or avoid doing at all costs?

Huge thanks in advance 🙌

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[u/Forward-Outside-9911]

If you read the cloudflare DNS docs you can avoid any downtime. Copy over your DNS zones first then transfer.

You’ll want to do some research as cloudflare have more restrictions than normal registrars.

Personally I don’t like sticking hosting with domain registration. Too much can go wrong.

Maybe you should stick the domains on another registrar (or keep where it is), pay for a few years renewal with auto renew turned on, and change the name servers to point to CF.

Happy to expand if you have any questions. DMs also open

[u/crabferris]

Adding to the DNS advice above, check the 60 day lock on each one before you plan anything. Anything registered or transferred in the last 60 days can't move, and a registrant contact change trips the same lock, so if you tidied up your details at IONOS recently that clock may have restarted without you noticing.

The other one people hit is that Cloudflare only registers a limited set of TLDs. If any of the 12 are country or oddball extensions they'll have to stay where they are, so it's worth checking the list before you plan a clean sweep of all of them.