Here’s the scoop. Our company has its web server and e-mail server hosted by some external company. Unfortunately, we’ve been very dissatisfied with them, since the e-mail server keeps going down several times a week.
Our sysad is preparing a new internal web server and e-mail server for us. However, he’s not sure how we should go about getting the domain name transferred. We’re naturally reluctant to ask our service provider. We’re not sure how cooperative they’ll be, and we can’t afford any interruptions in our service.
I don’t deal with this stuff often, but I’d say your first step is to find out who the domain is registered with, and who did the registering.
If it belongs to your company, just contact the registrar, get it transferred, and drop your lame service provider. If you (like some unfortunates) paid the service provider to do everything for you, there’s a chance your domain name is registered to them, in which case you’re kinda at their mercy.
Type your domain name in to whois.net for a start.
if you’re using POP (i.e. not IMAP) and you don’t have a huge install base, you should consider adding the new server first, setting up each of the clients to check for email at it in addition to it’s current check, then change the DNS info, wait a couple days for it to percolate through the internet, then shutdown the old email service, and finally remove the check on each of the desktops.