Anyone transferred a domain to IONOS… having issues?

I’m helping a friend move his site to IONOS (his choice of host). He’s no longer working with the person who managed his site before, maybe because of costs.

The person handling it set the IPS tags to IONOS since it’s a .co.uk domain, so no transfer code was needed.

I went to IONOS and used their ‘transfer a domain to IONOS’ feature, but I got this error:

"Your desired domains cannot be transferred

uk.co.uk is invalid

This top-level domain (TLD) is currently not offered."

I’m positive I entered the correct domain, but it won’t go through. Anyone here know what I’m missing? I’ve only done a domain transfer once before, and it was a .org with an auth code.

Did you reach out to IONOS support? What did they say?

If they’re not helpful, there are plenty of solid .uk registrars you can try. Porkbun, for example, is a good alternative.

Prescott said:
Did you reach out to IONOS support? What did they say?

If they’re not helpful, there are plenty of solid .uk registrars you can try. Porkbun, for example, is a good alternative.

Not yet. I thought this would be simple, but then ran into this issue. I figured someone here might have dealt with the same problem before I contact support.

I’ll try reaching out to them tomorrow if I don’t find a solution here.

@Abby
Yeah, I had a similar issue before. For some reason, it only worked when they handled it from their end.

Make sure you’re on the UK version of the IONOS site, not the US one.

Here’s the link to the UK page: https://www.ionos.co.uk/domains/uk-domain

The error says: “This top-level domain (TLD) is currently not offered.” Are you sure you’re entering the correct domain? A uk.co.uk extension doesn’t exist.

If you’re sure and it’s still not working, you can try contacting Nominet to transfer the domain. They should be able to help.

@Andrew
I entered the domain as .co.uk, so I have no idea why the extra ‘uk’ shows up. I triple-checked everything.

I guess support is my next step. Let’s see what they say.

Why would you want a uk.co.uk anyway? Isn’t .co.uk enough for a UK domain? Is the domain you want not available?

Brad said:
Why would you want a uk.co.uk anyway? Isn’t .co.uk enough for a UK domain? Is the domain you want not available?

I’m not entering uk.co.uk. My domain is just MySite.co.uk, and it ends up formatted like this:

https://MySite.co.uk/

But it still gives me the ‘uk.co.uk not supported’ error.

I’m completely sure it’s not me adding the extra UK. After the first error, I double-checked everything. This has to be some weird system error.

@Abby
Looks like you’re going to need to contact support and have them look into it.

Brad said:
@Abby
Looks like you’re going to need to contact support and have them look into it.

Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I just hoped someone else had dealt with this before so I could skip calling them. Plus, I’m not the account holder, so I’ll probably have to jump through some hoops to get them to fix it.

@Abby
Can you be with the account holder when you call?

Brad said:
@Abby
Can you be with the account holder when you call?

Maybe, but we’re both pretty busy with our stuff. We’ll find a time to do it though.

Abby said:

Brad said:
@Abby
Can you be with the account holder when you call?

Maybe, but we’re both pretty busy with our stuff. We’ll find a time to do it though.

You just need 5 minutes together to get it done. Or, if you’re feeling brave, you could pretend to be him. I’ve done it before for things like this, and it worked fine.