Forum Discussion
Transferring Office 365 hosted by GoDaddy to Office 365 hosted by Microsoft
How do I transfer my domain from my old Office 365 account hosted by GoDaddy to a new Office 365 hosted by Microsoft? Everytime I try to setup the new Office 365 I get following errormessage:
"domain.at" has already been added to another Office 365 mandate (Netorgft123456.onmicrosoft.com) managed by GoDaddy. To add this domain to this tenant, you must contact GoDaddy support and have the domain removed from Netorgft123456.onmicrosoft.com. After this is done, you can come back and continue this step.
GoDaddy isnt verry supportive so I try to seek help here :=)
20 Replies
Hey,
No need to migrate from one tenant to another—we can actually do something much better: it’s called Defederation.
Defederation allows us to remove GoDaddy’s control over the tenant and bring it fully under Microsoft’s management without changing accounts, data, or emails. Here’s how it works:
GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 – Defederation Overview
- Disconnect GoDaddy
- Access the hidden Microsoft admin panel
- Remove GoDaddy’s federation and regain control
- Assign Microsoft Licenses
- Purchase new licenses directly from Microsoft (GoDaddy licenses can't be transferred)
- Use shared mailboxes where possible to optimize cost
- Update, Secure & Adapt - Reset all user passwords
- Update DNS to Microsoft for better email security
- Change SharePoint URL to a new, Microsoft-managed domain (optional but recommended)
-Verify & Finalize
- Seamless transition with zero downtime
- Full access to Microsoft 365 admin features, security tools, and no GoDaddy restrictions
Result: Native Microsoft 365 tenant with full control and better long-term scalability.
Let me know if you'd like to proceed—I’ve helped many businesses through this exact process smoothly.
Best,
Ahmed Masoud
Thanks for the post - I will try this next time ... but want to keep the domains with GoDaddy. Your suggestion for "Defederation" or "Federation" is interesting, but I can't much about this from Microsoft 365 support articles about this. How exactly do we disconnect GoDaddy ... can you show us the steps, print screens, or is something we need to ask GoDaddy to do for us?
- How do we Access the hidden Microsoft admin panel?
- How do we Remove GoDaddy’s federation and regain control?
Thanks for the great question!
You're absolutely right—Microsoft’s official documentation doesn't clearly explain how to defederate from GoDaddy, which is why it’s been such a common pain point for many users.
The good news is:
👉 You don’t need to contact GoDaddy, and
👉 You can keep your domain registered with them—we’re just removing their control over your Microsoft 365 tenant (that’s the key part).
To answer your questions briefly:
🔐 Accessing the hidden Microsoft admin panel
- Go to https://portal.azure.com
- Sign in with your admin account (you’ll likely need the original email address removed for privacy reasons account)
- From there, you’ll gain access to Azure Active Directory and can reset the password for the true Global Admin
🧩 How to remove GoDaddy’s federation:
- You’ll use Microsoft Graph PowerShell to change the domain authentication from Federated to Managed
- This allows you to bypass GoDaddy’s redirection and fully manage your Microsoft 365 tenant
I’ve written a step-by-step guide (with PowerShell examples) and all the details you need to do this safely in my latest blog post here:
👉 Break Free from GoDaddy – The Smarter Way
Let me know if you want a quick visual walkthrough or need help running the commands—I offer 1:1 support for this as well if you prefer to have it handled professionally.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Ahmed Masoud
how to complete the following stepes :
GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 – Defederation Overview
- Disconnect GoDaddy
- Access the hidden Microsoft admin panel
- Remove GoDaddy’s federation and regain control
Thanks for the great question!
You're absolutely right—Microsoft’s official documentation doesn't clearly explain how to defederate from GoDaddy, which is why it’s been such a common pain point for many users.
The good news is:
👉 You don’t need to contact GoDaddy, and
👉 You can keep your domain registered with them—we’re just removing their control over your Microsoft 365 tenant (that’s the key part).
To answer your questions briefly:
🔐 Accessing the hidden Microsoft admin panel
- Go to https://portal.azure.com
- Sign in with your admin account (you’ll likely need the original email address removed for privacy reasons account)
- From there, you’ll gain access to Azure Active Directory and can reset the password for the true Global Admin
🧩 How to remove GoDaddy’s federation:
- You’ll use Microsoft Graph PowerShell to change the domain authentication from Federated to Managed
- This allows you to bypass GoDaddy’s redirection and fully manage your Microsoft 365 tenant
I’ve written a step-by-step guide (with PowerShell examples) and all the details you need to do this safely in my latest blog post here:
👉 Break Free from GoDaddy – The Smarter Way
Let me know if you want a quick visual walkthrough or need help running the commands—I offer 1:1 support for this as well if you prefer to have it handled professionally.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Ahmed Masoud
I can't believe Microsoft allows GoDaddy to use Microsoft's name on services that are not actually Microsoft ... the GoDaddy versions are nothing compared to what we get when with Microsoft directly where it costs the same or less?!! MUCH LESS as GoDaddy changes for years ahead and won't refund.
We called GoDaddy and had domain released from their MS 365 and they said we can add it to our new account after 24 hours ... and 2 days later we are still waiting for it to be released - now 2 days without emails !!! We called GoDaddy back and now they say it will be released in 90 minutes !!?
We also opened a support ticket with Microsoft and escalated as there is no way we need to wait for GoDaddy to release anything when we can validate we own the domain.
Migration from office 365 Hosted by GoDaddy to Direct Microsoft can be a time-consuming process.
1) Take back up of data (exchange mailboxes, OneDrive and SharePoint etc.)
2) Contact GoDaddy to defederate the domain. (Remember, GoDaddy doesn't retain any data once the domain is defederated so it good to have a backup in advance).
3) Add the domain in New Microsoft hosted tenant
4) Create users and upload the backupThe straightforward way is to contact Microsoft support directly since they can handle it from the back
- Nop, if you contact Microsoft support, they'll advise to contact a Microsoft Partner or do it by yourself following the steps explained above.
- Hi Emeraldo,
I have done several migrations from GoDaddy to Office 365 in the past. The way that GoDaddy’s control panel is deeply integrated with Office 365 tenants for their customers make it almost impossible to remove the domain without GoDaddy’s support as well as do advanced admin actions you would usually do when managing 365.
If you have a different solution currently and not actively using Office 365 with Godaddy just raise a support call and ask them to strip the custom domain out of the office 365 tenant and cancel any associated Office 365 service. After you can set up in the new tenant and change DNS when required.
If you are migrating from their Office 365 and are actually using their service my recommendation is to set up the new 365 environment on the name.onmicrosoft.com domain, get a copy of the data via PST or migrate it with something like BitTitan, arrange a call with them and get an agreed time to remove the domain, remove services and cancel the subscription so you can coordinate the setup, DNS changes and reimport of the data. There will be an outage during this scenario but you can workaround this by setting up a server to queue the mail if you know how to do this.
Hope that helps,
Best, Chris- Chris:
Can you help me think through this one?
1. Domain is with GoDaddy
2. When did the domain, of course made the mistake to do the office365 there too.
3. Web hosting is with a different provider...that email is hosted with too.
4. People log in to email with the hosting provider... with their @ABC.com email account
5. Other services that GoDaddy didn't give use (business central, visio, azure, etc), users login with @abc.onmicrosoft.com account
So ... how specifically do we deal with this one? Everyone seems to be scratching their heads?
I think what I need to do is:
A. Move the web and email hosting back to go daddy and get rid of the third party involved.
B. Subscribe to Office 365 through the Azure account logged in as .onmicrosoft.com account
C. Download all files and such from Teams (that are at GoDaddy)
D. Download all emails (that are at GoDaddy)
E. Download files from OneDrive (that are at GoDaddy)
F. Cancel the Office365 from GoDaddy...
F. Move/Transfer the core domain from GoDaddy to MS and associate into the current (.onmicrosoft.com) account
G. Change the primary domain to ABC.com instead of ABC.onmicrosoft.com [or is this step even needed]
The goal is to get everything into the current .onmicrosoft.com Azure account/tenant, users then could use their ABC.com account to get their email and sign in to all of the applications and services at that point (email, business central, visio, etc). I need to make sure we do not lose email access for more than a day or few hours through this process....
Thoughts???ROWENS15 I've been trying to solve this for two years, last October we became Microsoft partners and it's been a pain accessing admin panels, the power platform, Viva etc.
I can't tell you how many support tickets and video recordings I have submitted, I've been in a ping-pong match with Microsoft and GoDaddy. I don't understand how Microsoft allows this to happen, I'm pretty sure we're paying double for certain products.
If anyone has guidance please share :sos_button:
This is not a support forum though, and we can only assist you with advice. You can always try to open a support case with "regular" O365 if the GoDaddy folks are giving you trouble, but at the end the domain needs to be released on their side.
