G Suite supports changing your Primary domain … usually
If you’re unable to change your Primary domain – which can be enormously important for several use cases – you may have run into one of these limiting conditions.
Changing the primary domain is not supported if:
- G Suite accounts are in a free trial period
- G Suite accounts include the purchase of your domain
- G Suite accounts were purchased from Google Domains, Wix, Squarespace, or other website providers
- If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition
Who cares? (Besides us)
Well, let’s say you want to run a Google to Google migration. One company acquires another for example and they’re both leveraging G Suite.
A domain can not exist within two G Suite environments simultaneously – not as a Primary Domain, Secondary Domain, or Domain Alias. If it’s verified in one G Suite admin.google.com console, it cannot exist in another – period.
How do we migrate our newly acquired company into our G Suite environment without any downtime and with minimal disruption to the business?
Here’s the rundown:
- If we can’t move our domain between G Suite environments we cannot support mail flow in our new environment
- The only way to free up a Primary Domain is to Delete the G Suite environment entirely! AND then you can wait 24 hours for the domain to be available to add again. 2 deal killers in most circumstances
- HOWEVER, a Secondary Domain can be deleted and immediately added to https://admin.google.com/ac/domains within another G Suite environment.
- Not being able to switch our Primary Domain can be a serious issue – I’ve seen organizations delay these projects for over a year struggling with this challenge
Workarounds
The most brutal (and expensive) workaround we’ve seen is an IMAP migration to an on-premises IMAP server for 3 months and a deletion of the Primary G Suite environment to free up the domain for another G Suite instance. An enormous amount of metadata was sacrificed and critical services were unavailable for a full business quarter. That’s as bad as it gets. Thankfully, all types of service providers are being forced to know the basics of G Suite, so these extreme events are less frequent. If that’s the worst … what’s the best?
We can help you!
Your best bet is to work with a skilled team who specializes in this type of work. We’ve been dealing with these things for over a decade!
Google Apps Manager (GAM) is your best friend for this type of effort. For a sizable domain, we may have hundreds, thousands, or more records we want to update rapidly.
We are available to help as much or as little as you’d like. Thanks to our strategic partnership with Google, much of our expertise is available to you at no cost!
