So, you think that “A Bucket of Chicken” is not a good name for your company because abucketofchicken.com is taken, well the answer is that it’s actually pretty easy in the modern world to change the name of your company, here are the steps:
- I won’t cover the legal stuff in much depth, but basically, you have to change your name where you’ve registered your company, in Delaware, this means basically a board resolution and then forms to the IRS and other tax authorities.
- Change it with banks and others. This is a detail, but typically, this requires more forms with your bank to get this done. Not hard but it takes time.
Add your new domain names to Namecheap, Netlify, and Google Workspace
- Make sure you have registrations for your new name at your registrar. Namecheap is typically what we use for this. If you are on AWS for instance, then you can use their registration service.
- Now you need to have a DNS for this as well. This is usually not the same as your registrar. If you use Netlify, they provide free domain services which is kind of nice of them. Once you use their domains, you have to go back to your registrar and tell it what those DNS servers are. But you login to Netlify > Domains > Add or register domain
- You can also use Route 53 for this on Amazon. If you are using Route 53, then go to your AWS console, select Route 53 > Hosted Zones, and pick the hostname, then you just need to change your A records to point to the correct AWS instance. Note in the A records, you can also choose to make it an alias to another A record so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself.
- If you are using Google Suite, then you need to add the MX records that it likes so that you can route mail. These are a set of records. If signed up before April 2023 to Google Workspace, then the records you need are with priorities 1, 5, 5, 10, and 10 respectively and the MX names are aspmx.l.google.com, the alt{1..4}.aspmx.l.google.com. This is a big pain creating five records, so if you signed up after April 2023, you only need to add one record which is
smtp.google.comwhich is way easier. - Finally, go to your Google Workspace Admin console and choose Manage Domains. you will now add a secondary domain and it will verify that it works by looking for those MX records. I find that with new domains it is pretty instant, but if you’ve had the domain for a while it can take days for the verification to word
Switch your Primary Domain, Change User and Group Emails
Finally, you are ready to make the big move, go to Domain Management and click to the right of the new domain, click on “Change primary domain, this will cause the account name to change:
- Once this is done, go to Admin > Directory > Users, go to each of the users choose Update User, and then change the primary email to the new name. This will automatically cause the il to the new name. This will automatically cause the old email to become a secondary email so you will still get the email from the old address.
- Note that the reason we are making this a secondary domain is that the other option which is an add-on domain, you can’t switch back easily, so its a pain, but you want to have all your domains work as primaries. It does mean that you don’t automatically get aliases for all of them, but it makes it easy to change things.
Change your AWS Account Alias, Netlify, and other logins
OK now comes the laborious part of changing the many systems that are using your company name, some examples: a
- AWS has a cool Account Alias feature when you log in, you don’t have to use your really long Account Number if you go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam, then you go to Dashboard > AWS Accounts > Account Alias and you can Edit or Create it, this means your applications live at abucketofchicken.awsapps.com which is nice.
- Change your AWS access portal URL. This is different from the account Alias, go to the AWS Access > IAM Identity Center > Dashboard > AWS Access Port > Customize but the documentation seems broken, I can’t find the cus
- Change your Namecheap login, so log in and go to Profile > Edit Primary Email. You will have to login again to Gmail because you change the name, but you should see a profile notification
