Under normal circumstances, yes, this is not a hard task.  I've done it several times and there is no big deal about it...unless you've opened an account with Yahoo Small Business!

The Backdrop of This Story...

In 2004, this was one of the leading hosting companies.  It was endorsed by AOL, and at that time, I had never heard of GoDaddy or HostGator.  Not sure if they even existed then.  It had a good rap and people loved it.

In 2007 I met John, my landlord and best friend.  He had a website up for his hypnotherapy practice and showed it to me.  It was a one-page "starter" website available for customers.  I had told John about my experiences learning how to build web pages.  He wanted more than the one page there.  I quickly found out that what he had is what he would be getting...unless he would dish out more money.  By this time I was not very impressed with Yahoo (or AOL, which I had dropped.)  I told him about ValueWeb (today, Hostway.)  We had no problems moving the DNS from Yahoo servers to ValueWeb.

In 2009, ValueWeb changed its name to Hostway...and everything went downhill.  We had problems with them but managed to get by. By this time I had been introduced to GoDaddy and HostGator.  I put my own first website up, and then another.  It all went smoothly...as we know with these two companies.

September 22, 2011:  John, We Need to Get Rid of Hostway

Today, Hostway is inferior to many hosting companies in that for what HostGator offers, one must pay extra for at Hostway. The biggest clincher is that Linux-based hosting comes at an added cost.  It is not possible to access MySQL, nor is there anything in its place in a Windows-based platform that our account is in

It does not support WordPress installations as it is now.  It costs more to have this.  John has been paying through the nose being in both Yahoo Small Business and Hostway, so "Okay John, let's fix this problem and get rid of the charges you are paying...oh, the nightmare that has been awaiting...

This began one of the worst run-arounds I've ever been on!

October 5th, 2011:  Let the Fun Begin!  Change DNS settings from Hostway to Hostgator

It took a while to figure out that we could not change the DNS settings from Hostway's interface.  I did this on the 2nd, I believe it was, and then waited.  Nothing happened.  On the 5th, nothing happened.

I called tech support.  Found out that this wasn't supported through them and I had to go to the domain registrar to do this.  It took awhile to find out that I had to go through Yahoo Small Business as this is where tie domain was...still.  I had thought that Yahoo Small Business was history a long time ago...and found out that we have been paying for domain registration AND hosting.  (John just kept paying it)

Went to the DNS page in the back office there (after struggling to find the login information) to find that we were not authorized to make these changes.  Went to tech support, which said that what we were trying to do was not supported and that we had to go to MelbourneIT...the domain registrar in Australia.  After waiting for 25 minutes at $4/minute, we were promptly told that we had to go to Yahoo Small Business to do this.

Come to find out, our control panel is broken and now it dawns on them that we do have an account there.  Okay, in 15 minutes, we will be able to do what we want to do.  That was a WEEK ago!

They reset the account and it went into "pending" mode, meaning, it had to propagate across the Internet like it was a new account.  After three days, it still said "pending."

When in pending mode, the DNS settings are unavailable.  When this wasn't clearing up after three days, began the hours and hours of calls, arguing with them that we DON'T have to go to MelbourneIT to do this.  They kept saying that what I'm trying to do is unsupported.  We have been told this about eight times.

What a run-around!  We were bounced from department to department.  We were sent to Verizon, of all places!  We were sent to their television repair department, telephone repair department, and finally to "Premium Tech Support" which John had to pay for.  When we got in there, we were promptly told, "We don't support DNS issues and here's the number you need.  It was different so we went along.

One tech had to audacity to ask us why we were changing from one hosting provider to another and wanted to know the details, to which I told him that I need to change the DNS settings, not disclose why we are changing servers.

Another tech (joke) had no idea what Hostway or HostGator were and I asked him if he knew what a server is, to which he stalled and had to think before he finally said, "Yes!"  This is no lie!

That number led to a menu, and one of them was something like we needed, so I followed it...only to find a recording telling me to go to help.yahoo.com...and there will be the answer.  Skeptical about this, I went to the help.  As expected, there wasn't anything helpful there.

Oh, there was one thing..."pending."  I followed it...been here already...

Two Days Ago:  John, We Need to Change Our Strategies Here...

Called back.  This time, "Okay, we need to place our domain with another registrar because this is a big joke!"  The tech wanted to know what was going on, and I gave him this mounting story.  Straight way, he noticed that we had the DNS pointing to Hostway, and the settings needed to be set to default in order to gain full functionality of the interface we were trying to use... So, here we are, back on Yahoo's servers.  This way we would be able to change the the DNS settings ourselves.  It sounded like we were finally getting on track!  YaaaaHoooooo!

All this worked except that now we are somewhere in limbo, we are getting "No Server Found" and it's back in "Pending" status again.  We are going on the third day now and this has not changed.

I called tech support again, only to find, all the sudden, that we can't proceed any further because John needs the credit card number he used to open the account with 5 YEARS AGO!  He has changed his credit card number about four or five times since.

All they can say is, "Sorry,  We must have that information before we can do anything to help you."  There is no work around.  We can't even close out the account and abandon the domain unless we just not pay anymore.

Yes!  They did find a work-around...security question...

He brings it up.  Here's the question, "A?"  That's it!  The answer?  Who the heck knows!  Seems during this ordeal I ran into this and didn't pay any attention to it.

We've had this domain since 2007 and it's too intermingled with the Internet for us to just drop it and start over.

Thinking of Yahoo for Your Domain and Hosting????????

Don't!