You know, I love the internet for the most part. Information at your fingertips, satellite pics of your house in seconds, news almost as it happens, hour by hour weather, and idiots.
I have been here working on the net since 2008, and I have learned and changed a lot during that time. Lately, I think I have grown complacent with internet as the rest of the world has. My kids don’t remember a time without the internet. They have somewhat of a hard time going without it on vacation. I have posted before about what good it does the family to just unplug and get away from the screens. My 4 1/2 year old is dying to go fishing and camping. He loves the outdoors.
So this brings me to my point, some internet providers and domain registrars suck. Big huge deep sucking holes of darkness. The first of these I had issues with was justhost. Don’t go there, do get a site from them even though they are cheap. They will drain the soul out of you after they cancel your domain name. I had one of their packages with justinsbrainpan.com registered with them. All fine, until I outgrew the service tier and decided to go to a decent provider at hostgator.com. (you can go there). The problem was my domain was registered with justhost, and they didn’t tell me that I couldn’t use it after I didn’t have their service anymore. so I lost justinsbrainpan.com and ended up with catharsisofthebogue.com, that I registered independently with 1and1.com. don’t go there either.
Recently, 1 and 1 internet and I have been in some fun battles for my domains. There was apparently an issue with billing on my account, and they decided to cancel my account, making my sites go down as they expired. First was Ameliasmakeawish.com, followed by bkmnursing, and then catharsisofthebogue. Skip forward to a bunch of fighting, and I got most of my domains back active. Amelias make a wish and Catharsis of the bogue are gone. registered with some company in china and japan, that has nothing for content. But i am pissed. I have ported the sites to this one, catharsisofthebogue.com and Amelias is ameliasmakeawish2012.com.
But don’t for one minute think that I registered those new domains with 1 and 1. I have registered them with haylestorm.net/clients. Ok, I am biased as this is partly my site, one that I partner with Bob Hayles on, and we are now resellers of Enom domain registration. Not a bad deal either, $12.95 per year for most top level domains.
I digress. Now, I have a list of times that I am going to be transferring all of my domains away from 1 and 1 and then warning everyone to stay away from that company. The moral of the story is, watch your domains. If you are not the owner of your domain because it is free from your hosting company, do whatever you can to make sure you end up owning the domain. Then keep track of the billing and renew dates.
All in all, I guess it is ok to change domains. I did lose all of my page rank and alexa scores, and it is going to take time to build back up. So I am glad you are here reading. I did it once, I will do it again.
Thanks for reading, share the links like crazy!
-Justin
