Are You the Master of Your Domain?
Really. Are you? The master of your domain name, that is.
Are you in control of your domain name, or is your hosting provider calling the shots. I can best illustrate this issue by telling a little parable about…you.
Let’s say you signed up for hosting at AcmeBigFrackingHosting.com because they offered “FREE Domain Registration” With every hosting account.
Cool.
Now you have your web hosting and your domain name. You don’t know domain names from Adam’s knee-brace but you have one and you didn’t have to pay for it and now you have a website. But after a couple of months you notice the your site is kind of slow, and it takes 72 hour to get your support ticket answered.
Four months later, you’re fed up. You find a new hosting company. They are not huge but they reek of competence. Forum questions are answered in 10 minutes or less. Their online community is just a thriving, nurturing love fest with more How-Tos and Tutorials than you can shake a stick at. By all accounts their servers are fast, reliable and overflowing with cool software packages.
You submit a question about transferring your site and they respond in 5 min saying “Absolutely!”. You sign up; your site is active in 5 mins. Oh man! You could get used to this type of service! You receive your account info email from new hosting company with instructions for “pointing” your old domain name to your site at the new hosting company.
You need to change your “Authoritative Name Servers” for you domain to the servers that your new hosting company uses. This is the one thing they can’t do for you. They helped you transfer all your pages and database content. But since domain names are very important only the owner, administrative or technical contact for the domain is allowed to change the name servers. Hmmm. Okay. You got this far, how hard could it be?
With mild trepidation you go back to your old web host and look for a way of changing your “Authoritative name servers”.
But you find…nothing. Nada. Not a word to be found. Just that same #$%&@ “Free Domain Name” headline that sucked you in 6 months ago. You submit a ticket. They respond after 60 hours – unusually prompt – and say okay, they’ll do it.
A week later your domain is still not changed. You forum post, protesting. Nothing. Forum flame post. The silence is deafening.
You scream and yell and frighten the bejeezus out of your cat. You throw things and stick pins in little hosting company dolls. But you just wear yourself out eventually and end up reading about domain dispute procedure and ICAAN. Yep, that’ll take a few months at least.
Your stuck. You swallow hard and register another domain. All your traffic is gone with the other domain wherever that may be. And you begin the slow hard work of re-building traffic to your new domain address at your new hosting account.
After six months you have built your traffic back up and then some. And with the new hosting company’s support you have learned a lot more about domain names, DNS, and site building. Your wiser, more knowledgeable, and you just graduated from anger management class. All is good.
Then you receive a letter from your old hosting company. Remember them? It’s a bill. What? They just charged you $35 for renewing your old domain name. You read it 4 more times, but it still seems surreal. Or like a bad practical joke.
Your cat takes one look at you standing there with bill in hand, and quietly sneaks out of the room as your hands begin to shake uncontrollably.
