Registrar Problem Solved

After two days of frantic emails to my webhosts (past and present), maddogmovies.com is back online.

The problem comes down to that strange and powerful entity, the registrar. The name itself conjures an image of a great and powerful potentate, a minister at the head of a vast empire who has absolute control over its citizens.

People who are new to setting up websites don’t always realize that reserving a domain name and securing webhosting are two different things. Often I’ll have a client who wants me to build them a site, and they’ve already reserved their domain through a registrar like Network Solutions, GoDaddy or some place I’ve never heard of. This usually makes things difficult for me, because I need to figure out how to log in and change their nameserver set-up. I’d much rather sign someone up for a domain name through a webhost and let the host take care of the registrar mumbo jumbo.

That’s why I had Cyberpixels handle both for me last year. They deal with the Enom.com for registrar services, but that didn’t concern me. When Cyberpixels’ hosting started sucking big time, I FTP’d my files over to Hostgator. To get the domain name associated with a new IP address, I had to log in to Enom (for the first time) and redirect the nameservers.

I realized a couple weeks ago that Enom charges 30 dollars for domain renewal. (Which comes to 60 dollars when you include my alternate domain, mikeboas.com.) Since I’d rather have my registrar and webhost billing tied in together, I tried to have the domain transferred to Hostgator’s registrar service, which would cost 15. I’d probably still have to pay another 10 for the renewal, but still come out ahead at 25 per domain.

Unfortunately, it takes seven days for this to take hold, and I didn’t make the request to Hostgator until a few days before maddogmovies.com was set to expire.

So the domain expired, and I was in no man’s land.

I couldn’t login to Enom to renew, because they had no record of my domain for some reason. Hostgator couldn’t help, because they never gained control. And would Cyberpixels help me if I didn’t even have an account there anymore?

Well, they did. The new staff at Cyberpixels was extremely helpful. (Kinda makes me wonder if their hosting services have improved, too.) It only cost 10 bucks, and I’m set for the next year. It should automatically renew, too.

Now the question is, should I bother moving mikeboas.com, which expires in a few weeks?