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My Kidnapping Experience
Margaret under Technology
You may have noticed that my site was down all day yesterday and most of today.
There’s a story about that (you KNEW there would be, didn’t you?). My domain name was kidnapped and held for ransome.
Yep -that’s what happened…
This blog used to be hosted at wordpress.com but about a year and a half ago, I started writing some paid posts for a company and wordpress suspended my blog (no notice, no opportunity to retrieve my intellectually owned data, nothing just no access period and no response to any attempts at “making it right” — let that be your warning if your blog is hosted on a free blog host such as wordpress.com or blogger — your blog is NOT your own!). Anyway, the company I was blogging for purchased the domain and secured some hosting for a year. When that year was up, I was to take over the financial responsibility for the renewal of name and host.
Well, when the time came, I decided to move hosting and the package I paid for included a domain renewal fee. The company I worked for advised me when the domain renewal notice came up and I fired off a note to my host reminding them that I had paid the fee to renew and to make sure it was done. The support ticket was closed with no response from them and I assumed the matter was taken care of. No, the matter was NOT taken care of and so, my domain name expired.
When I contacted my host and asked about this issue, they told me that the company that the domain name was originally purchased from would not allow them to renew the name and claimed to have let me know that (well, NO you didn’t let me know that!). By then, the site had been down some 12 hours.
I contacted the company who held the domain name and was told that it was in “redemption” and that it would cost me $70 to reclaim it PLUS the $10 to renew for a year. That’s where the kidnapping and ransom comes in.
Because I had “allowed” the domain to expire and because it’s an active domain with updated content and indexed and valued, I had to pay this exorbitant fee to get it reinstated in my name.
To add insult to injury, they changed the dns to point back to their servers, so the site was down an additional 14 hours to the 24 it was down over the domain name thing. The only way I found this out, was to keep pinging the whois service to see the status of my site. When it showed the dns servers being the old host, I knew the site would never come up if I wasn’t adamant about getting everything back the way it should be in order for the domain to propagate.
It took 8 phone calls and countless emails between myself and the two hosting companies to get this issue resolved, so let this be a lesson for you — just like with your car insurance, renew your domain name ON TIME. Bug the dickens out of them until the job gets done right. Don’t ASSUME anything ANYBODY tells you.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
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