When I registered david-s.net four years ago, VeriSign had just swallowed up Network Solutions and was one of the only registrars for domain names, so I decided to plunk down the $30 or so and make my little home on the internet. Every year, November 16th rolls around and its the big decision, do I really want to keep my domain for another year? If so, is it worth it to stay at VeriSign/Network Solutions? For the past 3 years, the answers were yes and yes (because I’m lazy).
This year, I decided that it was time to switch away from the evil dictator of registrars, and move elsewhere. That somewhere ended up being Go Daddy for two main reasons, its cheap and easy. I signed up for my new registrar on November 1st, put in my info, set my domain to transfer and thought I was on my way to freedom.
I thought it would be easy, but Network Solutions had to try and make it as difficult as possible. I check my email and I get a message “Domain Transfer Failed - Status Not Valid”. Hmm, I’ll just login to my Network Solutions try to unlock my domain so that I can transfer it over. I look around the control panel and there is no information to be found about transferring your domain to another registrar. Oh, they’ll tell you how to transfer your other domains to NetSol, but they won’t tell you how to turn off the lock. I checked the “DomainProtect” feature, and its turned off. Check the whois, see REGISTRAR-LOCK. I figure maybe it takes a day, so I wait and reinitiate the transfer two days later. No go. I don’t have time for this, so instead I go play paintball (looks like they need some help with a little XSLT) with people from work and take out my domain frustrations by shooting each other. Monday rolls around and I’m at home for a quick lunch, so I decide to call up NetSol. It only takes 3 menus and I got to speak to a real live human being (not bad). I tell him I want to unlock my domain so I can transfer it. He says ok, looks around, flips a switch and says the status should. Check the whois, still see REGISTRAR-LOCK. Give it some more time. (DNS changes take less time to propagate.) Tuesday comes along, lunch time again, call up NetSol, ask them to flip the switch again, this time for real. Guy says ok, should be set. Check whois, ACTIVE. Woo hoo!! I thank the tech support guy, and he asks why I’m leaving NetSol, maybe because I figure the world’s largest registrar would let me flip my own switches rather than have to hunt down tech support to make them do it for me. Sorry, but I’m glad you’re no longer the gatekeeper of top level domains. Welcome to something called competition. Re-re-re-initiate transfer. Fill in a couple forms, say sayonara to NetSol and konichiwa Go Daddy.
The new ICANN policy on registrar transfers takes effect today (November 12), to which Kottke over-reacts, but then corrects himself. This policy is actually meant to help out all of the poor souls who have sold themselves to the NetSol devil. Anyways, I have my new registrar and the world is at peace, correct?
No, things are never that easy. While I was busy at work the past few days, it looks like my host, bloghosts, decided to take a nose dive. Now they aren’t completely dead (you’re probably reading this off of their server right now), but its time to find a new host. In the 5 months I hosted my site with them, I was very satisfied. No longer did I have to worry about DNS, Apache, PHP, mySQL, Postfix, or anything else. All of that customer satisfaction went right down the drain. No advance notice, no email, not even a post on their RSS feed (and they called themselves bloghosts)!
I did some quick research, and decided to splurge a little to go with TextDrive. Why TextDrive? Take a look at the specs for one. I’ll have a lot more storage space to move my pictures back, shell access to a nice FreeBSD server to play around on, Subversion, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, and hack away on WordPress. Plus its run by a good group of people. Now I’m just waiting for the DNS to transfer, so if I disappear, I should be back in a bit.
This is going to be my last post from bloghosts. I’ll let you know once I’m up and running on TextDrive.
The answer to the question is only a click away (or /usr/bin/whois david-s.net if you’re so inclined).