Monday 20 February 2006 — This is almost 19 years old. Be careful.
It looks like my domain is back on the air for good. For about the last day, it looked like this:
In the end, the eNom.com support people were quite friendly and helpful. When I called during their business hours I always got a person in a minute or two, and they always moved the process along. To get the domain name up fastest, I renewed it with eNom, which costs three times as much as other registrars, but at least I’m online again.
My email wasn’t flowing all day either, but it seems to be coming in now, including all the messages that didn’t make it earlier, so I don’t think there was an interruption in the long run.
I learned some good lessons:
- Don’t assume that your service provider has your (or their) best interests in mind. For example, don’t assume they’ll send you a renewal notice.
- Don’t assume that a support ticket will result in a notification email when it has been updated. Poll on your own to see when something has happened if you really feel urgent about it.
- Don’t believe all the bad things you read online. Somewhere someone complained that eNom’s support phone always rang into voicemail. It doesn’t, but I didn’t call for most of Friday because I assumed it would be fruitless.
- Don’t register a domain with an email address at another registered domain. You end up with a house of cards falling onto your head. Use a yahoo.com or gmail.com address, so that you will always have it available for responding to registrars while the rest of your online world is evaporating around you like a mirage.
About that portal page: For about 10 seconds, I thought about redesigning my site to mimic it, but redesigning isn’t something that I do. An odd thing about that page is that the top link on the left-hand sidebar (“Batchelder” in the image) would sometimes change to two links in the list, “Batch” and “Elder”. I guess they’re trying out two different possibilities for what the word “Batchelder” might mean to the traffic arriving at the site.
One last appearance of JumpDomain in all of this: about 1:30 this afternoon, I got an email response to my JumpDomain support ticket that I wrote at 7:30 Friday morning. I chose not to follow up. I’m through with JumpDomain. A 3.5-day turnaround time for an urgent support call is not my idea of service.
Comments
Fred (if that is your real name!): I moved my hosting a little over a year ago to TotalChoiceHosting.
I use eNom as well. They're, as you say, not the cheapest, but they do seem to be reliable. They also offer automatic renewal of domain names -- they just charge my card once a year for each domain.
As far as actual hosting goes, I have Pipex home office ADSL, so it's just a box in the corner of my study. I will be moving to co-lo at some point this year, though.
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