How Not to change Domain Registrars

posted at 01:00:00
By Flipping Heck!

Posted In
Rants

There's a saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket", and it's definitley one to follow from now on!

I had my domain registered with my hosting company so of course, if you forget to pay them (whoops), your website goes down and you can't simply point the domain somewhere else such as a page on another site or some free hosting, so what happens? You loose all your email, all your ad revenue and if you've not run a backup for a while, you could lose all your content.

Also, the package I was on was pretty basic. Most things that I wanted to do such as a customer 404 error page, or mess around with MySQL database would have cost me extra on top of my plan (£50 for a MySQL database which I can run on my home PC for free?? I think not thanks!).

So, as I own a hosting reseller account I thought it would make sense to host my own website there instead of having everything spread here, there and everywhere I decided to locate all the hosting in one place and move the domain somewhere I could then point it where I liked.

So far it's been 3 weeks and the domain transfer (as far as I know as I'm away from a computer) is still going on. That's madness!

The process is supposed to be relatively simple(ish):

I request a transfer from my current registrar
The registrar accepts and unlocks my domain name
I receive an EPP (proof of domain ownership) code from the current registrar
I request a transfer from the new registrar
The new registrar accepts and sends a transaction ID & security code to the email admin contact on the domain whois data
I receive the transaction/security codes, log into the new registrars website and enter the codes
The new registrar send the old registrar a request of approval for the transfer
The current registrar approves the release of the domain
The transfer takes place which can take up to 7 days

Well, that's all well and good except both my email address and the current registrars email addresses were incorrect so neither of us received emails and it took 2 weeks to get that changed (why, I don't know). Then the current host didn't rememember they had to approve the transfer again. Blimey!

If my website was up and running, in theory there would have been no downtime and no-one would have even realised I'd upped sticks and changed. As it was, I was (and still probably am) getting my former hosts holding page - which I can understand as I owed them money but I wasn't too worried about as I was told the domain transfer process would be very quick (ha!).

Luckily, my "www.flippingheck.com" domain was registered elsewhere so I was able to use that to move all the site content onto (I managed to back up my old site before it was shut down - hoorah!) but the problem was that a lot of links pointed to "www.katywhitton.com/flipping/" as originally, "www.flippingheck.com" was a framset, pulling in the katywhitton content (shock, horror, bad girl! etc.) so a lot of people have dropped off of the website.

When (if) I get the "new" katywhitton.com website up and running, I'm putting a 301 redirect on the flippingheck site so people will be routed over to the new one automatically. It should also sort any stray links out in Google too, although I am worried that I've lost a lot of page rank and search position after this debacle.

So, the moral of the story is try to keep your website hosts and domain registrars separate and make sure you regulary backup your website and databases (and if anyone can suggest any backup tools I'd be most obliged).

But for now, in theory, I'm sorted. New hosts, new regsitrars and a new look katywhitton.com coming soon.

If the domain ever gets transferred.

Note, this is a scheduled post (as I'm a busy girl and preparing for my holiday). As a result my domain may have already transferred and I will be talking utter rubbish. If that's the case just ignore me.