OK I’m not going to lie to you, there’s no way to sugar coat this…
I despise the Domain Registration system.
Can’t help myself. I’ve owned thargy.com and unclecraig.com for well over 10 years and every year I go through the same renewal hell of trying to figure out who owns what – requesting transfers and all the unnecessarily messy rubbish that the industry subjects it’s users to. It’s not that I’m a ‘search for the cheapest deal’ masochist, it’s purely that I have a great habit of backing losers when it comes to the great registrar consolidation world war that has raged continuously over the last decade. I have genuinely lost count of the times that one of my registrars or hosts has changed hands, such that my host, and domains all exist with different people. I genuinely hate Domain Registration.
Well enough is enough, I’ve finally decided to combine everything onto GoDaddy.com. I strongly suspect this is a decision I will live to regret (going on previous form) and certainly my initial experience has been somewhat typically hellish. After many hours of work, numerous support tickets raised, etc. (at one point I even got sent a completely blank EPP Key/Authorization Key in a friendly email) I have at least registered my transfer of thargy.com and have attempted to begin the process of transferring unclecraig.com (though success there remains firmly in the balance).
I am hoping to move this WordPress to GoDaddy, and transfer everything (including CloudFlare CDN support) over in the next week. I figure there’s no time like the present, after all my subscriber count is still very low.
With luck there will be no noticeable interruption, however if the inevitable happens and the site is down, please bare with me as I hope to get it back up and running as soon as possible!
I have some great blogs posts planned for when everything settles down so I hope your persevere.
Quick Update:
Thargy.com was hosted by Deluxe For Business which was formally “aplus”. Now, even though they are one of the ‘re-branding’ culprits that I moan about I really want to say that their live chat customer support was the best I’ve experienced to date – particularly a guy called ‘Matt’, who dealt with me with good humor and a genuine helpful spirit.
My reasons for moving haven’t changed, but they deserve credit for making it easy. The same can’t be said for GNAX who don’t appear to do registration any more but have inherited my account – dealing with them is something of a nightmare (they have unclecraig.com).
Update #2:
OK thargy.com is now running off of GoDaddy’s servers, thanks mainly to CloudFlare which made it easy for me to rework my zone file (I already have thargy.com set to use CloudFlare’s nameservers).
The actual domain name transfer won’t happen for another few days, but it’s a start.
As for unclecraig.com I got my EPP but deluxe haven’t actually instructed the registrar to remove the lock – so not a good start! I’m waiting for their glacially slow support to respond to my latest tickets.
Update #3
Finally both thargy.com and unclecraig.com are now fully in-transit so in theory I just have to wait for the five days to pass and they transfer over. At which point there’s every chance there may be yet more DNS mucking around, although I’ve tried to preempt that somewhat.
On a positive point, I finally got the 301-redirects working fully, so any of the following will send you off to http://thargy.com:
http://thargy.com
http://www.unclecraig.com
http://unclecraig.com
http://www.unclecraig.org
http://unclecraig.org
Which should help ranking and will prevent access to the old host website.
Update #4
Thargy.com has now transferred, according to stats.thargy.com, there were two brief outages today totalling ~7 mins, but a part from that is seems to have been a smooth transition. Unclecraig.com should hopefully go in the next couple of days too.
Update #5
This should be the final update! Everything is now moved. Despite some big problems with my unclecraig.com emails (to be fair it didn’t help using unlcecraig.com in the configuration) I am now completely transferred and up and running.
My initial feeling is that GoDaddy’s servers are a lot slower than my old ones, and http://stats.thargy.com has reported a few downtimes already – however the GoDaddy tools are pretty comprehensive (albeit somewhat unintuitive for advanced users in places).
With hope this will be last time I need to move in a while…