Learn From My Mistakes

I received an email from one of the Variant Frequencies fans. He asked if the site was down. I wrote back that I’d check. So, I checked. Yep, it was down. I put in a trouble ticket, assuming that it would be working again in the morning. It wasn’t. I later found out that it is going to be out for a few days.

To know how I got into this predicament, I’d like to give you a little history. I hope this helps one of you avoid what I have gone through.

Four years ago when I first started the site, a friend from the internet provider that my company was using at the time, setup my domain name for variantfrequencies.com. It was a little bit tricky because I wanted to use my dotMac site as the location for the podcast. That was an easy way to produce a podcast at the time. I had asked him if we could point variantfrequencies.com to my dotMac. He said he could do it. The next thing, I knew, he had it setup.

That all seemed fine. About a year later, his company was bought up by another company, and eventually he was let go. The guy who took his place assured me that I didn’t need to change anything.

About a year later, I was dealing with some things with the domain, and realized that variantfrequencies.com wasn’t in my name. I contacted him and asked him to make the change. He assured me that he had. It looked to me like it was all set. Also, my company was no longer using these people for our internet access. I should have followed my instincts and moved my domain to someone like GoDaddy or some similar company.

Well, jump forward to January 21, 2010. A listener asked me if the site was down. I checked into it, and yes, it was down. I put in a trouble ticket with my provider, thinking that it would be back up in the morning.

Not only was it not working in the morning, I found out that the domain name had expired. I sent a couple of emails to the guy who worked for the company that was controlling the domain name. I wasn’t getting any answers.

Finally, I called them. I found out that he was no longer working there, and that they didn’t know who the hell Variant Frequencies was, and closed the account, because the domain had expired on January 19, and as far as they were concerned, it was not a paying customer, so basically “fuck em.”

I did finally get in contact with a nice woman who tried to help me. It was made more complicated by the fact that they really didn’t handle domain registrations either, it was another company.

Well, to shorten this already long story. I had to set up an account with this other company. She and I had to fill out a form that said that they were releasing the the domain name to me.

Oh, and by the way. That jerk had not switched it over to my name. So, I was not getting any notices that it was about to expire.

Anyway, I now have to wait for all of the paperwork to go through. I was told that it can take five working days. They have me over a barrel.

That is the whole ridiculous story. the moral is that I should have followed my instincts and switched it to another setup when I had the chance. If you ever setup a web site. Make certain that the domain name is registered to you directly.

I’ll let you know the the Variant Frequencies site is back online. Until then, thank you for sticking with us.