Yes, I forgot to renew my domain. Yes, that became a real pain very quickly when I realized what the repercussions were.
For future generations, I suggest not having to deal with this when:
- you want to switch domain registrars
- you want to switch DNS hosting providers
- your goal is to save money
- you have never switched either registrars or DNS hosts for any domain before
- your domain’s WHOIS records are severely out-of-date (mostly because, through a comedy of errors, your host won’t let you update them)
- most of your administrative e-mail goes to a now-defunct mail address whose inbox you cannot access (I’m looking at you, .Mac, with your costs that went from $0 to $99/year in one year, and your vexing lack of forwarding)
- the rest of your administrative e-mail goes to an address in your expired domain (“because that’s the one e-mail address I’ll always have control over! Not like that .Mac account, no!”)
- you forgot that the reason why you didn’t switch domain and DNS providers earlier was because of the WHOIS hassle, and you just blithely plunged ahead with it
- you’ve waited until the day the current domain hosting provider has cut off your service (“hey, why can’t I connect to anything in my domain today? Er … ah … hm … oops. Maybe I should Twitter about this.”)
- you have to converse with the support organizations of at least two companies, and one of them is losing business
- you have better things to do with your life.
Lesson learned.
Anyway, it looks as if the long electronic nightmare of jaharmi.com being offline for Web and e-mail purposes has now ended. I can see this site. I can send and receive e-mail.
Good day.