As a friendly \”heads up\” to all of you SP fans (all 5 of you) I as the \”Editor-in-Chief\” and \”money man\” of simpleprop.com I made the executive decision last year that when the registration of our website expired on November 15th I would transfer the hosting from register.com to our good friends who host the content of this site: dreamhost.com. This decision was purely economic in nature. For the same amount of cash you can get 9 years of registration from dreamhost or a paltry 5 years at register.com. In addition, register.com offers a service they call \”Private Domain Registration\”. This is described as follows: Protect your contact information by replacing your name, address, phone number and email address listed in the WHOIS domain lookup database with a private, generic contact listing for just $9.00 a year. (emphasis theirs) That\’s 9 bucks per year for just putting generic information in the WHOIS database. Theoretically you are bound by some law to provide accurate information for the WHOIS database, but when you register a website this
is information you could type in yourself… and register.com is charging you 9 bucks a year (emphasis mine) to do this for you. And you know that this process is entirely automated. They don\’t have a person sitting at a computer all day whose job it is to type \”register.com\” in the name field, \”123 Any Street\” for the address, and so on. Anyway, I had this reminder on my calendar for almost a month now, and kept putting it off. I finally got around to doing it one evening last week only to realize that to transfer a domain, you need to obtain an authorization code from your current registrar…via telephone… during business hours. Well, it kept slipping my mind until this morning when I realized that this Thursday was the 15th, and if I wanted to avoid giving 35 bucks to register.com (one year\’s worth of registration) I best be transferring ASAP. So I called they up at their 877 number… seriously. Not to get all Jeff Foxworthy on you, but you know your a half-assed company when you don\’t even have a 1-800 number. Anyway, I call up the number and I get a most cheerful woman who answers \”Thank you for calling register.com would like to hear about our hosting plans?\” Ummm, no. Actu… \”Well how can I help you today\”… ually I would like to obtain my authorization code. \”I can transfer you to that department… the wait time is approximately 4 minutes, thank you.\” Mercifully the wait proved to be less than 4 minutes (does that ever happen???) and soon enough I was speaking to a young man named Jody (I\’m not kidding). Jody asked me why I called register.com and I told him I was looking to obtain my authorization code. There is really only one reason to get an auth code, and that is to transfer, so immediately Jody (I cannot get over him being named Jody… seriously, what kind of parents name their son Jody? who are these people??? … ok, I went and looked up the statistics… 61% of the 94,000 people in American with the first name of Jody are female. only 61%!!! are you kidding me!!! 87% of people named Robin are female, but only 61% of Jodys are female??? … but I digress) asked me if I didn\’t mind telling him who I was transferring my website to. I told him dreamhost.com. He then asked why. I told him b/c their price is much cheaper. He then asked me if dreamhost does their own registering. How the **** am I supposed to know!!! So I told him that I believe they subcontract that service out… seriously… why the **** am I doing market research for Jody at register.com!!! Have you ever called up to cancel your cable TV, or change your telephone company? If so, you are familiar with the hard sell. \”What would it take to keep you with register.com?\” was Jody\’s next question. I was fairly confident that a company that was charging nearly 100% more than what I could get at dreamhost was not going to bargain with me, so I told Jody that there wasn\’t anything he could do to change my mind. \”Not even a lower price?\” Nope. The rest of the transaction went quickly as Jody retrived my auth code, unlocked my website and told me to expect and email with 5 minutes. Good day to you Jody. Now we come to the point of this post… once I had my auth code in hand I turned to dreamhost to complete the transaction. The transaction was completely automated with the final step being I had to click a link that was to be sent to the webmaster account for this
website… wait… did that say \”webmaster\”? The same webmaster email that we deactived a few years ago b/c there isn\’t a bigger spam target than sending an email to webmaster@xxxxxxx.com??? Dammit!!! To make a long story short (too late), I was able to turn that address back on, and get dreamhost to erase the first transaction and I sent the transfer request through a second time. Now, the kicker is that it takes up to 5 days for a transfer to complete… which if you do the math takes us to Saturday… which is two days past the date that the registration expires on register.com. So theoretically it\’s possible that at 12:01 AM on Friday, simpleprop.com will cease being listed on domain servers. Now it takes a bit of time for all the DNS servers in the world to update with new information, but it\’s possible we may disappear for a day or two sometime after Friday. But never fear, if you get a 404 Not Found error, just try again the next day and we should be back. Now if you\’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to spend the money I\’ll be saving with this transfer.
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