Passes & Canyons Blog

Hey, did you notice this website was offline for . . . oh . . . nine days?! You better believe I noticed.

I have been through web domain hell. Despite diligent efforts by the support people at my web host, HostGator, this experience could hardly have been worse. You cannot believe the relief I feel about getting the site back online.

It all started, sort of, on Sunday when I went to log into my blog to post for the coming week–this week. My heart nearly stopped when I saw that page in the image above, reading “This Domain Name Has Expired.” There was a link to renewal instructions but they were pretty generic and I took the more direct approach, I called my web host.

The point is, my account was set up so that they would take care of renewing my domain name. I had recently received a couple emails from an outfit I wasn’t familiar with saying my domain was about to expire but “knowing” that HostGator had all in hand, I assumed this was some scammer trying to get money out of me. I sent those emails to my spam folder.

The guy I reached at HostGator looked up my account and and said that they had screwed up and he would take care of it. He said I should be back online in 24 to 48 hours. I thought things were taken care of. After speaking with him I discovered an email from HostGator from the previous Tuesday–in my spam folder–telling me the domain name had expired. If I had seen this notice from my web host vs. some outfit I didn’t know I would have paid attention. But it had gone to spam.

Two days went by and the site was not back. I contacted HostGator again. That person spent a long time with me and thought he had it all set up but rather than an email confirmation was needed and while we waited the time just dragged by. Finally he said it would come sooner or later and we broke off.

Frequently yesterday I checked to see if it was fixed and it was not. This morning I called HostGator again and was a bit more angry. The guy I got was super nice and did his very best to be helpful but ultimately, after nearly an hour, he told me that HostGator does not maintain my domain name, a company called Registry Rocket via a company named ENOM did, and I should contact them.

So I called Registy Rocket. That person asked for my domain name and quickly said, “We don’t maintain that domain name, HostGator does” and immediately transferred me to HostGator–right back where I started. I hung up and called Registry Rocket back and when the the rep asked for my domain name I told her first not to do anything until I told her what was going on. Only then did I give her my domain name.

She checked and said no, HostGator maintains my domain. I said they told me you did and she said no, they are wrong. So she transfered me to HostGator again.

I told the rep I got this time that one of her coworkers had sent me to Registry Rocket, who had sent me right back to HostGator, and “One of you has got to be wrong.” She checked a little further and found that HostGator does indeed maintain my domain. It had been the other way but at some point they migrated a bunch of domains over and mine got lost in the shuffle. Wonderful.

To make a still rather lengthy story short, she got it taken care of. And now I’m finally back.

What an incredibly exhausting, frustrating experience. In the meantime, a ton of traffic to the site has gotten that same “domain name expired” message and Google has undoubtedly taken note and severely downgraded my site’s rating. All I can say is that it’s a good thing I’m not in this for the money, because if I was I’d be filing a lawsuit right away!

Tags: domain expiration

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2018 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Updates Made to Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.