Domains, Registrars and hosts!

Years ago, I had a blog on a website called Xanga, I also had a livejournal account and few other journal type apps I’d use. At some point back then I decided to purchase my own domain name and start my own blog. By the way, when I say back then, I mean like way back in like 2001. So I had purchased ARod (dot)org, my very first domain and site hosting plan with a company called Doteasy. At some point, due to their slow and shady customer support, I moved my domain to another hosting service called Total Choice Hosting. Eventually, I let that subscription expire and I purchased NYCTalking on Godaddy. When Godaddy was getting hit with all those denial of service attacks I jumped ship and moved on to Namecheap. After years, I’ve now left Namecheap and I’m hosting a VPS server with a company called “Cloudways.” 

I’m still trying to get Namecheap to credit me for my hosting plan as I’ve had open tickets with them for months due to my site being utterly slow and often being offline. It’s not a lot of money, but I can use it to pay off some domain renewals and its about the principle of the matter. I paid for a service that was not provided so I should be refunded that money. This reminds me, I still have an outstanding ticket with Verizon now for over a year regarding no connection in our Fort Totten location. They charge us, they refund us, but no fix, it’s freaking ridiculous.

Recently I decided that I wanted to consolidate all my websites into one registrar. This was just a matter of making administration simpler. At one point I had even forgotten where the hell ARod.org was registered! So originally I was going to move them all to Godaddy as they are fairly trustworthy and care about their image, but they charged way too much to renew sites annually once transferred in. 

I thought about going with Doteasy, but their customer service is horrendous. Their support is only available from 6am to 6pm Pacific time. If you try to reach them after hours, on social media, on the weekend, or any other time you will only encounter crickets. Case in point, I’ve been trying to get them to unlock ARod.org so that I can move it to another registrar, and it has been over 5 days since I sent my first request about that. Between their slow replies, trying to keep me, it’s been a ridiculous amount of time to unlock my domain. 

Furthermore, why the hell do they need to unlock it for me? On Namecheap and godaddy all I had to do was press the unlock button and it was done practically instantly. Doteasy takes you to a screen where they offer locking the domain for $6 for three years. Uhm, I just pressed the option to unlock, not lock! So yeah, they make it hard for you to transfer. In addition to that, I guarantee you that it will take the full 7 days to transfer it out once I do get it unlocked. Can you believe that these guys had the gall to tell me “Hey, you can transfer all your domains in to our site for the low cost of $8 per domain.” Uhm, no, no, no!

So, I decided to keep my sites registered on Namecheap. They’ve been getting slammed now for a few days but I think its stopped and I’m not sure if it was affection the DNS service. They are one of the big registrars, fairly affordable and I do already have quite a few domains registered there. So I decided to move my remaining two stragglers from the other registrars here. As I said, Godaddy is already done, they didn’t give me any trouble and everything including the approval was automated and done by me, unlike Doteasy. That’s why I left them in the first place, being super slow, it’s funny to see that their business model hasn’t changed one bit. I’ll be glad to be free from those guys. Namecheap isn’t perfect, but they are responsive and they try to help you. That goes a long way with me and its part of the reason I’ve opted to keep my domains registered there. So long as my sites still work, I’ll continue to do so.

As far as hosting goes, I’m now on a more “premium” plan with a VPS host and so far I’m happy with Cloudways. I’ve also moved my podcast to a hosting service, for the time being I’m using AnchorFM since they are free. I tried buzzsprout but saw no real difference or point to pay extra for hosting. I used to self host my podcast on my blog but I was told that this would slow everything down. So I moved it to see if things improved on Namecheap, they didn’t. Part of me feels like bringing it back over, but I think I’m gonna ride this out and keep it hosted separately on anchor. I don’t trust free companies too much as they could simply up and disappear, but so far they’ve been pretty good, and with spotify backing, I’m fairly confident they’ll stick around. Hell, I even created an ad on there! 

We’ll see how things continue going forward, but so far I’m pretty happy with Cloudways. Hopefully all this backend work is done and I can simply focus on putting out good content!