I learned some valuable lessons in the last couple of months and even as recent as within the last five hours. Lesson #1 — Never trust the testimonials that web hosting companies have posted on their websites. They're nothing but a pack of lies that may have been true at one time. Lesson #2 — Never trust a registrar to do what their service claims to do, even if you get an automated receipt for it.

I moved my hosting from dotster.com (while still leaving them in charge of the domain name) when I moved my blog to philhosting.net (trying to support the local economy in the Philippines). Philhosting.net had "email only" customer service and support. That would have been fine if they actually answered their email. I finally received a response when I accused them of not being able to read English. The support person then accused me of deleting their responses or not checking my spam folders. Ahem. I'm very observant and never received anything, even as spam, or I wouldn't have been complaining. There was nothing but praise in the testimonials on their website. Who did they pay to write them? That was my first lesson. I have since moved the hosting to hostnine.com and have had zero incidents since starting with them. They answer online chat quickly and support emails fast — even on this holiday weekend.

In my post yesterday, UV History: One Year Ago 2006-05-27, I oh so smugly laughed at dotster.com's email notification that my domain had expired. I had several domains on their system expire at the same time. I should have paid more attention and the warning flags should have gone up. I didn't and they didn't. Prior to setting up hosting with hostnine.com, and because I knew I wanted to transfer the domain as well, I logged into my account at dotster.com. I turned off the transfer lock service and even received an automated confirmation of it a few minutes later by email. When I started the hosting account on the 3rd of May, I also set up to transfer the service. Hostnine's registrar is register.com — I had to approve the transfer through them on the 4th. Here I was all dumb and happy that everything had gone well.

Just before 10:00 pm local time last night, a parking page popped up when I tried to access my blog. My guess is that's how long it took for dotster.com's name server changes to propagate to their internal ones. Of course I was distraught. Something I thought had taken place hadn't taken place at all. After informing some other online blog authors and checking at my account on dotster.com, I found that the transfer lock was never taken off. That was why the transfer never went through. It would have been nice if I had been informed of this back then. I could have taken care of it one way or another.

I don't have any money in my old PayPal account, an account that no longer has a bank linked to it. It's still active, for whatever reason, and Matthew of eJabs was kind enough to transfer a small loan in order for me to renew the domain at dotster.com long before it would become publicly available for purchase. Before I did this, I sent a scathing email to dotster.com's support address thanking them for not informing me about the transfer failure. I finally got the domain back online, at least in the U.S. and everywhere but here in the Asian pacific region, within 4 hours. I don't know how long it will be before I see it normally here. I can only post this because I put the IP address in my hosts file to make it resolve for me.

This was my second lesson. Never trust an automated reply. Go back and check anyway. Note: I just now received a support response from dotster.com (Bryan) that says it looks like I renewed my domain and I can now transfer it out. Nice guy, isn't he?