My Domain is Now Free
No, it's not free for sale!!
My blog was down during the past 36 hours and most likely many of the regular visitors and subscribers noticed this. Probably that was my fault that I had to announce what I'm going to do with my domain on a blog post before starting the progress but some security reasons as well as the fact that I never could predict some unexpected troubles stopped me from letting my visitors know about it. I tried to use Twitter to let others know about the status and this is another application for Twitter and similar sites!
However, the down time was long enough to force me write about the story here. This can be informative for some other people who may be in my previous situation to move their domains.
My Nayyeri.net domain was registered on OnlineNIC via a local reseller three years ago. At that time I couldn't predict such a future for the site and domain and also had no idea about what's going to happen in politics world in the next three years.
OnlineNIC is an amateur registrar in the east and I saw some domain steals from them due to their weak security mechanism. Moreover, they're affected by political views and have broken their policy many times for many countries.
In the recent months I saw a bad wave of domain expirations and domain steals on their services. Some people who had registered their domains via same reseller lost their domains and one of them was a friend of mine!
These happenings bit me to rethink about my domain registrar to avoid future troubles for myself and loosing the time and energy that I have put into the site in the past three years.
These were some reasons for me to finally end up with the idea of moving my domain out of OnlineNIC:
- The first one was what I mentioned above and that was the domain expirations and steals.
- Locally we're suffering from internet (and media) censorship and usually government blocks sites and blogs when they pass a level of popularity. They're very suspicious about my blog and other English blogs and I noticed this recently. There is no policy for domain registration and internet service companies to stop them from doing what government wants and forces them to do so government was able to simply take control over my domain via the domain reseller. Of course, owner of the reseller is a cool guy who helped me a lot at first stages to start this blog with first version of Community Server but unfortunately in our world companies are forced to do what government wants!
- The quality of OnlineNIC services and their control panel wasn't very well and I always had problems with them. During some server transfers I noticed longer down times due to some errors in their control panel that didn't let me modify my name servers.
- I'm getting closer to the final point in military service and big things are going to happen in my life (hopefully). This domain is a part of my personal realm so I have to regard it in my decisions. This domain transfer was a part of my strategy for my future.
Considering these reasons I looked for a new registrar in United States to make me sure and comfort with everything. My dear friend, Mehrdad, has been using 1&1 services for a long time and was happy with their service. I also found their quality excellent and finally decided to move the domain.
I never had transferred a domain registrar so had no idea about its progress and troubles. Domain transfer progress is usually a 7-10 days progress that starts from the new registrar. Thank to Mehrdad, the progress started last week and after some confirmations by me on OnlineNIC side, domain moved to 1&1 and they updated the WhoIs database on Tuesday (29th January).
However, 1&1 doesn't allow you to modify DNS settings until the original registrar confirms that domain can be moved. Before then, they use a default DNS settings that points to their local name servers with a default page parking. The gap between movement and confirmation was the reason that my visitors couldn't reach to the site (down time was different based on the update time for local name server data for ISPs). Actually there was a problem with 1&1 servers with my domain that made the progress longer. We contacted them and they confirmed this reason.
By the way, domain is now moved and people around the world should be able to see it shortly. I had accepted this down time to leave all the amateur stuff and put my domain in a safe and professional state. Now I have full control over the domain and I don't worry about anything anymore!
This down time was terrible. I noticed it everywhere! Most of visitors couldn't see my previous post about my new article on ASP Alliance so it had its direct effect on my article's traffic. Many friends and visitors informed me via email, cell phone, IM and this Twitter thing, of course! I'm thankful for your attention.
Latest three days were one of the worst days in the year for me but not for this domain stuff. Generally this year was a bad year for me and these three days were worst than it because of the difficulties that I had at service! Yesterday we solved our problems at service and my mind got free from those things so could get back to my regular life but I have to think about these difficulties and find a good solution during the next week.
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience and down time. Security is a big concern for us in the new world so I had to transfer the domain. Hopefully this won't happen again. Thank to the better service quality of new registrar and my VPS, you can expect a real %99.99 of uptime!
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1 Comment : 01.31.08
#1
Nayyeri.NET Turns Three
06.28.2008 @ 7:35 AM
Today, 28th June 2008,  is the third birthday anniversary of my site and blog, Nayyeri.NET! It’s