Are You Master Of Your Own Domain Name?

Domain Name: You Are Ill or URL?
Change can be as good as a rest, or make things FUBAR: F'd Up Beyond All Recognition.

Sunmail.ca was FUBAR. It is a story best told in a blog entry. I moved my website from dotserving.com to canaca.com and it went into a black hole for about three weeks.
I decided to move sunmail.ca just to learn how that would be done, and also because of slow Blogger publishing, occasional outages, but really just as a learning exercise. I had not migrated websites before. First lesson: You need to be the admin of your domain name, don't let your hosting service be the administrator. It is a pre-nuptial thing. Second lesson: Plan.

I had two domains to move (sunmail.ca & spudreport.com) and each fell apart a different way.
Sunmail.ca had an expired email address of mine, from echopc.ca, as the admin email. This was key because I had to repoint my sunmail.ca name to new Domain Name Servers at my new host canaca. Couldn't do it because I had lost the CIRA login info and they would only send my new info to echopc.ca; or I could get a Notary Public and wait a month for a paper form. I got the super awesome idea to renew echopc.ca which was abandoned, then after a week of waiting for DNS propogation I requested and recieved the login I needed to repoint sunmail.ca, at ken@echopc.ca, which I brought back from the dead. That old admin contact pointing to echopc.ca was a huge security hole, anyone could have bought echopc.ca and became my sunmail.ca admin!

Spudreport.com was a different story, it was down for only two weeks. The admin info had domains@dotserving.com as the contact which means the fate of my migration was in the hands of my former host provider - a place you do not want to find yourself in. Every DNS change is frustratingly slow and more so when you are not in control. I now have the admin contact as me. However spudreport.CA is still in limbo, but working at the moment. At the mercy of my former host. (Thanks dotserving.com)

I moved two mySQL databases, which I thought would be the hard part of changing hosts, it was easy: export, import, done.

The problems were all in the DNS settings of my Domain Name and my lack of control to change them. Until I became the master of my own domains!

So beware the pitfalls of Domain Name control, check your site at internic.ca, or whois.com and know who really owns your site name! If it is worth anything to you it should have your email as the admin contact!