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I want my domain back

Published by Ravikiran Rao March 27th, 2004 in Web World

Can someone help me please?
I registered my domain about 2 years back with Win2000hoster.com. I was young and naive, and it seemed like a good and cheap deal at the time, but now I’ve realised that the problem is that they are both the hosting company and the domain registrar, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to transfer the registration elsewhere.

I cannot run movabletype on it. There are blogging software available which uses ASP.net, but they don’t support it either.

Any idea what I can do about moving my domain to a new host? My registration expires in May. I am okay with waiting till then, but from what I have heard, I’ll have to risk losing my domain to someone else. Is there any foolproof way I can keep my domain? I am the administrative contact on whois, but the technical contact is someone else.

13 Responses to “I want my domain back”  

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  1. 1 MadMan Mar 28th, 2004 at 1:27 am

    Ravi,

    This is easy to fix. Mail me at the linked email address and I’ll tell you how to move it off.

    Since you’re the admin contact, you can do anything.

    (How much will you pay me for my advice? :)

  2. 2 MadMan Mar 28th, 2004 at 1:42 am

    Oh, what the fuck, I might as well put it down here so others can benefit too.

    There are two aspects to your site:

    1) The web hosting.
    This is trivial. Find a hosting company that you like (I use this one) and set up an account with them. They will tell you the names and IP addresses of their primary and secondary nameservers. Since you’re the admin contact for your domain, you can change this info and have your domain automatically point to your new site. The change takes upto 48 hours to propagate through the Internet.

    2) The domain registration. OK, you can renew with your current registrar for another X years if you want. But you shouldn’t because they’re bloody expensive at $14.95 per year. You can transfer to a registrar like GoDaddy.com for $7.95 per year, which will save you almost 50% off the price. (Please stay faaaar away from the Indian registrars.)

    The best thing is that you don’t need to do much to transfer your domain. It can all be handled automatically. GoDaddy.com will send your existing registrar a transfer message. Your current registrar should then send you (at your Yahoo account) a message saying a transfer has been requested, and asking you to approve it. Once you do that, the transfer takes place.

    That’s about it really. If you don’t want to use Godaddy, the procedure is mostly the same for other registrars too.

    However, you must proceed with the transfer at least 10 days before your expiry date. So please do it in the next two weeks.

  3. 3 MadMan Mar 28th, 2004 at 2:02 am

    two-minute research on WebHostingTalk.com revealed to me that Win2000Hoster, your hosting company, aren’t even a true-blue hosting company. They’re actually resellers for FastHosts, a company notorious for the “unlimited bandwidth” offer they give to resellers (in the hosting world, anything “unlimited” isn’t). I also got a few posts about how their connection speeds are poor and customer service is slow. I would imagine that customer support requests have to be routed to FastHosts.com first, and then passed back to you, hence the delay.

    Please move your account off these buggers ASAP.

  4. 4 Ravikiran Rao Mar 28th, 2004 at 12:08 pm

    Thanks.
    For some reason, I had the impression that there was no way of changing registrars at all and once you register, it stays put till expiry.

  5. 5 Anand Mar 28th, 2004 at 9:44 pm

    Thanks! I needed the info too!

  6. 6 MadMan Mar 29th, 2004 at 12:23 am

    That will be $10 in consultancy charges please.

    (and if you pay me another $10, I’ll tell you where to get hosting for $3 per YEAR. :)

  7. 7 Ravikiran Mar 29th, 2004 at 4:06 pm

    These are not the dotcom days Madman.

  8. 8 MadMan Mar 30th, 2004 at 12:45 am

    That’s why I didn’t ask for $1000. :p

  9. 9 Yazad Mar 30th, 2004 at 11:23 am

    In the spirit of socialist collectivism, I think guest bloggers on AnarCapLib should offer their services free!

  10. 10 Shabeeth Apr 7th, 2004 at 5:18 pm

    hey pal i gotta problem here and i want advice
    i bought my site bakersgroup.com from some really fucked up website that i dont remember and i didnt know much about the net so i got totaly screwed i have no idea how to get stuff into the server they have offered me is their anyway i can get my .com back i need it dude help bud thanx

  11. 11 anjan Apr 26th, 2004 at 9:47 am

    Start transfering to a new registrar. Choose anyone you like. The only condition is the expiry date should be atleat 30 days{just to be safe}.
    I am reseller f onlinenic.com as well. You can take my service if you like. It may cost 10$ with one more year registration. For any reson if you don’t my service:-( use godaddy or anyone else.
    thanks

  12. 12 Ravikiran Apr 26th, 2004 at 12:55 pm

    Thanks for the offer, but I have already done the transfer to godaddy

  13. 13 dedicated server Jun 9th, 2004 at 11:00 am

    That’s weird for me