It’s “Pending”. It’s “In Progress”. It’s complicated.
ilyAIMY.com will celebrate its 25th year in August, and over that time the hosting services I’ve used have been myriad. Not by intention, but because bigger businesses gobble up little businesses and as of earlier this year my hosting service had been purchased by one with a particularly bad reputation.
I first became aware of NetworkSolutions.com because they owned the School of Musical Traditions domain “schoolofmusicaltraditions.com” when Dave Eisner first partnered with them. I’m not ENTIRELY sure how this became my problem, but if there’s something technical within the Eisner Radius, it eventually is.
My problem, that is.
And so I became aware of NetworkSolutions and their daily emails that came with threatening red BOLD letters letting me know that schoolofmusicaltradition.com could be purchased by ANYONE unless I bought it first. And that schoolofmusicaltraditions.org was in danger of being bought by someone if I didn’t act NOW. I especially liked the gambit of them “reserving” a bunch of variations of the domain name for me and then sending me threatening “YOUR SITE IS EXPIRING” emails. I actually almost paid the bill for something like schoolofmusicaltraditions.info before I realized that no, that was actually NOT our domain name…
Trying to leave them was a nightmare. I eventually transferred the domain to the host I was using with ilyAIMY.com (and eventually imtfolk.org, hmtrad.com, AND musicaltraditions.com) so that all of “my” properties were under one roof, but this required phone calls, multiple steps of “confirmation”, all while they sent threatening letters implying that unlocking my domain would result in immediate theft (it’s part of the transfer process), etc etc – it’s all the tactics of a political campaign wrapped up into a very vanilla product offering and shitty customer service.
And so I was more than a little pissed to see networksolutions.com purchase my web and domain hosts. Sure enough, all of the threatening language was back, obnoxious pop-ups when running the backend of my website: “YOUR INFORMATION IS AT RISK” (because I wasn’t buying their additional packages and services) all while they were slowly deprecating packages and services that I’d been using for decades while jacking up the price.
I’d known that my deadline for signing another two year contract with them was coming up and that’s sent me into this multi-month process of transferring the contents of ilyAIMY.com to another server, and I knew the day would come that I’d have to actually transfer the domain name as well. I just underestimated / had forgotten JUST how shitty it was to go through the process.
Domain transfers can take up to a week. I know that. Usually the old server doesn’t shut off till the new server’s up and running, but networksolutions.com cut off my website and email the moment I started the transfer. Buried in that same email was the notification that I needed to call to initiate the transfer once the process was started. 45 minutes on hold, listening to sales pitches, eventually getting a human who told me about how insecure all other hosting services were, do you really want to do this? I can get you a better price… I see where you’re coming from buuuut… and finally going into a really condescending explanation of “how domain transfers work”.
So… hopefully in a couple of days I’ll have my .com and my email back. I wish I’d been smarter about warning people about the potential outage but I’d hoped it wouldn’t be this bad. I bought robsopenmics.com in the meantime. ilyAIMY.com will be about a third of the price under the new host and my email accounts only 2/3 the price that networksolutions.com was going to renew me at. (though their “please don’t leave me, baby” price was almost comparable).
I know I’m making the right choice. It was the best possible time to do it. Ish. I’ve had almost 25 years of often okay service. I guess it’s time for some upset. If I can get another 25 years I’ll probably be beyond caring.
Bah.
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