Hosting Pains
Warning: Rant Ahead! This is really one long rant, but I have to say I do feel better now.
Problem 1: Return to trouble
After returning from our summer holiday, I went to one of my sites and was greeted with a strange shopping/search spam site. This was a little disconcerting to say the least. The site isn't particularly important, but it is the domain of my main public email address. Sure enough, about half way through my holiday, I had no more incoming email.
Domain name expiry
Prior to leaving for holiday, I did remember a domain name renewal notice, which I was sure I'd paid. A check of my records show that is correct, so I'm onto my hosting provider. Annoyingly, it took three or four days to resolve. I'm still not sure what really happened but I suspect my provider didn't actually complete the domain renewal.
It makes you wonder what emails have been missed, and indeed if the person that had taken over my domain temporarily had seen the emails and what private information they may now know.
Completing the move
Due to problems a while ago with my shared web hosting, I decided to make a move off this provider. I've gone with Google Apps for my email and Amazon EC2 for the websites. This has been working fine, so I wanted to cancel the web hosting at my provider and just have the DNS registration and use their name servers.
Problem 2: Cancelling the hosting
Just one week after the problem renewing one of my domains was resolved, the end of the hosting plan came around. I'd asked about continuing the DNS hosting without paying for website hosting and the provider's support person said this would be fine, so I went ahead and didn't renew the website hosting.
Bad move. As soon as the website hosting is cancelled, all my domains are down - including email of course.
It transpires that you do have to pay for website hosting, even if you don't want it, to get the DNS hosting. So I pay the renewal which you would think would just re-activate the account. Apparently that would be too easy. Cutting a long story short, a week later I've been able to get into my new hosting account and update the DNS records of my sites accordingly and I'm back online.
DNS hosting only?
Now I just need to find a company to host my domain names that will do the renewals and where I can update DNS records and I'll be happy. At last.
