Khevor's Landing

Ok, so I was a little longer than I had originally though.  Well… a lot longer.  I had troubles right from the get-go.  Then it just piled one error or problem on-top of another.  So here it is, 13 hours from the time I started and I *finally* have everything back up and running again.

I will say this… what a freakin’ nightmare!!!

(For those with a keen eye, yes, I said 13 hours from when I started.  That also means I didn’t start until nearly 11am EST – and you’d be right.  I didn’t have the necessary software in my possession until then.)

For the record – 32 bit software and 64 bit software do not play well together.  I’m not saying that they won’t, but I am saying it’s a pain.

In about eight hours from now [January 28, 2010 from 8am EST til 12pm EST] (give or take an hour or two), the site will be down for maintenance.  There’ll be some serious, behind-the-scenes, upgrading going on.

Not sure how long it’ll last for but you can bet anywhere from 2 to 4 hours… possibly more given rise to unforeseen circumstances.

Well, half of my plan didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.  I wanted to set up my own mail server… yeah, didn’t work out so well.  Turns out my ISP blocks port 25 and as such, I wasn’t able to have my mail server receive any emails.  I could’ve signed up to a port forwarding service, but that’s just more of a pain in the ass than I wanted to contend with.

On the up-side, the rest of my site is working again (as you can see).  Ah well, can’t have everything, right?

Allow me to take this moment to scream…

Ok, with that out of the way, the domain transfer has become something of a nightmare – propagated by miscommunication.  I signed up with Netfirms.ca.  During the sign-up process, it asks for the domain that you already have.  Ok, no problem.  After a series of other questions and things to fill out, you get to the control panel.  When you click on Transfer Registrar, you discover there’s a fee attached.  Then you go and look at your invoice from when you signed up, it quite clearly states: Transfer <domainname> FREE.

In any event, I discovered that my domain was locked and it couldn’t be transferred that way anyway, so I contacted the registrar (and former host) of my domain.  After some email bickering, they finally gave me the EPP code I needed to unlock the domain.  No idea what to do with this code, I went back to Netfirms and sent them a support request asking both about the transfer fee thing and what I was supposed to do with this EPP code.

Netfirms, you see, boasts 24/7 support.  I don’t know what their idea of 24/7 is but I was under the impression that this also meant quick correspondence (and I found in another part of the site that I wasn’t wrong with that impression).  7 hours later, still nothing.  I ended up deleting the damned account (which consisted of removing the domain name from them – a simple click of a link).

After several hours of checking out various domain registrars located in Canada (note I didn’t say host companies), I ended up back at Netfirms as they had, by far, the cheapest rates for transferring and renewing my domain.  So I signed up again.  During the sign-up process this time, I was actually taken to a different sign-up page (as I initiated it differently this time).  Located there it said quite plainly that transferring a domain’s DNS was free… however, transferring registrar’s would cost me a year’s renewal fee up-front.  Now I understood why the invoice said one thing and the control panel said another.

Good thing that I already initiated a transfer of funds from my bank account to my PayPal account on Saturday.  Too bad it didn’t get into motion until today and funds won’t be available until Feb. 1st.  With that said, Netfirms is also the only domain registrar I found that will accept payment via PayPal.  Everywhere else is credit card only… and I don’t have one of those.

So now I have an EPP code that I can’t use until money is in my PayPal account so I can start the registrar transfer.  Oh, I failed to mention that the EPP code is used during the registrar transfer.  Found that out while I was pouring over Netfirm’s help files trying to find out why there was a discrepancy between the invoice and the domain transfer in the control panel.

As you can imagine, it’s been a long day, but at least now I’m further ahead than I was before (in that I now know what everything means) and I’m somewhat prepared for the domain transfer.  On the plus side, the yearly fee is less than $10.  I think I can live with that.

Ok, so I’ve started to reach out to the internet again.  I signed up for Twitter (and if you can’t figure out the name I used, then you either don’t know me, or you’re brain dead) just to see what the hype was all about.  I haven’t yet determined a use for the account yet but I might come up with something eventually.

Also, with this blog working out quite well (behind the scenes), it gives me a new incentive to work on things once more.  It’s been about a year since I did anything productive in terms of my ‘online presence,’ so I figure it’s about time to start it all back up again.

In other news, I’m waiting on 2 domain registrars to get back to me about transferring my domain name to a company in Canada.  For years, it’s been hosted in the Netherlands and I figure it’s about time it comes home.  So soon (hopefully in the coming couple of weeks), Khevor’s Landing will be back on its domain again (khevorslanding.net).   If not, then I’ll be buying a new domain, this one named khevorslanding.ca.  I might buy the new domain anyway and just merge the two (keeping the .ca as the main) but I haven’t fully decided on that.  I want to see how things pan out in the coming days first.