Blogging 101—The Master of My Domain

I'm sure this won't surprise any of you but TW is far from a techie genius. Any mention of the letters h t m and l sends her into cold sweats. The thought of switching hosts or even self-hosted WordPress makes her break out in hives. That said, a few weeks ago some of you may have noticed we went off-line for about eight hours. Blame it on TW. I did. We were transferring my domain name over to a new registrar. OK, it wasn't entirely her fault but I'm gonna tell you what you need to do if you're ever tempted to do this to make your life easier.

In 2010, I got tired of seeing "blogspot" in our url so we decided to sign up for the stunningkeisha.com domain. At that time, we could do it through Blogger. A couple of years later, Google got out of the domain business and gave all their domains over to godaddy. Since they've technically had my domain for four years, we decided to transfer it over to them. As we all know, Google has no technical support and godaddy's tech support is supposed to be good.

Anyway, they took our money, which turned out of be twice as much as we were paying since they charge to make it private. Lemme say a few words about why we pay to have a private domain. When your domain is public, anyone using Whois can see your name, address, phone number and email. Anyone can use it or a stalker can find you. Our domain was private on google but we don't know how we did it.

They gladly took our money but neglected to tell us anything else about the transfer. Being a tech moron, TW figured "this was easy." Nothing is ever easy for TW.

About a week later, she got a call from godaddy (which will be called GD for the remainder of the post) telling her she had a GD account, didn't she want to do anything with it. She explained she had transferred our domain. They said nooooo. After back and forth, they finally told her she had to unlock the privacy on the google account. Oh boy! The reason she switched was she had no idea how to get into the administrator dashboard or google apps but now she had to figure it out.

She called them back after finally managing to hack get into her account and unlocking it. Then they told her they needed an authorization code from google to complete the transfer. How could she get that? Easy peasy. She should call them up or email them. Um, google has no tech support. There's no way to contact them. They gave her the "secret" google email address and she waited. In case you're ever in a similar situation, here's the link to get this code but you might not be able to see the page unless you have a google apps account. Three tech guys from GD had to contact google before they finally emailed TW the code.

I tell you this is all computers are good for!

TW thought it was solved and the transfer was complete. She is so gullible. Monday morning she got an email that the transfer was complete. She clicked on our site and got a GD site instead axing her to buy various hosting services. HUH??? She was back on the phone with them when online help wasn't any help. Now she needed to retrieve her domain's name server from google but guess what? Google had already deleted her domain name. Note here that if you look up your domain on Whois, you can get this information the easy way. We didn't know that.

Ack! As I said before, nothing is ever easy. Another long tearful call to GD followed. The tech told her he could use one of their name servers but there was the possibility the blog would come up and all the content would be lost. It could take up to 48 hours although most blogs were back within the hour. TW backed up the content and we held our breaths. Before long, we received an email from Aunt Pauline telling TW to disregard her earlier email since she could now get into stunningkeisha.com

If you're thinking of transferring your domain, make sure you

1. unlock the privacy setting if you have it locked
2. get an authorization code and
3. get the name server.

If you have all these in advance, you shouldn't have trouble with the transfer like we did. We wish someone would have given us this info before we jumped in with all four paws.

If anybody has any Blogger questions, now's the time to ax me and I'll try to answer them.

Wake me when we're up and running again.