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Blogging 101—The Master of My Domain

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.

Blogging 101—The Master of My DomainAnyway, 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.

Blogging 101—The Master of My Domain
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.

Blogging 101—The Master of My Domain
Wake me when we're up and running again.

Would you like to comment?

  1. A lot of humans have problems with tech stuff. My human is usually pretty good - html and css are her middle names - but she hates GoDaddy with a passion! BTW, isn't that the company with a president who's a big game hunter?

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  2. TW is not alone..my tech savvy is ..well not savvy at all..i have many moments where i could cheerfully take a sledgehammer to my computer...glad it got sorted sweetie ...loves Fozziemum xxx

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  3. Oh my, what a nightmare TW had to go through. Being opposite from tech genius myself, I applaud her effort. And thank you for sharing the information!

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  4. Oh CK We're so sorry ya'll had to go through all dat. Mommy's fur sure no techy and it scares da pee wadly outta her to make any changes to our bloggy. MOL Glad things are settled now and all is well.

    Luv ya'

    Dezi

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  5. OH MY CK that was totally a big bad nightmare for TW to go through. UNtil blogspot kicks us off we're staying put!

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  6. Eeeek! We won't change and if we do we'll harass you two beforehand.

    Shoko

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  7. Oh God you poor thing!!! It sounds like what I went through when I bought my link for Cody. I don't even remember the details. I get so frustrated and yes, the tears DO come! I feel so bad for you. When I did Dakota's I had someone else do it!! Thanks for sharing your experience, I am sure I will have to refer to it again one day! catchatwithcarenandcody

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  8. This all sounds complicated and awful! When Mom's contract came up to be renewed at West Hosts, she seriously thought about moving, but then had second thoughts. We think she made the right decision. Thanks for some very good tips and info. XOCK, Lily Olivia, Mauricio, Misty May, Giulietta, Fiona, Astrid, Lisbeth and Calista Jo

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  9. Oh my, that sounds like quite the adventure, CK! I am really tech-stupid, so I'm not even willing to try to transfer my blog somewhere else. I don't mind the blogspot being in my web address.

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  10. Ck......uh.......frank lee we lost R mindz at birth, noe wait....we troo lee due knot understand any oh thiz stuff coz yur blog iz still in R reeder on blogger....

    oh, in just in case...
    HTML =
    herring
    toona
    mackerull
    leopard danio

    ♥♥♥
    ☺☺☺

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  11. This sounds like a nightmare. We purchased our domain name last May and knock on wood, so far all is OK.

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  12. Ugh! What an ordeal, CK. Our mom is like TW. Any techie stuff and she breaks out into a cold sweat. She would rather pay somebuddy a gazillon dollars to deal with the stuff than to deal with it herself.

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  13. We're so glad you got that all worked out. We used to be on GD, but we switched away a few years ago and found out that a lot of things we thought were hard on GD were... well, still not easy, but not AS hard elsewhere. Go figure. This blog post is going to be a great resource for people in the future who are going through this, CK.

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  14. What an absolutely terrifying story. When I made the switch to GoDaddy the transition was flawless...which actually scares me because what about tech is every easy???

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  15. Oh boy, that sounds confusing. Mommy could never figure that stuff out. She wants to change our domain from Blue Host but is afraid to. She might lose all of our stuff!

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  16. My Dad is a techy, but things like that scare even him. Anytime you rely on someone else just cross your paws and hope for the best CK!

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  17. GD is responsible for more than a few gray hairs and countless hours with customer support including last week. My techie woes continue but I did leave your tarot read at my blog.

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  18. I will never try to change, I know I would lose everything. I like Go Daddy, they are really good at tech support.

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  19. Ugh, sounds like quite the ordeal, but I'm glad you were able to finally get it worked out. I tried visiting when it was down but saw on FB that you were already aware of it. I will certainly take note if I ever need to do anything like that!

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  20. Thanks for spelling this all out for us, CK. We've got three domains through GoDaddy, but one of them was originally purchased through Google (Blogger) ... we need to get in contact with GoDaddy and make sure everything is a-ok.

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  21. Wow! Mom Paula is thinking about going private, but she's not ready to go through that hassle quite yet.

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  22. I'm moderately techy and switched from GD to HostGator a few years ago. We didn't find either to be particularly impressive with tech support and host gator has a really lame billing system. It's good you finally got it all sorted out.

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  23. Poor darling, what an ordeal!I can't imagine the suffering, the uncertainty, the panic! Oh, and I suppose it might have been a bit tough for TW also. It is stories like this that make us believe we will has a blogspot blog furever. XOXOXOX

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  24. That all sounds far too complicated for me... we avoid the tech stuff whenever we can.

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  25. Oh My Cod!!!
    Grrl Furrend, Poor TW sure had a hassle...but good old Saint Isidore loves to meddle in the affairs of Tech Users.
    Mommy always tries to sacrifice a chicken when she has to do anything complex...but she forgot last week when she installed Windows 10. Wes's had a brick instead of a computer until she got that one figured out...mes was denied the internet for 3 days!!!! Mes was worried my wedding would not happen...
    Thanks for the tips. Mommy will copy and paste them into her "When You Least expect it - things to do" File
    And mes happy yous back.
    Kisses
    Nellie

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  26. No body ever believes it when I say GoDaddy is not a good idea. We are with Rochen.com and value their hosting services very highly. We saved up and paid for someone to transfer for us, it took time to save up but we did it!

    Silver @ DashKitten

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  27. Oh, CK, that sounds like a horrible experience! We're glad everything is okay with your blog now. Thanks for sharing your experience so that we all know what to be careful about.

    Hugs to you, TW and Pop!

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  28. We didn't appreciate GD customer support so closed all according nuts with them. Took months to get the accounts closed. They did everything in their power to prevent us from cancelling payments.

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  29. Tech scares the female type at our house, and even though the male of the house, who is an IT guru, he hates dealing with all the domain stuffs. I'm glad you made it to the other side of the lake with that trouble. Smooth kayaking from here out!

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