Well, we made it. The move to GoDaddy for hosting of our websites and our email is complete. One major hiccup occurred during the change in registrar from 007names.com to GoDaddy.com. It seems that 007names removed our existence in their directory before they actually released the domain names for GoDaddy to take control of. This resulted in all sorts of problems, from the websites being unaccessible to email messages from Stacy’s customers being bounced back to them as undeliverable, for about 3 days.
But I’m happy to say that all functions are back, and most importantly, Stacy can get her email.
The power at home did go out for a little over an hour, and the website and email of course stayed up. As I’ve said, we have planned power outages about twice a year, and unplanned outages a couple more times during the hot summer months. For the planned outages I need to rent a generator capable of running all the network equipment, servers and desktop PC’s needed to run the business (Did I mention the cordless phones?) The 24 hour rental fee is around $40.00 from Home Depot. I then have to take the day off to set this all up, power all the systems off, plug them into the generator and bring them back up. Then repeat the process in reverse when the power comes back on and return the generator, full of gas.
The total cost is difficult to calculate, but $40 for the generator, $6 for gas for the generator, another $10 dollars for mileage on the Jeep to pick up and drop off the generator at Home Depot and you’ve got yourself a $56 cost. Times two = $112 which is more than…
I can host all my websites and email at GoDaddy for less than $100 dollars a year. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee (Which is better than I can do from home even with the generator).
Lessons learned; When transferring an existing web presence from one domain registrar to another, they may delete all your DNS information (If you use their DNS servers) before they release your names to the new registrar. They can delay this activity for 5-7 days. To avoid this issue, you can change your NS settings before requesting a domain transfer. Try to do this a day before to give your current registrar time to update internic (The god of all DNS). Internic will point to the new NS servers even if your DNS has been removed from your old registrar.
See the other sites I host www.vacationexchanges.com www.vacationsandtravel.com and www.angels-fans.com
Keith