Oops

Sinosplice has been offline for the past few days for reasons entirely unrelated to hosting or blocking.

The other night right before I went to bed a thought popped into my head: doesn’t my domain name expire sometime in April? I better check on that.

I did a WHOIS lookup on www.sinosplice.com. Sure enough, it expired the very next day. Furthermore, my registrar was still the much-loathed iPowerweb.com. I vowed to myself last year to transfer my domain name to a new registrar before the year was up. I figured I could make it, because I’m 12 hours ahead.

So I immediately signed up with GoDaddy.com (hey, they have cheap domain names!) and initiated the transfer. Unfortunately, these things take time. Especially when dumb slow iPowerweb is involved. So, before the transfer was approved by iPowerweb, the domain name expired and my site went offline. Immediately thereafter I had to go on a business trip to Shandong for three days.

Basically, iPowerweb refused to transfer my domain name unless I renewed it for another outrageous $20. Plus, the way GoDaddy’s system works, I can’t approve the transfer without use of the e-mail address in my WHOIS info. Once my domain name expired, I couldn’t access that e-mail address anymore.

So basically, I still had to pay iPowerweb $20. Lesson learned: initiate domain name transfers early. Also, iPowerweb is EVIL. Seriously. Never use them. They offer a decent deal to lure you in, but once they have you, it’s hard to escape, and their customer service is horrible if you have a problem that falls outside of the problems they run into day in and day out.

I still want my domain name out of iPowerweb’s control ASAP, so Sinosplice may go down again briefly as the domain name is transferred, because I think the nameservers may have to be reconfigured.

Apr 28 Update: Success! My domain transfer has finally gone through.