textadventures.online

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I might have an issue, as the registar that I used has my beaver address on file, which I cannot get to or change. We'll see. The site may live under a different URL.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm going to let this expire off namecheap ($44 to renew! Eat shit) and just buy it off porkbun after.

[Tdarcos]

Check IONOS.COM, they are offering $1 specials for first year registrations/
Also I use SPACESHIP.COM for renewals
IONOS also wants $48 to transfer textadventures.online, but SPACESHIP will do a transfer for $28.46.

When you buy a domain name other than for short-term purposes, (like the website announcing everything at your store must go (including store fixtures) at big discounts, you're almost certainly not going to renew) you have to consider not only the registration cost, but the maintenance: what is the renewal (or transfer) going to cost? And are you arranging to create your own off-line backups (at least monthly, and potentially weekly or for busy or hiigh-traffic sites, daily)? Depending on your hosting provider's backup system is risking your data with a company that may or may not be diligent,and may or may not have tested their backup plan. Their terms of service (have you actually read them?) may limit damages to a maximum of whatever you paid them, or someti,mes a maximum of $5, and to get even that you alnost certainly have to accept binding arbitration where you have to pay half the fee (proobably $250.00).

I have a policy: never use your registrar as your hosting provider*. If the registrar gets too many complaints from people who don't like you or the content of your website, they could drop you, leaving you with no website until you find a new registrar and new hosting provider, and restore your site from your offline backup (do you even have one?), but if separate, you transfer the domain name to a new registrar, reset its DNS records to point to your original hosting provider and you're back online within at most a day.

* If starting a new website on a very good price for domain and hosting that may be an exception.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Every domain registrar makes transferring away as shitty as possible. The people involved - product managers, product owners, developers - should be locked up when they pull this. Not forever, but I'd be happy putting these people in prison for a year when they implement the dark pattern of "easy to sign up, impossible to cancel." I don't think society would suffer at all. I think it would be better to keep the pieces of shit gleefully designing and implementing these patterns away from computers for a year and see if maybe they can reintegrate into the society the rest of us manage to make pleasing after punishment.

Namecheap did something similar for the initial sign up, Paul. It was really cheap, as their name implies, to get the first year. I forget what I had been paying since this last piece, but $44 for any kind of registration for any domain is just a shit company desperately hoping to wring some money out of people who are too busy to cancel or too busy to go through the very, very stupid and horrible process that is moving a domain.

Porkbun isn't offering $1 domains initially (although they should) but so far they have not pulled the awfulness of a 1000% spike in prices for subsequent years.