Well, I finally got one of my domains back this Tuesday. Woo Hoo!

I want to share with you an important lesson I learned recently on why you can never be too careful while doing business online.
ResaleRocket.com is finally back up and in my hands again after 4 days of downtime, hours wasted on the phone and $80 bucks spent..

As I mentioned earlier, the domain was registered with one of my former webhosts, “Bluehost.”
Last Friday, the site went down and nobody from the Bluehost support team could tell me why.
I called on Friday to see what was going on..
A support tech told me they were having database issues.
I called again Saturday.. One tech told me they didn’t know why the site was down.
I called again and another tech said he’d fix the record for the domain and I’d be good to go in 20 minutes.
Another tech told me it was a DNS issue.. (DUH, they changed it on me)

Its Monday and the site is still down..
I have no idea why because the domain registration was extended until 2010.
The Whois database said it shouldn’t expire until 02/2009 which was kind of odd and in the BlueHost member’s area, It said the domain expired!
WHAT??!! Why aren’t any of these dates matching?
At this point I was freaking out.. What the heck was going on here?
I thought, if this was correct, why wasn’t I notified somehow that it was about to expire?
They had my phone number and email address on file, so what’s the deal?

Tuesday morning, the site is still down and I’m a “little” pissed..
I went ahead and forked over 80 bucks to renew the domain and get it out of a domain auction pool where I guess someone else could have picked it up but luckily, no one had..
Why this ever was an issue when I paid up on that domain until 2010? I’ll probably never know.
I am currently in the process of changing the domain registrar over to Zoot Host to ensure this does not happen again on any of my domains.

All I can say is this..
Support at BlueHost is equally poor for their hosting in my opinion, which is why I quit using them for hosting over a year ago.
I know I sound like a broken record every time I mention Zoot Host, but this is one of the reasons why I am so happy with the customer support Jon Atwood and his team provide.
They know their stuff and this mess that I just went through with BlueHost would have never taken place if the domains were registered at ZootHost originally.

Moral of the story:
Be careful of who you choose to host and register your domains with!
Research carefully and listen to what others are saying.
Since your business relies on hosting for your sites, choose a company that values the business relationship it has with its customers and knows what they’re talking about when you have a problem or when your business is on the line.

Ryan

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