Six of one, half a dozen of the other

Equinox tonight. Been a while since I posted, so here goes:

I think I may have finally freed up my domain name.

I bought one some time ago, and it's basically served as a glorified email redirect for all these years.

A couple of months ago, it got locked up, due to my having transferred it to 1 & 1 Internet Services, which turned out to be something of a mistake.

Now, 1 & 1 certainly has low-cost domain registration, and they offer free private registration, in which your contact details are screened through their operation.

But what they don't tell you when registering is that if you don't go through the process in a way that specifically selects the Instant Domain package and wind up purchasing your domain registration as an add-on to an existing hosting package (which they damn near encourage you to do during sign up), if you don't have a package which supports private registration, there's no way to use that feature short of upgrading or downgrading your hosting package, and there's no way to split off your domain name from the package without some sort of additional fee, according to their faq.

My case is a little different, however. I'd had this free 3-year hosting preview package that they'd promoted when they were first starting out, and yeah, my domain name once transferred got tied to that. No private registration for me, even though that was one of the things I was expecting to get when I paid for the transfer.

Where it really went wrong was when the 3-year preview expired. My domain name was still locked up in the expired preview package, and I couldn't switch it out without giving them a credit card number, which I didn't have a valid one I felt like turning over to them at the time, given that their stated policy was to automatically “upgrade” any preview packages to the “nearest” full package and bill for that amount unless the customer specifically cancelled. And in order to cancel, the customer needed to supply a credit card number.

See where this is going?

In any case, by the time they finally authorized Paypal payments (which in turn require a pre-authorization which is there to essentially let 1 & 1 do automatic billing on your Paypal account), my domain was completely locked up in a cancelled package which I couldn't even access the settings in the Control Panel to split off my purchased domain into an Instant Domain ”package upgrade”.

I couldn't even get in to change the admin contact info and get the authcode for a transfer.

I must say that they responded to my emails rather quickly, if a little cluelessly.

So today I went and performed a transfer via their Transfer your domain interface (after much trial and error, as simply following the prompts kept kicking me back to the domain availability checking page or the front page, depending and I had to put the Instant Domain package in my cart, go to checkout the cart, and select the domain name from there before it worked), basically transferring it back to myself, this time as an Instant Domain package and hopefully it goes through and I can start using my glorified email redirect again.

Otherwise I start looking elsewhere.

There was also going to be a bit of a rant on local bus service and eBay (not related), but I have other things to take care of tonight so it can wait.