Who's Your Daddy, Hostmonster?

So I'm going to rant about all this domain name forwarding, DNS hosting nonsense for a moment.

Hostmonster is on my sh** list. They wanted me to pay double the price I paid 2 years ago for hosting my site, when nothing else had changed.

Unfortunately, we are pretty broke at this point and we're trying to save as much as we can for some big ticket items we need (new car, fixing up the house, etc.). And, of course, with the lovely unemployment figures our state & county has been seeing, there's always the big L word dancing around in the back of our minds.

Plus, I just wasn't updating that often, and I couldn't guarantee myself that I wouldn't wind up doing the same thing if I renewed.

So I decided to keep my domain name (The cats would never have let me give THAT up) and just forward it to a free Blogger account. That way, I wouldn't feel guilty if I didn't update and feel like I was wasting money. The domain name renewal is relatively inexpensive, so no big monetary loss there.

Hostmonster was all on board with this, and I was set to renew my domain with them. Their help site told me specifically how to contact tech support to make Cname and Arecord changes (blah blah technical jargon blah blah) in order to forward my domain to my blogger site. I followed the directions, and at first, it worked like a charm after a minor redirect hiccup.

Then all of a sudden the redirect stopped working. After some back and forth nonsense with Hostmonster, they basically said they could renew my domain name, but they wouldn't host the DNS nameservers or whatever it is that I need for the redirect. (I've dealt with some techy things, but even this mess is over my head, so don't ask me to explain fully just yet). They said I could find DNS hosting for FREE or...I could just renew my hosting packing with them.

Kind of stupid to pay $100 or more for something I can get for free.

I could've done the free DNS host and let Hostmonster keep my domain, but their lack of explanation, plus the misleading help page and constant back and forth with their tech support really pissed me off. So I transferred my domain to Godaddy. So not only did Hostmonster lose my hosting business with their hosting fee jackup, but they lost me entirely as a customer for not providing a basic service that others provide for free.

Godaddy renewed my domain name at a lower price, PLUS they offer DNS hosting services for it. Unfortunately, it'll take a day or two for the DNS to update, so for now, I have to use my blogspot address before the redirect takes effect.

Eventually I'll probably get my own space back. Godaddy has some good rates, and I could get 3 years worth of hosting for $50 less than 2 years with Hostmonster. But in the spirit of saving money, I'm going to wait until we're a little more financially stable. The nice thing about WordPress is that I can export my Blogger entries and reimport them into WordPress, so it won't be an extremely difficult conversion.

So while I haven't been around much, I'm not down and out just yet.