On the 9 May 2002 I registered shepline.com and set up the website with Advent Internet hosting the site. They proved to be incompetent charletans when it came to anything other than the simplest act of setting up a domain and taking money. They also have inaccurate contact numbers on there website (in the end I obtained a mobile number from worldpay.com) and do not answer their emails.
As you can imagine, unhappy with Advent I moved the site to Open Hosting last June (following a recommendation from tinyjo), who have proved themselves to be everything that Advent aren’t. As part of the transfer, I payed Open Hosting for 1 extra year of registration so it should expire on 9 May 2005
However, despite frequent requests for Advent to finish the transfer, they didn’t and so it expired on the original date of 9 May 2004.
Some time yesterday evening Advent Internet turned the site off, and now if you do a whois search on my site you find it listed with the status: REGISTRAR-HOLD (this is why you will notice that my site is non-existant and even these pages are lacking some graphics and elements of style, and that you may have received an email from me asking you to use an alternative email).
This morning I spoke with a very nice, helpful person at Open Hosting. He explained to me that now that it has expired I will have to renew the registration with Advent and then request transfer again. I have done this, and am now waiting for it to go through the system.
I still need to be rid of Advent though and so I have contacted BulkRegister, the registrar behind my current reseller. They too were very helpful, and following authorisation that I need to fax them on Monday will instruct Advent to change the admin contact for my site to myself. They will stipulate 5 working days for this to happen, after which time if Advent have not complied BulkRegister will make the change themselves. With myself as admin contact, the full transfer to Open Hosting can then take place.
In the meantime, the lady at BulkRegister said that she would lift the Hold on my site, so that it should appear again with 24-48 hours.
Very complex thing, these hosting sites and domains and such.
