Back about ten years ago I gave a few lectures on what it took to setup a website. I’d ask the audience (who were not technical) for ideas, showed them how to search on a registrar, find a domain name, register it and it would be live usually within 15-30 minutes.  Then I’d add some content and publish it. It worked every time.

So you’d think the process would be smooth as silk now. Think again. I registered a domain about three weeks ago. I’d had the .eu version for a game idea but of course being .eu and me not living in a EU country and so on so I decided not to renew it. However the .org of it was available and I registered that.

Last week I decided to configure hosting, buy a SSL certificate and start using it. Only when I added it to the server I rent (a reseller account), it didn’t show up on the domain page. That’s where you get the name servers from. Rather than faff around with A recs and MX records, I usually set up Name Servers to point to the hosting server. For that of course you need to know the name servers.  But the domain was not on the GoDaddy DNS page so no name server informtion. The hassle factor was ramping up a bit quickish. Very odd.

I faffed around for a couple of days and got onto GoDaddy’s technical support. It turned out, well they pointed out that (a) the registrar (123-reg.co.uk) had put parking on it. and (b) there was something a bit weird with the DNS hosting. Weirdly, on Chrome, the page is blank which is why I’d not seen it. When I looked at it on iPhone sure enough there was a parking page with adverts.

So I got name servers from GoDaddy and set them on 123. I gave it two days and looked and no change. The name servers were set but The DNS page on their site did not say that it was being managed by external name servers. You get that on other domains; this one for instance.

Onto 123 support and to be fair to them, they sorted it pretty quickly. Also I found out that 123-reg.co.uk and GoDaddy are sister companies. You learn something every day. So I looked at the site and it was the same Parking page except it now said Parked on GoDaddy instead of Parked on 123-reg.co.uk. Me I find this a bit cheeky; I’m paying for registering a domain and hosting but those companies are making a little (maybe more than a little) by parking my domain. I can understand that they’ve probably got a lot of domains in limbo; alone and unhosted so why not park em. But it seems a bit cheeky just doing it without saying anything.

How long to Wait?

So back to GoDaddy support which isn’t always easy. You can do it online by a chat Window and at one point I got this gem. 371 Minutes! Normally its 4 or 5 minutes… I closed the browser window and came back 30 minutes later.

So the oddity I mentioned earlier; somehow, the domain was added for hosting against somebody else’s account. I can’t explain it, they can’t explain it. So they asked me to verify ownership by reverting the name servers to 123’s and adding a TXT record in the DNS with a certain name and value. Once they can see that I really do own it, they’ll change ownership of its hosting (not even the domain just the hosting!) to me.

So what used to take me 15-30 minutes is about nine days elapsed time. And it’s not finished yet. I really do think this domain is cursed.