Hijacked!

The domain name under which I keep my philosophy blog and personal webpage seems to have been taken over by a domain name hijacker. (You might wonder how this could happen; there are a few details below the fold.) So I’ve had to move everything around. For anyone who links to those sites, or read them, the domain name is now weatherson.org rather than weatherson.net. Similarly the domain name of my email address has changed so it now ends .org rather than .net.

So how could this happen? When I set up the sites a few years ago, I bought a domain name and hosting bundle from Total Choice Hosting. They’ve been a reasonably good hosting service. As a domain name service, well not so much. The main problem was that when the credit card I used for the sites expired, I had to send a new one in. That I did – but I hadn’t imagined that they’d set up their company so that the customer had to tell both the hosting service side and the domain name side about the new credit card. Since I don’t do what I can’t imagine doing, I didn’t do this.

No problem you might think. They should alert me that the domain name is about to expire. Well they did – in a sense. They sent several emails to the email address I’d used when acquiring the domain name. Again, the idea that the email address I had on file with the hosting service might be the email address to use for the domain name service that I was buying from them didn’t exactly seem to register. Or perhaps everyone who does this kind of thing knows that you’re expected to tell both halves of a company about any change, not expect them to sort it out internally. As it stands I’m too tired from cleaning up all of this to think too hard about assignments of blame.