Whether you’ve been here the past few days or if you subscribed to me via RSS, you may have noticed that, since the 25th of July, 2010, this site had previously been pointed to one of those domain squatter’s pages (see here for an example).
Apparently, my claim on the domain had expired on the 25th but the notifications were never received by me. The WhoIs information was never changed with respect to my email address. To make things worse, I had assumed I was on an automatic renewal setup, so I never bothered to check when my lease expired.
You can imagine the shock I had when I went to make a post last night (probably about how much Statistics I’ve been doing over the week—a lot) and instead found a squatter on my page, with links redirecting to pole dancing lessons and pole barns. When I ran a WhoIs check, it said the “people” at Enom.com had swooped in and gobbled up my domain. I went there, and test-registered the domain. They wanted me to pay the $69 for something intangible that I owned a few days ago.
I asked a few people who’d know about this sort of thing (thanks Tim, Adwin, Stephen, and David) and the general consensus was that I was not getting my domain back. I contacted Hostgator about the problem, sort of in a panic, and the helpful support guy told me he’d do his best to snag it back on my behalf, and all I have to do is pay for the renewal for the coming year (since after all my lease did expire). So, $15 and one night’s worth of sleep later, www.the-ppole.com is back in my rightful possession, with all the WordPress installation + databases intact (I checked first thing this morning when I woke up).
Let this mark the start of a new age, where domain squatting bastards like Enom Inc. can cram it with their business model.
Re: Amy – The squatters’ asses have been soundly kicked.