A valuable lesson learned in the last 36 hrs

[lastprotocol]

Background : My main domain name, desk2web.co.uk was registered in 1998, and has remained with me through thick and thin. Before moving to HG I was hosted by realtimehosting.com in the UK, they retained the admin control on that domain when I moved to HG as a reseller (at the time it was the easiest thing to do and despite what anyone thinks I believe I did the best thing, for me, at the time).

realtimehosting sent me (as I found out today) many many messages through their control panel (HELM) but they were directed to an old email account which I no longer used ..... can you see where this is leading yet!

Anyway, at about 10pm UK time last night my wife was checking her emails and commented that she had "no server" - odd thought I, so I checked and low and behold no email, no web site. I checked whois (why I don't know!) and saw that the domain was being listed as lapsed since 2 Jun!

Panic!! I have a number of sub-domains on that domain which I use for some clients, just redirecting their domain name to their particular folder. Obviously none of them were working, no emails nothing.

I contacted realtimehosting - no joy, one man band, no replies to emails until this morning (more on that later) and UKReg who were the registrar who said that they could so nothing because the domain was in another usernames account.

At about 2am I contacted HG Support and requested them to basically transfer all records of desk2web.co.uk to lastprotocol.net - so that at least I could work on the sites and reconfigure things - now some of you may know better ways to do what I needed, but this worked and thats all I was worried about!

HG Support worked - now rememeber this is a dedicated server so they are not actually obliged to work on it I guess? And they sorted everything really quickly.

8.45am and an email from realtime saying that "We have sent many emails on this subject the domain expired on 2 Jun" - more panic!

Bounced countless emails across to realtime and UKReg throughout the day, no repsonse from realtime until about 4pm and only one from UKReg basically pointing me to their Domain Dispute procedure.

Anyway, up until this point you (like I was) are probably thinking realtimehosting what a bunch of ........

MSN Messenger flashes up that "Robert" is trying to contact me - Robert being the owner of realtimehosting. Now Robert is currently in France, on holiday and accessing his pda trying to help me out!

Domain name paid for, having got access to the control panel again (and changing email addresses etc!) and the domain is now being renewed!

So, back onto HG Support to ask them to move everything back to the way it was before! Fingers crossed they'll do it

So, the moral of this story is simple - keep all contact information, keep all IMPORTANT emails, keep a diary, but most of all DO NOT PANIC the guys n gals in HG Support are FANTASTIC, if they can help they will, and they will do it in such a way that they take all the pressure off you the customer.

Thanks guys - I could name each of you that has had some dealing with this today, but that would be a little unfair, because you are a team and a dammned good one at that.

Thanks