# Down, up, and move: Tales of DNS woes


I know this happens to people all the time, I remember my friend Leylop
had huge problems migrating her domain from one host to another, when
the first one wouldn’t release it. So I was up - a few days ago, someone
told me that they got a page advertising real estate when they went to
my page. I checked, and yes, apparently my domain had lapsed. I thought
the U-HS guys I were hosting with had been quite negligent in not
informing me up-front (I guess we’ve become kind of used to that kind of
hand-holding), and I was a bit annoyed with them. Took about 18 hours
before they answered my first ticket too. In the meantime, I knew I
would be looking for a better host because my one year contract was
about to expire, and I’d just set my girlfriend up with 1&1, where she
got several gigabytes of space (at U-HS I think I had 50, or 100). I
spent some time looking around, and decided on Site5.com, even though it
was slightly more expensive than I wanted; but then I get not only
ssh-access (which is so useful) and Ruby on Rails hosting (I haven’t
written anything yet, but if I want to…), and a lot of other neat stuff.
Plus five gigabytes of storage, unlimited subdomains, etc.

To make a long story short, it took a number of emails with U-HS, and
finally I got them to give me free DNS hosting for a year because of the
miss, which is very fair (after all, my site is not a critical business
site or something - I don’t think the world really minded it’s absence),
and I migrated to Site5.com. The migration was surprisingly easy, tar
all your files, upload them here and untar them (thank god for ssh here,
although cpanel did help me backup my files at U-HS), export my mysql,
change a few lines near the top with username and password info,
reimport, and everything **just works**! Nice. (And I upgraded to
WordPress 2.0.2 a few weeks ago, so everything is indeed cutting-edge.
Now I just have to write interesting and inspired posts. Hm…)

Otherwise - exams until the 29th, and in mid-May I am probably leaving
for Indonesia for a year, working for CARE Canada. Trying to learn
Indonesian right now. *Kucing yang berwarna hitam sedang duduk di atas
kacamata anak laki-laki*.

Stian