[conspire] Re: Linux hosting

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com):

> This is the trouble with smaller shops; they may offer cool features,
> and for a tasty price, but their suitability for one's business might
> not be there. Or their business practices might be a little bit...
> eclectic. For instance, one local ISP I tried out for domain registra-
> tion, to get away from Network Solutions, changed my domain's registrar
> to bulkregister.com, which is what I was expecting and what I approved.
> Then, a couple of months down the road, I found that it was changed,
> again, to directi.com. Why? Because he'd gotten a better deal to have
> all his domains registered with them. And, on top of that, I found out
> today that *his ISP* is the *registrant* (along with administrative con-
> tact, technical contact, and billing contact) for *my* domain. Great
> *balls* of fire, and knock me over with a feather!
> 
> Now, he's a good guy, and has told me he'll get right on this and change
> this, today, and I believe him, yet this is the kind of thing one has to
> deal with when running with the smaller guys. 

I walk away from that with an entirely different lesson:  Never, ever,
ever let someone else register your domain on your behalf.  For one
thing, it's extremely common for them to list themselves as Registrant,
which can be nine kinds of hell to fix, because that designates the
_owner_ of the domain, who is supposed to be the last-word authority for
everything else.

Big guy, little guy:  Doesn't matter.  Either way, you've been severely
shot in the foot when that happens.

Register your domains, yourself.  That way, even if you don't know the
first thing about DNS or server administration, at least you'll _own_
them.  Then, you can get ISP help in fixing things up.