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Auto-Domain Renewal Not so Automatic

• CATEGORIES: News This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

(Apparently not all the glitches are gone as I just had trouble re-logging into eWillys)

Some days just don’t go like I plan them. After being busy early this week with doctor appointments (for Ann), bread baking, and ewillys updating, I had set aside Friday morning to work on my next book.

But, life had other plans. First, Thursday’s night’s turkey (or maybe the glass of rum I had) upset my stomach, so I didn’t sleep well Thursday night. Then, at 9am while laying blissfully in bed with Ann, I received a call from Hobeken, New Jersey. I rarely receive calls anymore, let alone from numbers unknown. I told my wife that if there’s a message, it’s a bad sign.

There was a message. It was a bad sign.

A reader named Adam left a message informing me the site was down (and I do appreciate the message!). He noted that ewillys was defaulting to a domain renewal site. A few minutes later I got a follow up call and message from Roger in Ohio. Yep, there was definitely a problem.

After a few god-damnitts (not for the calls, but for the problem), I climbed out of bed and sat down at my computer desk. Only partly awake, I stared at the screen thinking ‘what do I do now‘? I was not quite firing on all cylinders (if any).  I pulled up eWillys. Sure enough, even in my half-awake state I could see that the wrong page appeared.

What was truly puzzling was that I HAD renewed eWillys.com eight days ago to avoid this very problem. To get to the bottom of it, I called the 1-800 number of the company (Midphase) that hosts my domain name (different than my web host). To my disbelief, I encountered three straight advertisements that required me to ‘exit’ the ads by clicking on the ‘star’ button of my phone. Worse, after the third ad I was redirected to Verizon (my phone provider). What the hell? I was really pissed.

So, I jumped back online. I entered a dizzying array of usernames and passwords before I remembered how to access my domain name management screen. I opened the billing section and saw that I had intact renewed my domain name. To get to the bottom of it, I entered an online help chat with a customer service support person who informed me I hadn’t renewed my domain name. But, yes I had, I wrote, and the evidence is on my billing statement!

The support person responded by exiting the chat and sending me to billing. Next thing I knew I was online chatting with a billing customer person. That person claimed I also hadn’t renewed my domain name. Again I wrote, But, yes I did and the evidence is on my billing statement!

She put me on hold so she could do research. A few minutes later she came back and told me that yes, I had renewed. They (who this mysterious they is remains a mystery) just hadn’t updated the domain name. She then apologized and said I’d have to wait a few hours for the domain name to propagate. I told her that wasn’t good enough. I wanted to know why it happened so that it wouldn’t happen next time. She responded that it could have happened for a variety of reasons. I asked how we keep this from happening next year. She offered to inform the admins of the problem . . . yeah, some admin at another location is going to listen to a call center person tell them they screwed up … I was not happy.

At this point I tried reaching through the screen to choke the person on the other end, but my hand bounced off my screen. To protect myself from virtually assaulting anyone, I left the chat room.

So, sorry for the drop in service Friday morning. While the domain seems to be fixed now, my faith Midphase’s domain service is most definitely broken.

 

7 Comments on “Auto-Domain Renewal Not so Automatic

  1. bob in nc

    dave;

    good morning.

    i had to re-enter in my email and name this morning on the leave a reply. fyi.

    we all figured something simple had happened. don’t sweat the small stuff. if it had been down for more than a couple days we would have started to worry

    bob in beaufort

  2. MB Jamie

    I really appreciate your dedication to keeping ewillys up and running and enjoy my visits here each time I come.

  3. dencoarty

    You might consider transferring your domain to GoDaddy or some other host. GoDaddy is very efficient and you can pay for more than one year if you want to. Our business has used GoDaddy for several years now and have had no issues. My son did the transfer of one of our domains, so I’m no expert on the process, but I’ll bet GoDaddy can walk you through it. There are so many options in cyberland, there is no excuse for bad customer service, simply bad for business.
    Thanks for your unflagging efforts to keep our favorite site functioning, Dave.

  4. Colin Peabody

    Glad you are back up and running Dave! You can tell how much you are missed when we can’t get our daily eWillys fix!! Even got an email from Glenn that he sent to you and copied me on. Several other fans asked me what the problem was, like I would know! I was in the dark as much as they were! LOL!!!

  5. Alaska Paul

    Nice save, Dave. Ann, the turkey was great, really moist and tasty and I wasn’t even there.
    Safari found Ewillys at 9:30 this morning (Nov. 30th) but the Goddess found ewillys with FireFox yesterday so that proves everything I do always takes me longer to accomplish than normal folks.

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