I have registered a new domain, Bhatnaturally.com and have taken a new hosting plan with GoDaddy.com. I am doing this primarily to avoid any contact with Znet India, with whom this domain is registered. I have had a terrible experience with them over the past 1 week. Thanks to a combination of reasons – my mistakes and terrible customer support from them, my site was suspended over the weekend. The full story, if you care to know:
This domain, http://www.lbhat.com is registered with Znet India. It expired on Dec 16, 2009 but their member control panel erroneously shows it as expiring in 2010. The site is hosted by Bluehost.com who kept sending me reminders about the domain expiry. I ignored them (my bad) since the date mentioned at Znet was a year away.
On Dec 16, when I called the folks at Znet India they casually said that they park domains for 2 years and hence it shows as 2010. I could not renew the domain since they were upgrading their back end. I was asked to give a cheque and was told that I will get an email with the details. That email never came. When I called them again, I was asked to ‘add funds’ (one of the options in their CP). I did through my credit card and got an error message. Sigh. I then added funds through PayPal.
All was well until 19 December when my site was suspended. I got an email from Znet India which evocatively said:
We have add the fund of 490, you can added by Your Fund Excecuted With Refrence:45Your Mode OF Payement Is:Paypal.
Note: We have only added the fund in your account. You have to execute the orders/renew your services by your existing fund by logging in your members control panel.
I could not ‘execute the order’ myself and dealing with them on the phone was horror story. After 4 hours of explaining things to various people who promised to call back within 10 minutes but never did or gave conflicting solutions, I managed to speak to the Billing guys at Znet, who renewed my domain.
I simply want to avoid any telephonic, email or direct contact with the self-proclaimed ‘India’s top web hosting company’.
The plan now:
– operate a new domain through GoDaddy
– attempt to migrate the database from this site to the new one
– if the above fails, keep this site as it is and start afresh at Bhatnaturally.com
I know the last option is fraught with risks – all the hard work over the years in terms of page ranks, visits and traffic gone down the drain. Whatever rankings this site enjoyed in AdAge Power 150 or at Blog Rank will disappear. I hope I can count on you, dear reader for your continued support.
Update: Exporting databases and migrating content is too big a pain. I think I will stick to using this as my primary site. Thanks to my impatience, I now have an extra domain name and hosting package that I may never use. About 10k down the drain. Sigh. So until further notice, I will stick to updating this site.
