Transferring Domains Out of GoDaddy and Domains By Proxy
I’ve finally reached my breaking point with Internet domain registrar company GoDaddy.
From the company’s constantly increasing prices, the high annual fee of Domains By Proxy, the endless advertisements throughout the ordering process (even loyal customers are spammed with ads), and the ridiculous television commercials for GoDaddy, I’ve had enough.
No more GoDaddy.
No more paying to help sponsor former IndyCar / current NASCAR driver Danica Patrick.
Enough is enough.
I decided to switch to NameCheap for my domain registrar. I’ve used the company several times in the past and my experiences have been good. Their regular prices are cheaper than GoDaddy, and the privacy company that they use, WhoisGuard, is *significantly cheaper* than Domains By Proxy with GoDaddy.
It’s a win-win situation by switching to NameCheap.
Anyway, NameCheap was offering a sale on domain transfers for this Earth Day (April 22nd). Having never done a domain transfer, I went to the NameCheap website, looked through the FAQ pages, and found the exact information that I needed to switch from GoDaddy to NameCheap. It’s a little bit tricky, but as long as you follow the instructions, then you should be fine.
The hardest part wasn’t dealing with GoDaddy but rather Domains By Proxy.
Once you agree to use a privacy service like Domains By Proxy, that company then “holds” the website domain for you in the name of security. You can still log in to GoDaddy and renew the website, and you can also let it expire, but you cannot transfer the website to another registrar company without clearing the way through Domains by Proxy first.
What if it’s been so long ago that you’ve last used Domains By Proxy that you’ve lost or forgotten your login information, and the e-mail account you used no longer exists? How are you supposed to access your information at Domains By Proxy?
That was my situation. I created by Domains By Proxy account back in 2007 when GoDaddy was running a free promotion. Since then I’ve switched computers twice, and the e-mail account that was registered to Domains By Proxy was long gone. It turns out that it was connected to one of my websites that I created in 2006 and discontinued in 2009.
Fortunately, there’s a way to go through GoDaddy to find your Domains By Proxy account number. Here’s a guide on how to do it. Read more…
Categories: Uncategorized, websites Tags: websites
General Updates – August 2013
It’s hard to believe that we’re already in the month of September.
For me, it’s also somewhat surprising that I basically went an entire month without adding new posts to this website. I need to keep adding articles here, even if they’re small and fairly simple.
Throughout the month of August I’ve been working overtime on both my Florida Project and Chamber of Reviews website. Unfortunately, all of my updates on both of those websites are very time consuming.
Right now I’m working on adding more photos at Florida Project. I literally have over 50,000 photos from the Disney and Universal theme parks and probably about 80 or so hours of video content in my overall collection. The main problem is that it takes a while to sort the photos down to the highlights and then place all of them in a meaningful order. I don’t just add random photos in each section of the website. All of the pictures are in order of how you would walk through an area of the park and also how you would experience a ride or show. The catch is that for some of the areas and attractions, simply organizing the photos can take a couple of hours. Add in more time for editing the photos and then creating a page for them on the website. The final product looks great, but it’s very time consuming.
My review pages at Chamber of Reviews are also very time consuming.
When it comes to the movie reviews, the average review consists of fifteen to twenty pictures and over 3,000 words. Depending on how well I know the film and the characters, it’ll take anywhere from two to six hours to write a single review. Like with Florida Project, the objective here is attention-to-detail. When I review a movie I want to get the details correct. Some websites like Wikipedia are a great help when it comes to reviewing films, but the synopsis is frequently lacking information and it places events out of order. As a result, I need to keep referring back to said film while writing its review, making sure that I get the characters, details and sequence of events correct and maintain my credibility. Read more…
Categories: Uncategorized, websites Tags:
Florida-Project.com – Update & Future Plans – Summer 2010
My website Florida-Project.com has been growing by leaps and bounds since its creation back in 2008.
Since then, I’ve scanned and added hundreds of old and current Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando theme park guidemaps, dozens of vacation planning guides, and THOUSANDS of digital pictures. The website is my personal dedication to fellow theme park lovers and those who want to know more about the history of the parks and rides.
And recently, I began editing and adding video clips of rides and attractions. These clips include walking through line queues and recording first person P.O.V. on the rides themselves. This is just the beginning as exclusive video content of vintage and extinct parts of Disney and Universal will (hopefully) start being added in the next 3-4 months.
Here’s where I stand right now with the content: Read more…
Categories: websites Tags: website
The End of Summer – Time to get Down to Business
It’s August, we’re only a few days away from the first NFL preseason game, and all around the metro Atlanta area and kids are getting ready for school.
For me, the entire month of July was gone in a flash. The month started with preparing to leave to spend a week in Detroit, Michigan (yeah, I’m crazy at times) only to have that trip canceled at the last minute for emergency repairs at home. That issue was finally solved and a week later we headed down for a planned two-week trip in central Florida. After coming back home, I then spent a week working like crazy adding new content and fixing an nagging issue with my Florida-Project.com website. Whew!
Read more…
New Waterfall and Lake Burton Pictures
Last night and today I finally added more pictures to my online photo album hosted here at RellimZone.com.
This time around the photos are focused on recent Fourth of July trips up to Lake Burton in the mountains in the northeastern part of the state and some of the waterfalls in neighboring North Carolina.
Lake Burton photos.
North Carolina photos.
Read more…
Categories: photography, travel, websites Tags:
Website updates – April 9-10, 2009
First of all, my scanner is starting to make strange noises.
I’m fearing that this is an early sign that the end may be near for my cheap scanner. I only use it for my Florida Project website, but I’ve got lots of scanned material already out there and still a lot more material to scan and add to that website. I also have a lot (thousands, actually) of digital pictures to edit and add to the site, so for the time being I’ll be focusing more on the pictures and a little bit less on scanning. The photo pages are excellent when it comes to SEO and generating new traffic to that website.
My other big update is that I brought my Local, State & National website back to life and posted several articles out there.
Read more…
Mid-week update
After applying new SEO techniques and adding two new pages, I’ve already seen a slight increase in natural website traffic at my Intruder Prevention website (– UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com). I don’t do any paid advertising for any of my websites (at least for now), so all of my traffic is from people doing regular searches at the popular search websites and through word of mouth. And for IP, that natural traffic is on the rise.
Read more…
The conversion of Intruder Prevention is complete.
The other day I picked up an excellent (and more importantly, updated) book on search engine optimization (SEO) that gave great examples of how to maximize the usage of key words and phrases without overdoing it, how to write better META descriptions and key words, and how to write more persuasive articles to lead to better conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Needless to say, once I went through the first two chapters and saw the example website that was successfully converted from a nothing website into one of the top websites in its category, I was inspired. I went straight to my Intruder Prevention website and spent the next two days working hard on the new SEO techniques.
– UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com
Affiliate marketing is next
Okay, it’s time to move on to the next project in my quest to have a six-figure income through websites and affiliate marketing.
So far I’ve been researching ways to develop Internet traffic through natural ways such as Yahoo and Google search engines, blogging software, and direct links. My sites are slowly improving in traffic flow, but it’s going to take a while at this rate.
Read more…
Post updating update
After updating my three WordPress websites, one of them today has been reporting back information at StatCounter.
That’s a bit of a relief. Now I know that something is working even though I know for a fact that my website has seen more traffic than what was reported and I still would like to know other critical pieces of information. This is a good start even though it still needs further investigation.
Let’s see if this works.
On my quest to get StatCounter working correctly, the best advice I could find was to make sure that my version of WordPress was in fact the most recent version. As you could probably guess, mine was not.
I initially built this website and my two other WordPress ones at the same time and used the same version of WordPress, which at that time was 2.6.3. I had received notices about upgrading to version 2.7 for a while now, but when looking at the documentation to do so it looked more complicated than it was. Rather than risking losing my websites during the upgrading process, I just didn’t upgrade.
StatCounter review
To help get a true idea about the traffic patterns for my websites, the other day I registered with a website called StatCounter and added the code to five of my websites including this one.
I like the amount of detail available from clearly seeing things such as visitors’ traffic patterns and the top downloaded files, but for some reason I still cannot get it to work with my WordPress websites.
Reporting problems with Google Adsense & Analytics
So last night I was going through my Google Adsense account and seeing how the advertisements were doing.
Overall, my page impressions (advertisements that were actually displayed to website visitors) were fairly high for what I usually see. This past week alone I picked up a strong link for one of my sites and saw a great boost in traffic.
As great as the increase in traffic and exposure was, it sure wasn’t reflected that way in Google Adsense.
Widescreen photos
Don’t you hate having one of those “Doh!” moments when you finally realize how to do something better?
Yeah, that just happened to me last night while I was editing photos for my photo album here on this website.
My main photo editing tool is Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. I like it and it can do the things I need to do to my photos, like other photo editing software can do. Well, I finally realized how to correctly modify pictures to turn my 4:3 images into 16:10 images that neatly fit on widescreen monitors. And like how many things happen, it happened by accident.
Read more…
Categories: photography, websites Tags: Florida, pictures, websites
And the work finally continues.
I’ve finally gotten back to working and adding content again to my website, Florida Project.
It feels good adding content back to that website since I switched website hosting companies. I didn’t want to switch, but after my website had an unwelcome visitor that exploited holes in the software I was using, changing hosting providers and making a fresh start was the best option. I have no idea how far that person got into my files and directories and if any spyware or any hacking programs were installed.
Ordinarily, uploading files and rebuilding simple websites is a quick process. My Florida site is an exception to that rule. Right before the unwelcome visitor, I had over 3 gigabytes of scanned images and theme park and resort photos on my site. Needless to say, uploading that amount of content isn’t exactly a quick process.
Read more…
Categories: websites Tags: Florida, pictures, website
It’s finished! Finally!
After months of debates, criticism, negative advertising, and all relentless TV commercials, the national election is finally finished.
Now we can take a breather and not have to listen to that crap for a while. I don’t know about you, but I found most of it quite annoying not being able to watch a football game or TV show without the commercials being filled with the same political advertisements over and over twisting the truth and making you hear only what they wanted you to hear.
Read more…
Categories: Uncategorized, websites Tags:
It’s finished!
This is a follow-up post to yesterday’s posting about my site IntruderPrevention.com.
– UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com
After spending hours uploading and configuring new add-ons and making sure that everything is working properly, I’m proud to say that the main work on that website is finally finished. I’ll just be doing minor daily updates to the news section each day, but the main work is complete until I add another section in the future. Right now that part isn’t even in the planning stages, so it’ll still be a while.
Read more…
IntruderPrevention.com is available again!
Intruder Prevention was one of the first professional websites that I made. It’s essentially a website dedicated to educating people about home security and preventing a robbery or home invasion from occurring. It covers topics ranging from a general comparison of the national home security companies to securing your home to choosing the right kind of deadbolt lock. It also has a news article page that I update daily, with most of those stories dealing with home robberies and even armed home invasions.
http://www.intruderprevention.com
– UPDATE – I no longer own or maintain www.IntruderPrevention.com
Read more…
Categories: websites Tags: home security, Joomla!, website
Joy of new software
The rain is falling outside and we’re experiencing our first real blast of cold air for the Fall season. Inside the climate-controlled environment I’m busy installing and configuring new software for my websites.
Most of the website software that I’m using is open sourced, that is, most people are encouraged to modify parts of its code and make attachments / modules / plug-ins / modifications to it. The good news is that most of the software has forums where people can post comments and discuss ways around design problems and other issues. The bad news is that not everybody speaks English or knows how to say things clearly. It’s easy to pull out half your hair trying to figure out how to make simple changes in the programs.
It’ll be nice once my sites are up and running and I only have to worry about basic security backup procedures and adding new content.