Technical ConfusionBecause Technology Is Confusing

I have several domain names registered with three different registrars. At one time it was four, but I moved those domains to my main registrar.

Several domains were registered with Yahoo. I got these domains for $2.95, which I thought was an outstanding deal, especially for a domain name addict like myself. I was also aware that these domains would go up in price, to $8.95 or $9.95, which they did. I had no problem with this.

This year, the domain names went up again. Way up. The price to renew each domain name was $34.95. This is part of an email that I received:

Thanks for using Yahoo! Domains. We’re writing to remind you that it’s time for the annual autorenewal of your service.

Your Domains plan, associated with the domain XXXXXX, will renew on 10/01/2008. If your billing information is up-to-date, there’s no need to do a thing (except keep enjoying your service).

**** IMPORTANT NOTE: Beginning on July 1, 2008, Yahoo!’s annual domain renewal price increases to $34.95 per year. ****

$34.95. This didn’t include web hosting, folks. No privacy features, nothing. Just the domain name.

This is insane. I wound up cancelling 8 of my domains, and I transferred 2 - one that isn’t officially mine, and another domain that I simply wasn’t ready to part with, to Godaddy.

If you’re looking to purchase a domain name, your best bet is Godaddy. They’ve never raised their prices so high in all the time I’ve been with them. Heck, I also use Domainmonger, and while I do consider them high at $17.95 - they’ve never raised their prices.

$34.95! I’m still not over it!

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I’ve been obsessed (which is putting it mildly) with the Caylee Anthony case for the last few weeks, and as a result, I’ve been negligent when it comes to my own sites. I decided to start working on breaking this obsession, and decided to upgrade my blogs this weekend, which was way overdue.

I decided to use the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade and see how it worked on multiple blogs.

The Wordpress upgrades went well. All except one. One site seemed to upgrade ok, except that the plug-in didn’t automatically re-activate. No problem. Turned the plug-in back on, a couple threw errors on me, upgrading the plug-in solved the problem.

To look at the site, everything was all hunky dory. My tags weren’t working, and I was trying to figure out a way to import them and use them on the updated blog, but the site wasn’t showing visible errors.

I decided to upload another plug-in, and couldn’t because I was out of space. The site had plenty of space the day before. Hmm. A quick FTP session revealed several rather large core dumps taking up all the space. I downloaded one to look at to determine the problem, which was all tag software related.

Luckily, I’m obsessive about keeping backups. Before I proceed on any project for any site, I back up. Sometimes it will be the whole site, sometimes just the folder. I deleted every file on the site, deleted the database and re-uploaded the old files. Everything works fine.

Always back up. The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does a backup for you if you choose, but I found it does not back up your theme folder and plug-in folder. I would rather manually back my sites up, just for my own peace of mind.