The Website Expiration That Wasn't

Well. My personal website is still here this morning. Despite daily warnings these past few weeks from the outfit with which I formerly had my domain name— paulburgess.org— registered.

Let's see if I can untangle the history of all this. My ISP provides its users with I think it's 5 megabytes of free webspace. So back in August 2001 I cobbled together a personal website and put it online. (Believe me, it was a retro site design even back then!) My site rapidly outgrew its 5 megs— soon I was paying my ISP to host my site— and by late October 2001 I had gone and dug up an outfit out there through which I registered the domain name paulburgess.org for my site.

My site continued to grow, until I suspect it was by far the largest and most complicated site my small, local mom-and-pop ISP was hosting. So in May of 2006, my ISP contacted me and offered to shuffle me off onto a company which would handle everything for me— webhosting, domain name, and all— offering me something like 40 times the webspace, and 50 times the bandwidth, for half the monthly fee I'd been paying to my ISP. The flip side of this is that my ISP had obviously been ripping me off for years, but since the new arrangement was a good deal, I took it, and extended my domain name registration for another year (to 2007) while I was at it.

This summer I started receiving periodic emails from the old outfit through which I'd formerly had paulburgess.org registered, darkly warning me that my domain name would expire at 0239 UTC on 26 October 2006, and that I'd better renew it through them or else! These past few weeks, said admonitory emails have become a daily affair, including now the daily warning that each daily email was my last chance to renew, before paulburgess.org turned into a pumpkin and stopped functioning.

How each email, every day for two or three weeks running, can be my "last chance," I'll never know.

I must admit, in the past few days I've been doing a WHOIS search through InterNIC every once in a while, anxiously verifying that indeed things are not due to expire until October 2007. And when I got up this morning, I was a little nervous that I'd go to paulburgess.org and find... nothing. Blank. A dead channel.

However, no such trouble. My personal website is still there this morning, safe and sound, same as ever. So much for one more predatory commercial attempt to scare me back into toeing the line through a daily dose of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.