NEWSFLASH

Saturday, September 11, 2004

http://royblumenthal.com and roy@royblumenthal.com are now alive and kicking again. Thanks hugely to Steve Peters and Jean-Marie in Australia for jumping through hoops to get my French service provider to get me back online.

It was a nasty Catch-22 -- they stopped accepting foreign card payments, but locked my domain name. This prevented me from transferring the domain to a US-based server. Eventually, Steve asked Jean-Marie to make the payment using his French account. So now I'm in the process of working out how best to repay Jean-Marie.

Complicated, huh?

But here's a hint... host your domain name in a country that speaks your language. Most of this hassle comes from the fact that the OVH dudes speak no English.

Another hint... shop around. My South African service provider wanted to charge me R800 (around US$80) for transferring and holding the name for one year. GKG.com in the States was asking US$7.50 for the same service. OVH.net in France is asking 8 euros. Makes no sense.