Distrowatch.com comes back as a .org

in legal on 2014-07-09 14:38 (#3Q5)

Not sure what happened, and Distrowatch king Ladislav Bodnar isn't saying, but a couple of days ago, Distrowatch.com went off line. A day or two later it was back, but as distrowatch.org.

Ladislav writes:

As many of you noticed, the distrowatch.com domain name was suspended by the domain's registrar, Doteasy, last Sunday. I don't want to go into details about what exactly happened as it's a long and boring story. Suffice to say that I feel grossly aggrieved by the series of greedy and even malicious actions taken by Doteasy and as soon as I get this sorted out, I will be looking into transferring the distrowatch.com domain name to another registrar. If any of you have a recommendation for a good registrar (preferably with customer support personnel that is competent), please let me know in the comments section below or send me an email.

Glad to see it was just bureaucracy, and not Distrowatch going off line. I love that site and visit it on a pretty regular basis, even though I'm pretty loyal to just two or three distros and almost never try out those exotic, little-known ones.

gandi (Score: 1)

by pete@pipedot.org on 2014-07-09 15:56 (#2D0)

I've had good luck with Gandi.net, based in france. they have a 'no bullshit' motto, and good customer service from my personal experiences.

Re: gandi (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-07-09 19:23 (#2DC)

+1 for gandi. I've been using them for years. Never a problem, so I don't know anything about their customer service because I never needed it.

So what was the deal? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-07-09 18:11 (#2D6)

Wondering what happened? Offhand, I'm imagining:

guy forgot to renew his domain name
Doteasy stopped it, canceled it, whatever
Guy tries to get the name back
Doteasy requires some ridiculous, expensive "reactivation" process
Guy decides, fuck it, I'll just buy the DotOrg and be done with it.

I used Doteasy back in the day. Free Hosting (OK, but you pay like $25/yr for the domain name, so that's where they're making their money). It was no hassles. Pleasantly surprised to see a site i read fairly regularly was also housed at the same provider. Granted, I never used whois/dig to check it out.