Woo hoo! I exist again.

For almost a week now I felt as if I didn’t exist. Not having a Web presence and not having personal email has been a weird experience. After for some many years counting on my personal domain name (savas.parastatidis.name), it was strange not having it around.

Here’s the full story…

I wanted to move my domain’s hosting (primarily email) to Windows Live Custom Domains. However, since savas.parastatidis.name was a third-level domain name, this was not possible. When the .name top level domain was first created, only third-level domain names were made available, so I couldn’t purchase parastatidis.name. Well, the policy has changed since then. I tried to acquire parastatidis.name but, unfortunately, someone owned a subdomain so it was locked. I checked with the .name registry authority and they confirmed that, as my last name is not that popular around the world :-), I was the only one who had registered a subdomain. So, it should have been easy.

Unfortunately, it turns out that my prior registrar, Register.com, did not support second-level .name domains 🙁 So, the only way to acquire parastatidis.name was to transfer savas.parastatidis.name to another registrar. To my bad luck, none of the registrars I contacted supported the transfer of third-level .name domain names 🙁 The only way I could acquire parastatidis.name was to delete the third-level one first. Due to processes set in place by ICANN, I had to wait for 5 days for my existing third-level registration to be deleted so that the second-level was freed for registration. This finally happened earlier today and so I am alive again and with GoDaddy.com as my new registrar.

I am trying to sort out my email now. It should work tomorrow.

My sincere apologies for this “absence” from the World Wide World! The experience and disruption in service I experienced over the last few days reminded me of one of my favorite arguments: “identifier vs address”. I’ll leave that for a different post though.

Finally, I would like to thank Asbjorn of GNR, the .name registry authority, who was a great help throughout this experience. For more than a month now he has been patiently answering my email messages and providing me with a lot of valuable information. I spent hours and hours talking to technical support folks in registrars who had never dealt with a situation like mine. Thanks Asbjorn! I owe you beers next time I am in London.

Update:
I forgot to mention that during the process, I also retired my old Windows Live ID (ex-.NET Passport). If you have stored sparastatidis@hotmail.com anywhere, please delete it. My Windows Live ID from now on is going to be savas@parastatidis.name. That’s how you can reach my via Windows Live Messenger as well.