My totenherzen.com domain name was transferred to GoDaddy last year. I did it to avoid WordPress locking it into a premium upgrade when it was time to renew. Didn’t stop them putting a dirty grey filter screen over the blog though when the ‘remapping’ expired. Cheeky bastards.
I’ll try to explain that in simple terms. Most human beings don’t notice the difference between a remapped domain name, but it would look something like this:
book page URL on a website eg totenherzen.com/books (that would be remapped)
the non-remapped page would simply say totenherzen.com regardless of which page you visit.
After I transferred the domain name my WordPress blog was remapping the domain, but that upgrade expired earlier this year. I kept getting reminders to upgrade the remapping, but it was unnecessary. Imagine my distaste when the day after the expiry the totenherzen page was unobtainable. You could see it beneath a murky grey filter screen and the words this blog is unobtainable.
Now what really pissed me off about this was the fact that the webpage was not unobtainable. My visitors were being blocked deliberately; it wasn’t a technical issue, it was a choice made by WordPress to get me to renew the remapping subscription. I can’t remember what I did to unblock the page, but it’s accessible now.
And it’s not the first time WordPress have been cheeky about their upgrading policies. You have a free blog but the only upgrade options are the premium service, or they remove certain features and stick them in a more expensive subscription, or – and this was the reason for transferring the domain name to GoDaddy – they won’t allow domain names to be renewed on their own, you have to renew them by taking out a subscription upgrade.
Correct me if I’m wrong on that last point, but I paid for totenherzen.com via WordPress, if I had lost that domain name because of their greedy shenanigans at renewal time I would have been incandescent with rage. (Or apoplectic, whichever is the higher.)
But it’s safe now. Unless GoDaddy start pulling stupid stunts.
The Opening Sentence 
Hope you manage to sort everything out so you can get back to us soon!
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Everything seems to be okay at the moment, thanks. I don’t know what’s stopping me from blogging more often. If I figure it out I’ll write a blog about it.
I do have a feature on Helene Fischer I might publish…
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I’ve found WordPress to be pretty arbitrary – they impose changes without warning and call it an ‘upgrade’. I’ve stuck with the free WordPress blog largely because it’s well established and it would be a pain in the backside to switch it now – I’d lose the interconnection wordpress.com offers with every other blogger. But everything else is via my self-hosted website, which also uses WordPress software but is otherwise unconnected with wordpress.com – and with good reason.
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I always assumed if you migrated from .org to .com WordPress would have a way of exporting your followers and followees, but I’m guessing it doesn’t work like that. That’s a lost opportunity. There are times when I’d like the freedom of wordpress.com but not for my blog. It’s taken too long to build up these connections.
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I haven’t come across this issue but I have plenty of other issues with WordPress, and they really get my back up. I know it’s a largely free service (I think I pay about £20 a year for an option but I can’t remember for what exactly), but it’s the undemocratic way in which things operate that gets me going. Features change without any notification. Stuff gets added and stuff disappears randomly. Unless you’re a WordPress geek and read all the forum stuff, which I don’t because I might be a geek but not a WordPress geek, then you tend to miss stuff. Life’s too short to get involved. In fact, my life’s three minutes shorter for writing this. Interesting post, by the way.
Alen
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Changing very familiar things, like the text editor a few years ago, totally discombobulates you for weeks. I suppose they call it enhancing the user experience. Patronising tarts.
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Patronising tarts. I like that.
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GoDaddy is a registrar as well as all the other stuff it does so while you’ll have to pay them each year to renew your domain, you have the right to host it anywhere with anyone. I used to have my own website but now I just have the domains parked at GoDaddy so I can continue to use my original email address [which is linked to my now non-existent website].
As a wordpress.com blogger, I can’t help wondering if is any real benefit to you in having your own website?
I know wordpress.com won’t let me sell from my blog, but as everything goes through Amazon anyway, that doesn’t bother me. Are there any other benefits these days?
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In the past I’ve registered domains with the likes of Freeparking and Simply, but they always hiked the prices when it came to renewal. WordPress didn’t do that, which is why I started to register domains through them. But then, a couple of years ago they started to move the goalposts by obliging you to register domains with paid for subscriptions or upgrades and if you didn’t upgrade there was a risk of losing the domain name.
I have thought of using WordPress,com (the self-hosted wordpress version) instead of WordPress.org, but I too don’t see enough benefits to cope with all the hassle. I don’t want to leave WordPress because I’ve always found their customer support to be very good, but they have started to get a bit sneaky when it comes to getting money out of its users. I’d prefer them to be more upfront about things, I’m happy to pay extra for useful features like custom scripts, but the trick with the remapping I thought was a step too far.
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Meh…I think I’ll be sticking to the free blog for now. I pay a tiny amount for added storage [for graphics] but I don’t think I’d like to feel pressurized into paying for other things either. Good luck with the site. 🙂
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I pay GoDaddy for my domain name, audreydriscoll.com. I also pay WordPress for domain mapping, so the url for my blog is https://audreydriscoll.com, without having to include ‘wordpress.’ I’ve never tried upgrading; my blog is a bare-bones WordPress freebie.
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You can direct your domain name from GoDaddy to your WordPress site without paying for domain mapping. The only difference is without mapping the specific webpage you’re on won’t show up in the URL eg audreydriscoll.com/books. The /books bit won’t show. Upgrading doesn’t bring a lot of benefits unless you want some commercial or hosting features, things most bloggers can do without.
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