Technical

Content about technical matters.

OnlineNIC making domain name transfers out hard

I have found that information on the Internet about which companies provide good service, and which companies provide bad service, are always useful to me when making decisions about who to do business with. So I have decided that I will start posting examples of when I encounter particularly good or particularly bad customer service here, so that I can return the favour to other fellow Internet users. Note that many of the reviews I post will be negative. This is not because I sit all day in my darkened lair plotting the demise of the companies that incurred my wrath, but instead out of a desire to warn the public of companies which it would be best to avoid doing business with.

I have had the misfortune of dealing with a few companies with bad customer service (and the pleasure of dealing with some much more civil customer service representatives as well), lately, and so have a backlog of tales to report. However, I will start with the troubles I have had with the domain registrar OnlineNIC.

I am not a direct customer of OnlineNIC. I was actually a customer of web host Cleverdot, who sell domain names (in this case, my domain name amxl.com). However, Cleverdot is not a domain name registrar themselves. They instead resell the services of OnlineNIC to provide the domain name. The problems I am having arise when OnlineNIC have blocked my attempts to move to another registrar.

Putting ads on my site

I got a letter from Google today with the pin used to verify my address (it took about a month to arrive) for the Google AdSense program (I had previously had ads on the earlier version of the AMXL, but Google started sending public service advertisements only because it had been too long without the address being confirmed).

This raises questions about whether I should have adverts on this site. This site is not intended to be a profit-making endeavour, and putting on Google ads also means that Google can track people. On the other hand, if it gets linked to from a high-traffic site, it would be good to recoup the bandwidth costs.

As a compromise, I have made it so it is easy for people who don't want to see ads to turn them off completely. In this article I discuss how I did this using Drupal.

Drupal Setup

I now seem to have got Drupal working for my site. I am putting this post with some details of the more complex stuff up to help others set up the site (and also as a test post)!

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