Monday, February 29, 2016

You can now change your password on the forums without the need to get ahold of me

I set up an email account for the forums which is required in order for users to be able to reset their own passwords (when a user requests a password change, the forums sends an email with a link to reset the user's password.)  Previously, when someone needed their password reset I had to manually change it for them.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

DNS Hosting service migration complete

I didn't plan to have to do this today. 

A little backstory:
Our domain registrar (domain.com) is the business that we used to register our domain (masterbands.us) With many domain registrars, if you register a domain with a particular registrar, they often offer DNS hosting for free (they will let you store your DNS records on their domain servers.)  When Fawndel downgraded our service to basic (we stopped using them to host our website) I found that on domain.com the option to edit our DNS records disappeared. Puzzled, I submitted a support ticket and this is what I got in response:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Support.

Your account masterbandsus is downgraded to domain parking account. We do not provide DNS tool for free in domain parking account. This is the reason you are unable to see the DNS tool in Domain central. You can purchase it for just $3.95 per month so that you can update DNS records. If you wish to purchase it then please provide us the authorization to charge your credit card.

If you can not purchase it, then please provide us the DNS records that you wish to update so that we will update it for you.
That's right, they want us to fork over about $4 USD a month to be able to easily update our DNS records using their DNS servers.  Technically speaking they did offer DNS hosting for free but you have to manually contact them everytime you need to edit you records.

Forget that, I found that namecheap.com offers free DNS hosting, even if you have not registered any domains with them, so guess who we are using now for DNS hosting?

A thumps up to namecheap.com and multiple thumbs down to domain.com

I could have set up our own DNS server to manage our DNS records, but didn't as namecheap's free DNS hosting was very quick and easy.

If you want to read more about DNS take a look and the Wikipedia page:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System

Monday, February 22, 2016

Web host migration complete!

We have finished moving our website to our new (and cheaper) web host! Everything should be up and running, but you find any issues feel free to contact win2tank(me.)