Oops

I went on godaddy.com to buy a domain name and hosting service for a website I made for an event I'm helping organize this summer (www.fielddaychicago.org.) I learned I could get a huge discount if I bought a second domain name, so I bought www.cyruswrites.com to use for this blog and applied the discount to fielddaychicago.org.

Long story short, I changed a lot of settings around on this blog (and didn't understand any of them) and eventually got cyruswrites.com to work. But then my original URL stopped working, and the links to other posts within the blog stopped working, and so I just disabled cyruswrites.com. Hopefully everything is back to normal.


Random notes from buying domain names on godaddy.com:
- ".org" domains are more expensive than ".com" domains ($15/year versus $10/year for the most basic ones) I assumed it would be the other way around since ".org" typically denotes a charitable organization
- I could have bought cyruswrites.info for $.89/year. Is there an advantage or disadvantage to ".info"? Can I use any suffix? What about cyruswrites.cum? Or cyruswrites., ?
- After I searched for cyruswrites.com and found that it was available, godaddy.com suggested I buy"premium" domains that were similar to cyruswrites.com (but would attract more traffic.) For example:
--- www.writeable.com ($2,800/year)
--- www.writeabusinessplan.com ($2,988/year)
--- www.writecash.com ($888/year)
--- www.mileycyrusticketsforsale.com ($1,488/year)

- Godaddy.com com tries to up-sell more than any company I've ever dealt with. It's laugh out loud funny. After EVERY SINGLE CLICK in the process of buying their services, they offer to sell you more of it, or an upgraded version of it, or just something unrelated. And on top of that, whenever I decided to buy one of their up-sold products, they immediately tried to up-sell me again on the upgraded product I just bought!

For example, I bought the domain name for one year, and got a pop up that said,

"Click here to upgrade to two years and save 15%!"

So I clicked on it to purchase the upgrade, and then right away I got a pop up that said,

"Click here to upgrade to three years and save an additional 10%!"

I clicked it just to see if they'd offer more, and they offered me five years. And then 10 years.


They also did another old sales trick. I purchased the domain name for $10/year, and then upgraded to two years, and then finally went back and declined the upgrade for three years. Once the duration of the domain had been firmly set, they offered me "private registration" for $10/year. I had no idea what "private registration" was, so I clicked on the question mark icon next to it and read that if I didn't get private registration, then all of my personal information (name, address, phone number, e-mail address) would be published on some public database and available to anyone in the world (including hackers/spammers etc.) They strongly urged me to buy private registration, so I bought it.

Then they offered me a premium private registration product.

It was something like that after every click.

Even when I called customer service for help with transferring files to the server, they were trying to sell me e-mail addresses and more server space. It was almost getting annoying, until I realized that -- once I was able to block out the up-selling -- their customer service reps were actually very patient and helpful.