This weekend has been one of harsh lessons about maintaining domain hosting, registration and not tying personal/financial services to your own domain’s email servers, along with the endlessly greasy nature of the human race as a whole.
I found I had little to do with my markborle.com domain anymore these days, with the advent of social media kinda taking the place of the old blog systems for a lot of people.
But while I did my damndest to make sure that most important stuff regarding financial and personal info had been moved over to my gmail account, there were a couple products that are still tied to my old @markborle.com email address. Nothing I can’t work around with a couple phone calls come Monday morning, but still a real wakeup call.
It’s been so long since I registered that domain (it would’ve been early 2000s at the very latest) that I didn’t even know which domain registrar had control of it. Turns out it ended up in the hands of a real sketchy looking company called Namecheap. These clowns provide a “service” which auto-renews your domain under the guise of allowing you to re-register it if you should let it go. But in all my adventures, some real truth came to bear regarding this “Whoisguard” they use.
This domain sat dormant doing nothing for a few months; I know this because my Chrome homepage pointed at a hidden HTML file on the server which just functioned as a glorified Favorites bar that would be cross-platform and cross-browser; created in the days before syncing bookmarks and Google accounts, and that I left there because I am lazy. Prior to my attempts to recover this domain, it simply failed a DNS lookup, throwing back generic “not found” errors.
Once I sent an email to these shysters (that one’s for you, dad) at Namecheap, it apparently triggered something in their systems, something that said “This dormant domain is active, someone come snipe it!” and lo and behold, a squatter page is up the day after I sought info on how to recover it.
I don’t think any warnings are necessary, considering the name alone “Namecheap” is greasy as fuck, so this post is more just a venting, rambling explanation as to why markborle.com is now jadax.ca.
Jadax is a gaming name I use, and I decided that while my life isn’t all that interesting and worth doxxing, I’d like to be a little more anonymous on the internet so I’ll hide behind this name for posting videos and such.
I’m moving my desolate Youtube channel over to this name as well.