smugmug as your website?

Lauren, whoever you registered your domain name with is a middleman between you and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). You pay a registrar (e.g. Yahoo Domains) a fee to register the domain in your name with ICANN. So the domain is yours. In theory, you can take it to another host, redirect it, park it, play with it, push it, pull it, break it. It's yours. You don't have to host with someone just because they registered your domain name for you.

 

You should be able to modify the DNS settings of your domain from your current host's control panel to point to smugmug's servers.

 

It's a good idea to check with both smugmug and your current host to make sure you're doing everything correctly. As you said, most of these services are good about answering questions. I felt embarrassed at the beginning asking novice questions, but they were generally very gracious and helpful about it (and at least at webmasters.com, quick to reply).

 

But all this would mean that you're paying an extra 100 bucks a year for hosting services you're not using. If you go Tony's route, cancel your hosting services and ask for a refund on the months you've already paid for in advance.

Thanks louis, it has been a few months at least already since I have paid the $100 and this friend has also put time into design for me. Since it is a friend, i would just eat the 100 if i decided to just go the smugmug route and I'm sure he'd be happy to help me convert to smugmug. The site he was doing couldn't really handle many large photos anyway, so he'd probable agree that smugmug would be a better route for me. I don't think he'll mind the loss of a client. he does this on the side and is an ICU nurse by day.

Thanks for the info

Louis, I didn't know that about the domains, that's interesting, so in theory I could retrieve my old domain name that I paid for and re-use it ?

 

Iskandar, Smugmug are very helpful on setting up stuff, but my site has taken me a lot of time and effort, it's not a 5 minute thing and the HTML and CSS does take some time to understand if you're not familiar with coding. I'm willing to help out, I have customized several other sites since doing mine.

 

Thanks for the positive feedback, last night I put a transparent header on, check it out

 

Tony.

Another option that most hosting services provide is a set of e-mail accounts related to your domain name. For example, your contact e-mail would be laurenm@yourname-photography.com rather than laurenm@yahooo.com or laurenm@hotmaill.com. Another touch of professionalism. Don't know if smugmug gives you this possibility, but it's worth checking out.

Tony, in theory yes, but it will take some detective work on your part. First, go to any WHOIS lookup and type in your old domain. One such lookup can be found here:

 

http://www.register.com/retail/whois.rcmx

 

See who the domain is registered to. It should be you. Now look at the bottom of the registry and note the DNS server settings. I'll come back to those in a moment.

 

Most registrations are for one year, and the going price now is about ten bucks a year. So if you registered your old domain more than a year ago, chances are that your registration for that domain has already expired. So just register it again (if someone hasn't already snatched it up) with Yahoo Domains or whoever. If it is still registered in your name, though, you should be able to "retrieve" it (though it's not really "lost," it's just pointing in the wrong direction).

 

I'm certainly no expert, but my understanding of how this works (as you see with your Yahoo Domains experience) is that a host only registers the domain and perhaps gives you some limited amount of service options for moving that domain around. The main service option we're interested in now is the ability to change the DNS server settings in your registry. See, right now your DNS settings are still pointing to your former host's servers. No good, because you currently have no hosting account with them. What you want to do is point them to your new host's (smugmug's) servers.

 

How do you change the DNS settings? Well, the best way is to contact whoever registered the domain for you initially (your former host, I assume) and ask them. You can also ask smugmug or even Yahoo Domains, but it may very well be that they can't do anything. Many servers lock the domains they've registered to avoid fraudulent domain transfers (aka domain hijacking).

 

Hope that helps.

By the way, you should change the DNS server settings and configure the redirect option in the same way that you did with your Yahoo-registered domain. In theory, then, whenever someone types in either www.your-old-domain.com or www.your-new-domain.com into their browser, they will in both cases be automatically redirected to your smugmug site.

 

Another warning: some hosts might charge you a little something for the redirection option.

 

And an interesting asterisk to my note above about e-mail: some hosts give you the option of adding on e-mail accounts for a few bucks more. For example, webmasters.com gives you the option for $9.95 a year. Take a look at www.webmasters.com under the heading "Domain Names" for a description of the various options.

By the way, Tony, a small thing I noticed on your site: when you hover over a picture, the img title is the whole text list below, bullets and all. You need to close your img title tag with ">, not leave it open like that.

Do some research before you run out and cancel your hosting account. Sometimes, if you just have a domain name registered, you are not able to add cname records.

 

I don't know about other domain registrars, but GoDaddy is definitely setup this way. The TotalDNS feature, which allows you to add cname records, is only available through their hosting menu. I recently switched to DreamHost as my hosting provider (but still have GoDaddy as my domain registrar), and now I have to configure the cname information at DreamHost.

 

The only thing I can still do at GoDaddy is configure domain forwarding, which, as discussed above, does not retain your URL once you get forwarded to smugmug.

 

Other domain registrars may be more flexible, so just be sure to check with yours first.

Tony I noticed all your keywords on your site are smugmugs and not yours. Is there a way to put your own keywords in?

Jon - I suggest emailing Tony as this thread probably won't be seen as it has been quite a few days since the last answer.