Ok.. A bit late posting here Ed lol.
Update...
The dns has hit all around now from what we know for the new domain..
http://www.reptilehaven.net
So people should be able to hit our site np now. If not, then the dns #'s above that I gave Eddie the other day should get you there. We had to hand that out to a few people before they could hit the site. That was when the dns was still circling though.
Tamer.. We back up the site daily. So the site was NOT lost..just our domain was. That's enough though for a nightmare to take place for us admins over there...UGH. We have been working on fixing internal site links and prolly will be for awhile. The site is navigational though as we have already hit the major linkings within it already.
* As far as the piracy thing....YUP.. it is definately what they hope would be done ..buying the domain back. They were asking $1500 for each of our two domains once we contacted them. We were not going to buy it back at first. After taking a closer look at
ALL that we were losing from not having the domains... We had to take more than most people could see into consideration in the decision of whether to buy back or not. Webmastering a site takes much more than is readily seen from most others...especially those that do not have sites and have built up what we have over the last few years with/on RTB.
Just a small insight into what this caused for our site....other than the lost domain names that is...
300+ members lost their email accounts [ I spent 4 hours manually transfering emails that I had in my account soon as we knew we would lose it all. The only function that would work at the time was a forward one for each of the emails located in the 18 mbs of email I had on there. I take in the site's administrative contacts , my personal email and biz email..etc.. SO my email gets jammed and quite a bit gets saved also for rtb admin emails...arghh] There were'nt many of us who could even hit the email accounts at that point either.
Our email accounts are provided free to our members...doesn't mean it is free for our site though ya know.
The email accounts were directed linked with the domain name. We have been chacking into purchasing other email services from servers for this type thing... It would cost a ton and also we would not be able to provide free email accounts to our members most likely.
Our site is located on
MANY MAJOR search engines. We paid for this to be done btw...I believe was in excess of $300 even. Not all search engines are free *
We'd have to pay again to list like we have been thus far with a new domain name and no hold over the old domain name at all.
Without having the domain name.. we also risk having a loss in the area of advertisers possibly. They advertise with our site due to the high traffic volume we get....they pay for the banner adverts on the site....our site being listed in MANY search engines [ see above] is under the RTB domain name. See the full circle yet ?
Course there is also
ALL the problems that we have to fix within the linking on the site etc that we are getting done now also.
And on and on and on the list could go...
I also received a phone call from Jeff Ronne the other day. He basically went up and down over the whole issue of us not going after getting our domain back. *He pointed out a few things..like all the hard work and the money that has been spent to date in what has directly affected where the site has grown. He also spoke with our site's owner after he got off the phone with me. His points were all valid ones , no doubt about that. He also offered funds that started the donations for funds to get the domains back as well. Sooo....
Bottom line now... We have received donations from the reptile community at large and our members for the purpose of obtaining our domain names back. We also got the person to come down on the cost for the domains to $400 each also. UGH.. But it is better than $1500 each no doubt. We are in the process of buying back the rtb.net domain. We also are being very careful in just how funds are transfered so that we are protected from any further loss associated with this too.
Redtailboa.net changes, possibly..
LOL J/k
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