Pheew that was close. You may have noticed thethriftworld.com has been down a few months. I'm sorry for the confusion...but it makes for quite a thrifty story.A few months ago I bought a house, and I was dealing with buying stuff for my house, figuring out how to pay bills, moving things in, repainting walls, and ripping up carpets. While all this is happening (AND I have internet connection problems at my house), I get a renewal notice from Google regarding my domain name (www.thethriftworld.com), which is supposed to automatically renew. Well, it didn't automatically renew, and the email got lost among the messages/bills/notifications/everything. And then one day, the website is down, and I am FREAKING OUT. My website has lost its home.
I call Google, and they want 90 stinking dollars for me to retrieve my expired domain. 90 dollars. By the way, it normally costs 10 dollars per year for my .com, so 90 is quite a hike. But I'm thinking to myself - What if a domain buyer buys it up and wanted thousands for it? What if they reopen the URL for $100/year? What if? Google is telling me I need to buy my domain now to get it back.
At this point I have a choice. I could turn my back to myself and my beliefs and pay an exorbitant amount of money to retrieve my beloved domain name, or I could take a chance and wait for it to become available again to purchase. In the meantime, anyone who has ever bookmarked my blog is getting a blank page...they think my blog is dead, but I decide to wait anyway. So I wait, and wait, and wait. Everyday I check godaddy.com to see if the domain name was back on the market.
Today, at work, I checked godaddy and my site is finally available! Price? $10/year. BAM. Patience, in this instance, really, really paid off. And truly, I took a chance. This is unknown territory for me, I wasn't sure what could happen. But the good news is, I'm back online. And while I may have lost some followers who thought my site was no longer running, I saved $80, and more importantly, I saved my pride.
I stayed true to myself and to my blog. I won.
