Faeroph

A few minutes ago I signed up for my own domain name - note that I haven't got any hosting yet - through the TCH site. In the payment section, I made what seems to have been a bit of a mistake. I used my PayPal account to set up a billing agreement and then rather foolishly didn't click the "Return to Merchant" button which appears to be what 'completes' the transaction. I understand that .COM domains take 4-8 hours to start working, but I checked the 'search for an available domain name' anyway and it appears that the same domain is still available. The billing agreement has gone through (it seems) though no money has been taken from my PayPal account so far and I do not have any customer details for the service that provides the domain names linked from TCH (securepaynet.net), so right now I'm not really sure whether I have registered the domain name or not. I have a nasty suspicion that the agreement is going to start taking money out of my account without me actually receiving any service. Note that I cannot contact the business "Domain Names/Hosting Services" by phone as I am in the UK, and it doesn't seem to accept calls from here (when the international code for the US is included), for whatever reason. Can anyone give me any advice? Thanks, Adam

Hey guys, After speaking with Alex - the owner of the domain - he said that it seems to be a problem with the registrar's servers, rather than a lack of payment on his part, but either way he seems to think he can sort it out... personally I think he just means he hasn't paid. Either way this should hopefully be fixed soon, so thanks for your help (and for the welcomes) - you guys are great. -Adam

Alright, I'll go hunt the guy in question down and get him to pay. Should be fun. Thanks again for your help.

...then my previous post probably also perhaps reflects exactly how much I know about computer science.. However, the site has been available for well over a month past the expiry date (if I've interpreted the American date format correctly - 11th December, not 12th November as it would be here in England?). Is it normal for it to take 6 weeks for the domain to stop working?

Ouch, sorry, shows how behind I am. I had no idea he changed host. Thanks a lot for your help.

Hi all, I'm writing this on behalf of the "tenant" of the site "blindedsilence.net", hosted on TCH. I'm unable to contact him at the moment, but the site in question hasn't loaded in just under a day now. I was reluctant to use the 'ticket'-reporting service, as I'm not a customer of TCH myself, but from looking around here a little it seems there are very occasionally issues with certain servers. Unfortunately I have no idea what server blindedsilence.net is hosted on, so I can't provide much in the way of useful information. What worries me is that I have reason to believe that the site may have been 'shut down' maliciously, as we (the residents of a community site situated in blindedsilence's forums) have very recently had a run-in with a particularly talented hacker, who was able to gain access to our database and suchlike, even managing to decrypt several of the passwords stored there. This was a few days ago and we had hoped that he'd left the site alone. As a student on a computer science degree myself, I am fairly certain that to remotely shut down a site entirely, leaving only a 404 message, is impossible, yet the hacker in question has shown himself to be exceptionally "talented", hence my worry about the site. I realise I, in all probability, have not provided enough information for you to determine whether the site is down due to a server error or as the result of an attack, but if you *could* find this information out, I'd be grateful, if only for the sake of my peace of mind. Thanks, Adam