Hey guys, welcome back.
Call me a bad Millennial, but I really don’t know how the Internet works. I mean, does anyone really know how things like web pages load or how Bing searches crawl the net? I sometimes like to imagine it’s all really magic, rather than a string of complex codes filled with 0’s and 1’s that I’d understand just as easily as [insert something super complicated].
This ineptitude came to a head just this weekend, as I went to do an irregular check and update of this website to find that it would not load in any of my three Internet browsers. I tried accessing the site through logging into WordPress as I have before, but all record that it had ever existed had mysteriously vanished.
It wasn’t until some frantic online chats with representatives of both Google and WordPress that I realized what I had done to lose my first myname.com. Earlier this year, in an effort to cut costs and get an email address associated with this website, I transferred the domain registration from my previous host to Google. I got a nifty email address to put on the top of my resume, plus I thought I had received a discount over what the previous site had charged. Once that transaction was completed, I confidently reached out to my old website host and told them that their services were no longer needed.
The last known image of my old website, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
What I didn’t know, however, was that transferring domain registries is not the same as changing hosts. While the URL JacobAlbrecht.com was safely secured in the digital vaults of Google, the meat and potatoes of the website were metaphorically thrown into a ravine. Since I told the old host I was no longer a customer of theirs, they saw no need to continue hosting my website, letting the data they had stored on their servers drift into the ether. I was left as the owner of my website in name alone.
It took an hour or two of troubleshooting with some poor folks in California, but I finally did comprehend the gravity of my mistake. After doing some searching online, and realizing that what the old host was charging was actually quite inexpensive for website hosting, I sheepishly returned with my tail between my legs, admitting to them that I actually did require their services. They seemed happy to have me back, and now here I am with JacobAlbrecht.com alive once again.
I had actually been planning on giving this ol’ website a revamp for a while. This definitely wasn’t the way I thought it would happen, but I’m trying to think of this as a needed compulsory update. Expect the same quality content as had previously appeared on this site, but with a fresh new look that only a now-humbled Jacob Albrecht can provide.
