CNAME and personal domain HELP!

sarah

Help! The company that hosts my url is stupid or something - POWWEB. Anybody use them? That is the company that Photosite went with when shutting down and they haven't figured out how to set up my nameservers or CNAME to get my site to work.

First of all, to have any access to change DNS settings, they want me to upgrade and pay something like $27.90 every 6 months which I am refusing. So they've set the CNAME for me but it's still not working. Should the CNAME be www.smugmug.com or www.sarahsphotoalbum.smugmug.com ? What I want is to have my smugmug site use www.sarahsphotoalbum.com

I'd give you my password, but it won't help because you can't do anything in my account.

Thanks,
Sarah

Andy

Hi, Powweb isn't easy to deal with :cry

BUT BUT BUT you are dealing with a company of Super Heroes and as such, I have already assigned on of our team to be an expert in navigating the difficult waters of Powweb. Please email our help desk http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal and put ATTN: SteveM in the subject line. He'll get you sorted out, I promise

SteveM

sarah wrote:

Help! The company that hosts my url is stupid or something - POWWEB. Anybody use them? That is the company that Photosite went with when shutting down and they haven't figured out how to set up my nameservers or CNAME to get my site to work.

First of all, to have any access to change DNS settings, they want me to upgrade and pay something like $27.90 every 6 months which I am refusing. So they've set the CNAME for me but it's still not working. Should the CNAME be www.smugmug.com or www.sarahsphotoalbum.smugmug.com ? What I want is to have my smugmug site use www.sarahsphotoalbum.com

I'd give you my password, but it won't help because you can't do anything in my account.

Thanks,
Sarah

Hi Sarah,

I haven't yet seen an email from you to our helpdesk, so I'll give you some info here.

Ahhh, my good friend PowWeb. What you say thus far is perfectly accurate. I've contacted PowWeb on behalf of our customers on multiple occasions and the outcome is always the same; they can't help or properly redirect domains to SmugMug. We don't know why, as these are simple changes.

PowWeb doesn't offer their CUSTOMERS a DNS control panel, without upgrading their service (which with the DNS control panel, includes some type of web hosting package. Who needs that with SmugMug?) , so any configuration has to be left to them, and again, thus far, I'm unaware of anyone able to get their domain redirected properly.

What we unfortunately have to suggest is having your domain transferred to a 'real' registrar. Our current favorite is GoDaddy, but any registrar that offers full DNS control will do. GoDaddy offers domain transfers for around $7 (one time fee), but this includes an extra year of owning your domain name, plus what you already currently have. They also give you neat perks like a free email account at your domain name (ie, contact@yourdomain.com or whatever you like). They give you a fully functional total DNS control panel, and it's super easy to make changes (we even have tutorials for you) or we'd be happy to set it up for you.

With the difficulties getting PowWeb Customer Support to make changes, which never seem to work, $7 seems a worthy investment to avoid the huge headaches and other fees associated with PowWeb.

Let us know if there's anything we can help with or if you have questions.