A Note About the Last Two Days

So yesterday morning it came to my attention that the site was down. I checked it out and, well, you can go to AstrosCounty.com and see for yourself. After some help, namely from The Batguy, who had to go through this very thing last week, I figured out who I needed to talk to in an attempt to get it fixed.

When I started Astros County in November 2008, I used a Hotmail account as the email address. Then I updated that to a Gmail account and deleted the Hotmail account. A few years later I bought the AstrosCounty domain through Blogger for $10/year, set to automatically renew every year. However, at some point in the last year the domain was transferred from Blogger to Google Suite. Apparently they used the old Hotmail email account to send notifications such as "Hey your domain name is about to expire, unless you want to go f yourself." Of course I never saw these emails.

I was stuck trying to log into an account I did not know I had. When I used the "forgot your password, numbnuts?" button, a verification code was generated and sent to...that old Hotmail account. And because I couldn't answer any specific questions from a very helpful Google employee named Lucas about the Google Suite account I did not know I had, they cannot verify my ownership of the AstrosCounty.com domain.

Of course there is Phone Support for Google Suite, but it requires you to enter a Pin number...which was apparently sent to the deleted Hotmail account. Anytime I try to recover the password, the instructions to complete the reset go to the deleted Hotmail account, and I cannot give them a different, not-deleted email address to which they would send the instructions. Google cares not for their undelivered emails.

So here's where we are: Astros County is still functioning, but as astroscounty.blogspot.com, just like it's 2011 all over again. I'll resume updating tomorrow morning with the Hot Links. I'm glad the blog is still around. I liked the minor professionalism of having my own domain name. Maybe I can buy it back at some point, but at least 8-1/2 years of blogging almost every day didn't just get lost to the Wayback Machine because of a got dang Hotmail account.

Carry on.

Thanks to The Batguy and US Cocksman for their help in trying to walk me through recovering the domain. Congratulations, Cardinals, you finally did it.