I'm an avid advocate for the electronic cigarette community. I started a website with my best friend a little over a year ago. The point of the website was to explain to smokers that benefits of switching to vaping, discuss the new products/devices that hit the market and to also drill into the politics behind the industry.
At first it was just a pet project that I had. I put time into it when I could, but it was only a bit more than what I put into the social media aspect of the community.
Once I began pumping out content, I began to get a lot of letters and comments that were very heart warming. Things that suggested I helped folks understand the ins and outs of what they were fearful of switching to. Things that illustrated that even though my audience was small, those audience members really took time to digest my elongated text.
Over time, it became enthralled by writing as much content weekly as possible between work, and eventually was asked by a popular online ecig magazine to write an article to cross post on their website. At one point, I was invited to sit in a round table discussion at a local news station to discuss the director of the FDA (Mitch Zellar) and our thoughts behind his regulatory decisions.
All of this was due to the hard work of myself and my best friend and co-writer.
I took a break for a few months due to life. Today I had planned to publish two review articles and brush the rust off fingers. Low and behold, my domain no longer existed!
Backstory, when I registered the domain with Godaddy, I registered using a spam email account (like a fucking idiot)that I never check, but just to be safe, I made sure I set the account for auto renew. AutoRenew would have eliminated this entire nightmare, if I didn't switch banks 5 months ago and completely forgot to modify my payment info with GoDaddy (like a fucking idiot #2). I logged into my spam email account, lo and behold there are multiple emails from GoDaddy attempting to renew my account, but the payment process obviously failed.
I called GoDaddy, the rep that I spoke with said that due to it's high volume of traffic received (it wasn't that high..) and it's ranking (does GoDaddy even cross reference with Alexa?), it's now considered a "Premium Purchase".
Needless to say, the amount is way out of my price range. The Godaddy rep told me that someone has purchased it in attempt to sell it for more than what they paid for it. I asked for the purchasers contact info, (so that I could contact them and explain the situation, maybe get empathy on my side), but unfortunately the purchasers identity has been masked.
My co-writer and I are going to meet on Monday to brainstorm on how we are going to pull the content onto a new domain (Gotta re-brand our site,facebook,twitter,instagram etc)
TL;DR lost something that I've put more of my heart into then i'd care to admit due to carelessness.
Don't make the same mistake, don't register important things under dummy email accounts either.
Submitted by http://www.wapmaxi.com/category/trending/
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