Big Trouble (in little blog)

So my question is, has this anything to do with the fact I changed the Nameservers? Someone suggested I get in touch with wordpress and ask them to change them back to my original host,

Oh dude – YES it does.

Okay, think of websites as property. There’s your host (your neighborhood), your hosting space (your piece of land in the neighborhood), your website (your house on the piece of land), and then there’s your phone number (your domain name).

As we all know, your phone number really has very little to do with your house. At your whim (or even the phone company’s whim), your phone number can change, your house doesn’t move, but the number where people call you can at any time. The only way for people to contact you (say you’ve moved from one neighborhood to the next, but you want to keep the same phone number) is if you tell them.

That is your nameserver. The *phone company* actually “owns” your phone number, they just rent it out to you. If you move, you *have to tell them* so they can associate your new neighborhood with the old phone number.

Now, what you did was very, very wrong. You just wanted to move next door. Not far, but enough that you needed to do just a *tiny* bit of editing with the phone company to tell them you switched houses. Instead, you told them you moved to another country. Being a good phone company, they obliged and changed your phone number to some abandoned building in France. There isn’t even a phone there. They just did what they were told.

Hopefully you’re following my analogy.

If you have a wordpress site on your own server, you do not change your nameservers to Wordpess.com. WordPress.com is a blogging *service* that has their own hosting and provides free accounts for people who want to blog but don’t have the webspace. If you have wordpress on your own server, you have aboslutely nothing in the world at all to do with wordpress.com. Believe me – nothing. The only thing that’s remotely similar is that they both happen to be running wordpress on their servers. *I* happen to be running 3 wordpress installations on my servers, but that doesn’t mean you should change your nameservers to me, now does it?

So to change your nameservers to them is utterly insane.

What you have to do is – from what I gather, your host also handles your domain names – log into your hosting account and set your nameservers *back* to your host. Your hosting account should have that information – if it’s not in your account space, it’ll be in the original email they sent to you when you signed up with them.

You’ve already *mistakenly* removed your wordpress installation and lost everything, so you’re going to have to do it all over again. But for future reference, if you want to move your installation, all you have to do is edit your Blog URI and remove the “wordpress” at the end. Then move your index.php file up one level in your directory, and edit it to find the wp-blog-header.php file (instead of (../wp-blog-header.php) it’ll be (../wordpress/wp-blog-header.php) or something like that)

Hope that helps.

Ha, yes that helped. Your analogy was excellent and it made me laugh.

Right, so I’ve messed up bad. I thought it all seemed like a lot of hassle just to change the URL a small amount. Now I’ve got to try and fathom how to change the nameservers back. I already asked my host to change them back and they said they couldn’t, so I hope it’s something I can do from my end.

Wish me luck. And thanks again for helping out a little lost soul on teh internets.

I already asked my host to change them back and they said they couldn’t, so I hope it’s something I can do from my end.

WHAT?!?

You have a host that will change the nameservers for you one way, but they won’t change them back for you? What a bunch of jerks. Just for that, I’d find a new host.

Oh wait – how recently did you have them changed? If it was within 48 hours (I think that’s the limit) then no, they can’t (and I take back the “jerks” thing!). Also, if you’re within so many days of domain expiration, you’ll have to renew before you can change them, as well. So you might fall in one of those scenarios. If you don’t, then your host is crap (and “jerks” is reinstated). If you do, then you should be able to request it again in a couple of days and they should be able to do it for you.

In the meantime, you need to figure out the following:

Who did you purchase the domain names from? Did you buy them from your host, or somewhere else (like GoDaddy or Network Solutions?)

Once you know that, you can log into your domain name Control Panel (if you bought them from your host, then you should also have a section in your hosting control panel that does the domain name stuff). and you should see a section involving “Nameservers”. Nameservers are in the sort of format like:

ns1.hostname.com
ns2.hostname.com

(In fact, you may be lucky, and your nameservers are that simple for your host) if they don’t have the nameserver information anywhere (which they usually don’t), you’ll need to dig up the original email they sent you when you first signed up for their hosting service. This email will contain stuff like your mailbox info, ftp info and control panel login. It will also contain your nameservers. Once you find that, you just input the correct nameservers and wait up to 2 days before they take hold. (Some are faster – I did this with GoDaddy once, and in less than 5 seconds it had taken, so you could get lucky!)

Hope that helps ??

Hooray! It’s all alright now. I asked my host again, nicely (also I was more specific about what I wanted) to change the nameservers back again and they did so.

It all seems to be working now, and fingers crossed it shall remain so.

Thanks a million for your help, I now understand a little better what I’m doing too. Praise be for the kindness of random strangers!