Month: August 2019

This is the update to TODO #1 – pointing my old monogreen.de domain to this blog (which is the hosted “free” plan from wordpress.com, i.e. no bells and whistles).

A bit of history: I’ve been using hosteurope to host my mailboxes and to register some domain names for years (I get a warm and fuzzy feeling by actually owning my email address and my mails – I’m hoping of course that hosteurope, compared to say, Google, is not interested in scanning my emails and selling my habits…). But I only bought the “email” package from hosteurope, and not anything else like servers or webspace hosting.

Naturally I’d like to point monogreen.de to this blog. As I’ve written last time, you have to have a webspace package booked in order to set that up, so I bought the cheapest plan.

First hurdle: It turns out they make that available quite fast (<15min) after ordering – but you have to log out and back in to see the new package in KIS. Groan.

Next hurdle: As I now had two packages (one email-only, one webspace which also includes a mailbox as well as webspace, php hosting, etc.), I had to “transfer” the domain monogreen.de from the email package. With some trepidation, I did so, as it seemed like the “redirect” setting would only be available on the webspace package, and I assumed I could still have the email addresses themselves point to the actual inbox I’ve been using for years.

Well that worked alright, and could immediately set up the redirect under the webspace package. However…the redirect didn’t work. Knowing things sometimes take a while to start working at hosteurope, I waited a while, but still nothing. Then, being suspicious, I sent myself an email from a different address/provider, and – it bounced o.O . I had managed to break my primary email address.

Half a panicky hour later I had everything back to as it was before (including setting back up the various email aliases to the actual mailbox, which the “move” had severed) – and here’s two tips for anyone in this situation, and for myself in the future:

• Every package in KIS has its own block of menu entries – and especially the “Domain settings”. Also there is a general one. So in my case there were three places to look for when trying to move the domain back from the webspace package to the email package (the correct one is the “general” area)
• Many changes in KIS take ~15min to take effect (they say that in the interface, actually, but you usually assume this is only a general “yeah yeah mostly immediately but let’s cover our asses” policy – it’s not with hosteurope. Needless to say that this makes trying out things extremely cumbersome and error-prone…

And fun fact: After all that, the damn redirect still didn’t work…until next morning, after I had given up, and it suddenly worked just perfectly. Groan.

In summary: Mission accomplished but with too much panicky clicking around…