I have a client whose site was ready to launch tonight. I just logged into her admin area on a popular (at least in my town) domain registrar that offers one of those free website template builder systems.

My client’s site was built using one of these packages and has been up for months.

So I go in to repoint the DNS to her new host and I’m told that the DNS is ‘unmodifiable.’ No explanations… I’d never seen that before.

After about 10 minutes of hunting through the help section I found an entry for ‘Why can’t I change my DNS?’ at the bottom of a long list of DNS questions. It seems that you have to disable the templating package before you can repoint to an outside DNS.

And when you do that, their site disappears and you’re left with the registrar’s ‘This domain has just been purchased’ and ‘website coming soon’ page.

During the 24-48 hour transition period, this means that anyone who happens on her old site will get this page rather than her site. This is really a bad practice on the part of the registrar in my opinion - is it common for those that offer this kind of web templating system, like GoDaddy? This site was not on GoDaddy, btw.