I thought I knew about technology....but sometimes it gets cloudy

I can see clearly now

I am a member of a natural voices women's choir and when I joined just over three years ago I volunteered to do their web site. They had a domain name and I thought I could do a simple google site and use a redirect to the domain name. This was all straightforward and the url worked fine until I failed to see the subscription for the domain name had expired. I quickly renewed the subscription for another 4 years eager to make sure that nobody else took our url, I thought once I had done this the url would work again, but I was wrong, when I entered the url it failed to recognise it. First I went to Google sites to see if I could do the redirect like I had done before but our domain provider was not on the recognised list, and the alternative option was very complicated and did not work for me. I decided to leave things as they were until had time to do some more investigating.

Inevitably things got in the way and my further investigating became an ever moving place holder. Anyway a few weeks I got a nudge from the one of the choir members that the web site needed updating, so I put aside some time to do this. When I had finished updating the site I decided to see if I could do anything about the url. The first thing I did was to enter the url into a browser and to my shock and horror it went to a page of adverts, advertising services that we would not want associating with a women' choir...I leave it up to your imagination with respect to the type of adverts. I reported this to the domain providers and once I had calmed down I did some more investigating and found that the site that was hosting the adds was a domain parking site, I had never heard of domain parking site, after some further research I found that these sites offer web site domain holders who are not using their urls opportunities to advertise to make money. It looks like they give advertising suggestions associated with the name of your site. I could not prove that the domain host had set up this redirect but it looked like a possibility, however, this gave me the impetus to pursue the redirect to my choir's site. After unsuccessfully waiting over 30 minutes on an 0800 number and some exchanges to email providers ta dah...the site is redirecting once more...phew, I no longer have a redundant url but I have definitely learnt something about the cloudy, possibly murky world of internet advertising.