Domain Redirect

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  captaingregh · Member · Nov 15, 2022 at 1:15 am

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  I’m the president of a community theatre. Currently, our website is hosted through a small tech company out of California. We pay nothing for hosting and apparently nothing for the domain, because the owner has a personal connection with one of our board members and they offered us free hosting years ago while they were developing their platform and basically used us as one of their guinea pigs.

  I’m appreciative of the arrangement we have, but truthfully, their platform sucks. It is such a pain in the butt to make edits or manage the site. I’m not the most tech savvy guy in the world, but I’m not an idiot either. I’ve been designing websites since the mid-90s. I used to code my own pages from scratch and host them on GoDaddy. But over the years, technology got away from me and I never learned how to do dynamic content, which is why I appreciate having publishing tools like WordPress.

  I badly want to switch our website over to a WordPress site. However, I don’t know (or don’t remember) how to gain control over our domain and redirect it to a WordPress site without contacting our current host. If I do that, I have to endure politics and complaining from the board, and I’m too exhausted to have this fight. I just want to design a new site, redirect the domain, and be done with it. I don’t want to have to go 20 rounds with people who – by the way – don’t work on the website and don’t have to put up with the crappy platform our host offers.

  I know the answer is gonna be ‘no’ but I’m gonna ask anyway. Is there any way I can get control of our domain without having to go through our host?

  WP.com: Unknown
  Jetpack: Unknown
  Correct account: Unknown

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)

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  staff-95percentghost · Staff · Nov 15, 2022 at 10:02 am

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  Hi there! As far as we’re aware, you’d still need to go via your host unfortunately. Do you know if the domain is registered with your current host? If so then it’s very likely you’d still need to go through the host in order to either make changes to the DNS records (to point it elsewhere) or transfer the registration outright.

  It might be worth checking if you can find who is listed as the domain contact person/owner (our own info about that in our system is here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/update-contact-information/ ) in case the domain owner has the ability to help you move the domain.

  In general though, it does sound like you may need to bring it up for discussion. What you could do if that would help, is set up a free WordPress.com site here with the content you need to show as an example, and potentially make the case that the hosting and domain renewal costs are offset by the time you save if you’re having an easier time using the WordPress software.