The site has been up and down since I changed my registration over from Yahoo! to Dreamhost.  Incase anyone else is doing the same, here are some tips/explanations of why I switched:

1. Yahoo! is charging a ridiculous $34.99 to extend a regular .com domain for one year.  This is not a competitive rate and hardly any other registration sites charge anything close to this.
2. I looked at all of the different places to register domains and decided for basic .com domains I would just keep everything under one roof at Dreamhost for registration and hosting.  They charge a flat rate every year of $9.99
3. For other domains such as .tv or .name I am using 1&1.  Same deal with $9.99 fees per year.  Very straight forward and they don’t try to screw with you to get a bunch of useless upgrades like GoDaddy does.  I’d prefer to have everything under one roof, but this has been a good solution for me.
4. Transferring the domain is not too hard.  From Yahoo! to Dreamhost you just need to get the domain authorization code and have access to the administative email account.  It was way easier than I thought and the instructions they give are straight forward.
5. Once the transfer has been confirmed and is completed (took 3 days in my case) make sure the new domain is showing up in the “Manage Domains” section in your Dreamhost Admin panel.  When I first made the transfer, I couldn’t modify the DNS A-Records because this site was not showing up in that panel.  There is an “Add Domain” section at the top where you can add in the newly transferred domain to this section.
6. If your using the domain as a custom URL for your Tumblelog you’ll need to create a new A-Record in the DNS panel.  You can add a new record from this area, only Dreamhost already has the A-Record pointing to a specific IP.  You’ll have to send them an email to remove the non-editable A-Record .  This was the main reason this blog has been down for a day.  The record you put in will become the default at this point and your custom URL should work just fine.

This was actually not too complicated and the Dreamhost customer support responded to my questions within an hour whenever I had problems.  This kind of support is one of the additional reasons I wanted to make the switch in the first place.  There are other reasons I wanted to have everything under the same roof at Dreamhost; including easy integration with Gmail and Ruby on Rails which my brother deals with.

Let me know if you have a better system or any suggestions.  It’s possible that some of these problems came about because I screwed up the process.