What NOT to do when reconfiguring domains

For the last couple of days, my server was subjugated to a bad case of Murphy’s Law.
My web hosts had associated the links in my admin panel with an old domain of mine which expired a while ago (which I wasn’t planning to renew). That is to say, there were quite a few broken links about. So I asked them to fix it.
But it wasn’t as simple as updating the url, site wide. They told me that all email addresses going to vantan.org would have to be re-created.
Fine, I thought. Just do it quickly and get it over with, so I can generate the email accounts again. In the meantime, I set up a catch-all email address so I wouldn’t lose incoming mail.
However, there were more problems with my domain. After they had reconfigured the admin panel, they wrongly assigned vantan.org to point to the wrong folder, an old website of mine.
I wrote in to tell them to please point vantan.org to the correct folder on their server.
They happily wrote back, saying that vantan.org had been redirected.
I took a look. My website was redirected, all right – to http://vantan.org/vantan!
First of all, that changed the URL of my blog. Secondly, as Movable Type uses absolute links by default, my web page was chock full of broken links. I couldn’t even log in to my MT panel to change the url, because after logging in, it directed itself to the wrong page.
They did fix the link, and I heaved a sigh of relief. Too soon.
Then my CGI-BIN folder couldn’t be located via my browser, although it was still there when I logged in to the server via FTP. Somehow, they fixed that, too.
Next, Serdar kindly informed me that ‘www.vantan.org’ didn’t quite point to my website, although ‘vantan.org’ was fine (!!!!).
So now I’m waiting to hear from technical support again, praying that this is the LAST time I need to bug them about this.
And in the meantime, please key in ‘vantan.org’ without the ‘www’. Thanks.
[Update: Everything should be fixed and you can go back to using the ‘www’ if you’re used to it. I hope this is the last time I am writing about it!]