Domain Pain revisited

In a previous post, I described the difficulties I had trying to set up a custom domain with 1&1 as my service provider. Since then, I've switched to Strato, and put the blog back to the FTP Publishing settings. So back to square 1, although I'm no longer all that bothered about having a Google-hosted domain, as it makes me totally reliant on Google Analytics for statistics, and this won't count browsers like mine who don't trust Javascript.