Sometimes when running your site out of your home, you’ll forget that in addition to being the Editorial Team you are also the entire Server Team. When things go wrong, you invariably end up calling yourself to get the problem resolved.
<WARNING, Quasi-technical babble from here on down>
I had been using the free DNS services provided by hn.org since September of 2002 when the original DNS I had chosen (DNS2GO) decided to charge for their services. I’m running this site on a shoestring, so anyplace I can save a couple of bucks is worth it… usually.
About halfway through the day today, I found that my site was no longer available to the outside world. We had a wind advisory and a fairly healthy thunderstorm, so I figured I had a brownout and the old ‘Socks just needed a reboot.
I get home and this is not the case.
It would seem that on September 9, 2002 I signed up for hn.org’s services using an email address that I checked on a regular basis. Just over 3 years later with no problems, I checked that email address on the average of about once every two months to make sure that it still exists. Had I checked it slightly more frequently, I might have seen this note floating at the bottom of my inbox:
Please be advised that hn.org is scheduled to turn down by 2006.02.15.
Other than my IP address, that’s the whole email. I assume that ‘turn down’ means ‘turn off’. I mean, I assume that now since the service was gone and the page just gives the extremely helpful message that ‘hn.org is closed’.
So, in a scramble, I desperately looked for an alternative solution and eventually settled on EveryDNS.net. Which I’ll use until the donations become mandatory.