...and we're back

so yeah, the blog was down for about three days, as was the AWIA news page. both are back up now, and expected to stay that way.

when i first purchased animalswithinanimals.com, nearly a decade ago, there was a lot less competition in the domain registry market, and i ended up using network solutions. but years passed, price wars were waged, and by 2011 i could no longer justify paying netsol's rates ($34.99/yr, going down to $15/yr if you renew for 5-10 years). one of my facebook friends suggested 1and1 ($4.99 for the first year and $8.99/yr after), so i decided to make the switch.

for some foolish reason i decided to do this while that wired (uk) article is on the stands, even though my domain wasn't set to expire until march. so naturally this resulted in a DNS error taking down the blogs (while the rest of the site stayed up), and since DNS can take up to 48 hours to propogate, i waited impatiently for two days, expecting the issue to resolve itself. all the while, wired readers were presumably punching in the url in the article only to find a dead page (though at least google had it cached).

on the evening of the third day, i felt enough time had passed to justify contacting 1and1 customer support. although their website brags that you can email them for free using your account control panel, i could find no such feature and in the end resorted to calling their free help line. after listening to several minutes of heavily distorted on-hold music—harsh noise remixes of led zeppelin, the cult, and the who, it would seem—i was eventually told that i would need to contact my web host. despite my suspicion that this was crap, i did so anyway, and sure enough, my web host was able to fix it immediately.

so now we're back, not that my regulars would even have noticed considering how infrequently i post these days. ¶