sublimed.be

One morning last week as I was drinking my coffee before leaving for work, I was checking my online ’stuff’ and I suddenly realised one of my sites, shantaram-forum.com was down. Not only that, but the domain was ‘parked’ at some spammy-looking page. Apart from reeling in the immediate terror that shook through my mind, I was complaining on twitter (can happen) about this and wasn’t sure at the time how the hell my DNS had changed!

The investigation

Needless to say it, but I was extremely agitated by this event. I happened to have a few spare minutes to re-set the DNS to the Media Temple account before I left for work. I quickly sent in a support request with the host that I use to manage my domains (that’s not Media Temple, by the way) at the same time. I simply could not understand how my account had been compromised since I used a cryptic password and had committed that to the memory banks since I conceived it two years ago. That simply didn’t add up, given that only one domain was affected.

Fast-forward now to when a reply came in, and it transpired that when I had requested to cancel my bulk hosting package and revert to a basic plan around 4 weeks previously, the host had also cancelled all my domain name renewals!

This was the cause of the domain being released from my ownership (for about 4 days) while my site went down and thereafter took a nosedive in Google’s SERPs. So I wasn’t paying attention, duly, but I could just have easily been on vacation. What was even more infuriating is the fact that the re-renewal date in my control panel lists November 2009 as the expiry!!! The steam was coming out of my ears at one point.

"It’s my precious… they stole it from us!"

That site has been up for nearly two years, and although not a majorly busy website it still is arugably the best place to find out information on Shantaram and it’s Author. IT may be a moot point but if some unscrupulous person had scooped-up that domain (not sure if there’s a minimum period after a domain expires in which it continues to be held?) then everything I’d worked on for that site in those two years would have been lost, forever. Until I could have got a new domain, because I sure as hell wouldn’t buy it back from a speculator. Even then, it would take months to rebuild its SERP ranking. Either way, there was something at stake, even if it’s not a huge successful site.

The good news is that of today, almost one week later, the site is back in its proper position on Google. So a word to the wise, never underestimate how stupid people can be. If you said to me cancel my hosting and I cancelled your domain renewals too, wouldn’t you think I was stupid? You can weigh up many “ifs’ and buts’” regarding this but the fact remains there was an assumption made, and it was the wrong one. #FAIL, as we like to say.

Although in part this little occurrence was the result of timing as well as bad communication, you just can’t change someone’s DNS settings to point at a spam page. It appears to me that this is an automated service of some kind, given the DNS was something like ns1.updateyourname.net. If anything at all, a final notice should have been sent to me to notify me that the domain had expired and I should either a) Do nothing or b) Do something else.

I’m left wondering if I can trust this host with any of my digital assets, as the hosting itself was below par and caused me to switch to (mt), and now another problem: An easy mistake to make, but one which could have had detrimental consequences for me, a customer.