Outage

Just in case you didn't already know, BLF was unavailable here between at least 23:00GMT (Wed, 16th June) and 08:30GMT today (Thu, June 17th)

And it happened the other day too. Anyone knows whats wrong and what to do about it?

Yes i sure missed it yesterday......wanted to check what was going on between breaks from Wizard 101 but my browser kept saying no connection.

Yup, that was a long outage. My apologies to everyone who was affected. It looks like it's time to look for a new domain name, unfortunately...

In simple terms, here's a quick rundown of what happened, you probably already understand this process but here goes:

  1. Your Internet service provider doesn't know where every single website in the whole world is located. So when you want to visit http://example.com, your request gets passed to a huge organization with a ton of name servers that know the IP address of any webpage that ends in .com , and they point your request to the address of the correct page. The .com name service NEVER goes down. If it did, there would be worldwide chaos.
  2. In the case of http://budgetlightforum.cz.cc , our address is registered on a, well, "budget" domain name provider. What else would you expect from a budget-oriented site? ;) So when you enter http://budgetlightforum.cz.cc into your browser, your ISP passes that request to the servers that know where anything that ends in .cc is located. The .cc name servers are also reliable as far as I know.
  3. However, for our domain name, there is an additional step. The .cc name servers only know where .cz is located. They don't know where "budgetlightforum" is located. So they pass that request on to cz.cc
  4. cz.cc has their own set of name servers that know what is the IP addresss of the server on which "budgetlightforum" is located. Unfortunately, cz.cc has been having issues recently, and when their name servers fail, every single site that ends in .cz.cc can't be located by any user. All this time, our data has been safe and available at the great web host company that holds the actual data of BLF. It's just the name servers of cz.cc that have been unable to point our users to WHERE the BLF data is hosted at.

I really dislike this kind of outage, because it's totally out of my control. cz.cc could disappear overnight and I would have no way of notifying everyone. So it looks like it's time to change domain names. What do you guys think? http://budgetlightforum.com? http://budgetlightforum.info? http://budgetlightforum.org? Unfortunately, this will be a setback for our google search rankings, because google will have to "re-learn" all our content.

We might as well have a poll and see how that goes....but i like the name and .com....just makes it easier to remember. And i missed this site yesterday......Cry

I suggest WeAreNotLightSnobs.com or CheapAssesAreUs.com :) ....ok, just kidding, but google would probably be able to transfer the search ranking stuff, if you notify them.

I was wondering if it were a DNS issue. But having your own isn't going to do a lot of good unless you can bypass .cz.cc nameservers which would be tricky-impossible. I assume this is living on a colocated box somewhere - does BLF have a unique IP address? - no problem here with typing http://123.456.789.012 or whatever now that I've actually thought it through. However, having tried the real IP (according to my DNS cache), it didn't work and I think I know why now that I've thought some more. And it probably wouldn't be a good idea to disclose publicly the path from the official IP.

I'd vote for .org as it isn't a commercial proposition, but if .info or .com are cheaper...

That's my order of preference anyway.

I'm sure enough of us could pass up on one BLF cheapskate's DeLight for a month to cover your costs. I'm certainly glad to do so. This is a great place and I don't want to see it disappear and am quite happy to contribute to keep it running.

All of the TLDs I checked have budgetlightforum available. Well, there were all sorts of strange errors from checking .cn but I thought you had to be a Chinese resident/national to get one of those anyway.

Nice name suggestions! ;-) As for Google transferring the search rankings to another domain name, I thought the same thing, but unfortunately they won't. I use Google Webmaster Tools, and they have a section for domain name changes, but it's only valid for toplevel domains. Unfortunately we are technically on a subdomain of cz.cc.

Thanks Don for your comments too. Yes, we are hosted on a shared hosting service, and a rather good one at that- http://downtownhost.com

However we don't have a dedicated IP. I just have IPs for the DownTownHost DNS, and they deal with the rest via NAT as they see fit. And besides this is less than ideal for new users, who won't come back again if they find the site down. But don't worry, we're not going anywhere, the site itself is in good hands with a great webhost, I just need to find time to change domain names. I'll see if I can look into it next week.

Meanwhile, thanks to our loyal users for your patience and support!

Dont worry we are behind you, no matter what domain name you choose!

You know i am....this is my Light home away from reality.

Good one!

Thanks.....cant tell you how many times i was checking to see if the site was up.

Thanks you guys for your support! We'll get it worked out. It's just that in the beginning I didn't want to risk buying a domain name until I was sure that the site would be used. So I took the cheap route. And let's just say that budget (sub-)domain name providers are not as reliable as my budget lights...

But possibly more reliable than my DX throwers.

Don't forget http://www.godaddy.com/ very cheap domains

I know I've only been a part of BLF for a little over 3 months but this is the first time this has happened to me. So for me it's really not that bad but either way, I will support your decision. I love BLF and will help in any way I can to keep it going. :love: