By David F. Rooney
This did not shape up to be the kind of Easter I had hoped it would be.
As some of you may know The Current is a huge website. It has about 10,500 photos and about 4,400 stories. It also takes up a lot of space — 5 gigabytes to be exact.
I reached the limits of that space last weekend and purchased a new and much larger 10-gigabyte hosting package. That required space on a new set of servers and the domain name (revelstokecurrent.com) had to be pointed at those servers. Here’s one description of the process:
“Propagation is the period of time, or delay, involved in sending your domain’s address information to all the various name servers in the world. Name servers intentionally keep track of addresses for domains in their memory for a specific period of time (defined by the administrator of the name server). This speeds up the process of looking up an address for a domain name. Unfortunately this “cached” information also stays in the name servers when it has been changed at the source of the original information (the domain’s registrar).
“Name servers refresh themselves from once an hour to once a day. Experience dictates that 3 days is a good estimate for the period of time from when a domain’s DNS information is changed at the domain registrar to when everyone in the world can see the change.”
And, naturally, whenever there is a person in the loop human error is always a real possibility. A simple typo during part of the process caused more trouble before it was tracked down and fixed.
It all took much longer than I thought and I was thoroughly stressed. But now we’re back to normal.
Thanks for your patience and understanding. You are wonderful and loyal readers and I appreciate you greatly!
