Four Island

Oh freaking God! So, there was a bit of unnecessary stress tonight. You may not have noticed it (especially if you live in Australia), but Four Island was down for a few hours today. But, no, it wasn't a usual outage involving a virus or a total creator failure. No, this one was pretty scary and most of you probably didn't even notice.

It started while I was in my house, surfing Four Island. Obviously, because Four Island is hosted in-house, I have to use a custom DNS server to be able to type in "fourisland.com" and related sites and actually get where I want to go. So, therefore, I was completely oblivious to the fact that Four Island was down until I received a call from my cousin, telling me that all attempts to access Four Island resulted in a parked site. You know, one of those annoying, stupid sites frequently used by domain squatters that almost always look exactly like this:

Yeah, Four Island had one of those. With the same annoying girl smiling in that cocky way. HOW DARE YOU SMILE! YOU STOLE MY WEBSITE! Anyway, after walking through the problem with him, me thinking that he misspelled the domain somehow, we realized that something else was happening because he wasn't doing anything wrong. As I was sheltered inside my house, protected by the magical DNS server, I couldn't see the problem, so I tried using the data service on my iPhone and I finally saw it. EVIL. PARKED. SITE.

WTF?

I dug deep into the problem, relaying as I researched things for my cousin to try to access (as I didn't want to cut too deeply into my data service) and every subdomain was also parked. Even my Tumblr was blocked! Caption'd, which is also hosted on Tumblr, was not blocked, however. Interesting.

There was only one thing that could've happened:

I lost fourisland.com.

Does anyone remember what yesterday was? Hm? The third anniversary of Four Island. But, hey, didn't I say earlier that Four Island actually existed for a week prior to September 22nd, but under a different name? Well, if you go back and read the actual post, you'll see what September 22nd is really celebrating. That's the day that I registered fourisland.com.

Yeah, that's right. Somehow, the domain lapsed and went back into the pool.

I seriously freaked out then. I was running around the house, screaming that my domain had been stolen, but simultaneously wondering out loud "WHY WOULD SOMEONE BE WAITING TO STEAL FOURISLAND.COM WHEN IT LAPSED? WHO CARES ABOUT ME??!!?!?!" Well, after I calmed down a bit and did some more research with Yahoo, my registrar, I finally discovered that the credit card on file used to automatically renew Four Island had expired some time between last year and yesterday. Yeah. And apparently, it's standard procedure at Yahoo! to park the site a few days upon lapse before putting the domain back into the pool. Oh yeah, and completely canceling accounts while forgetting to send any emails whatsoever that may have notified me of this. Thanks, Yahoo, you've been a big help.

Anyway, after some credit card action, Four Island was back under my control! Horray! I set up the nameservers and within 72 hours, Four Island should be back up for everyone. Yay! And just like that, the day I lost Four Island passed like any other. :P

Domain Name.......... fourisland.com
  Creation Date........ 2007-09-22
  Registration Date.... 2007-09-22
  Expiry Date.......... 2011-09-22