Site was down, site's back up

My site was down this morning, I noticed it when I started to get Outlook errors Wednesday morning. I did a little investigating and figured out that it wasn't the site itself, the domain name wasn't resolving properly. In non-geek terms, that means that the computer server (called a DNS or domain-name server) that's responsible for finding the actual address when you type in hevle.com wasn't doing the job right. Every web page is on a computer connected to the Internet, and every computer on the Internet has a unique address called an IP address (Internet Protocol address). Domain-name servers take an easy-to-remember name (like hevle.com) and connect it to a particular computer (like 67.15.110.8). Here's a good non-technical explanation of the domain-name system. DNS servers are maintained by the company that registers your domain name, called your registrar. Domain-name servers used to be hosted by ICANN but now they're all hosted by the registrars. You can host your own DNS, too. ICANN is the organization that assigns domain names to IP addresses. They keep track of which DNS is which through 13 root servers distributed all over the world. This is the organization that the Euro's were getting all bent out of shape because it is American-owned (hey, we invented the Internet, we get to manage it. Now go smoke your little black cigarettes.)

So when I typed in hevle.com in my browser, nothing happened. I figured out that it was the DNS because I could still access the site controls by using the IP address, but not the domain. So I called my site host and they said "Oh, you were supposed to get an email saying our domain name server addresses were changing". So I went to my registrar (another company in this case) and changed the DNS and within a couple of minutes it was up and running.

So it was an easy fix, but in the mean time, any emails sent today would have received an error message, which is a hassle. Many email servers will try to resend emails, so I'm hoping I didn't miss anything. And I think I'm going to move my site from my old host ev1servers.net to godaddy.com (who is my registrar).