OK, if you are able to see this, then the DNS changes have propogated to your system… 

The story:

My hosting provider for the past year has been excellent up to about two months ago.  At that time, things started to slow down significantly.  The MySQL database server was down (or otherwise unavailable) for periods totaling 20 minutes or so multiple times during the week.  Then the web server software started experiencing these same symptoms.  This is a classic symptom of overselling in the shared web hosting environment.   Unfortunately, I didn’t have many other options (at the time I first moved the domains from home) - I can’t host from work (we are still running on a DSL line that will soon be upgraded to a T1) and the current mvps.org site infrastructure runs on IIS and I won’t try to run a small blog application there (IIS is fine for larger apps, but something like Community Server is overkill for me).

So, I upgraded “a bit” from the shared hosting situation.  I’m now setup on a virtual server that has much better response and guaranteed resources.  We will see how well this works for a while before making the “ultimate” decision about how to proceed.  I’ve spent the past week on migrating things and making sure everything would go smoothly.

NOT!

The one eventuality I didn’t anticipate was problems migrating the DNS records over to the new host.  I have done this quite a few times in the past, so I was assuming no troubles.  WRONG.  This time, ZoneEdit failed me.  I have hosted my primary domains with them for a while, but this site and Networking Community Discussions were hosted by my last internet provider (bad, I know).  So I went to ZoneEdit yesterday and set up the new domains and added the appropriate DNS records.  Normally, I trust ZoneEdit to do this.  However, they didn’t load these zones onto the two DNS servers provided to me.  I didn’t check.  Ooops..  (I won’t do that again)  Last night, I contacted my registrar and updated my nameserver pointers to ZoneEdit.  Bad Mistake…  This is why there was a long downtime today while I was emailing back and forth with the ZoneEdit staff.  In the end, I dropped ZoneEdit and am using a different DNS provider.  That’s why the site is finally back on the internet after a 18 hour downtime.

Aaaarrrggghhh..  Just what I didn’t need this weekend…

My learning experience:

• Always check the setup.  Don’t rely on the fact that a provider has always provided reliable service before.  Verify before making a change.