![\"Computer](\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/bigStock-Crash.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn the interests of transparency, here’s what happened:<\/p>\n
- \n
- The nsrd.info<\/strong> domain, it turned\u00a0out, was due for renewal December 2014.<\/li>\n
- I didn’t get the renewal notification.\u00a0Ordinarily you’d blame the registrar for that, but\u00a0I’m inclined to believe the issue sits with Apple Mail. (More of that anon.)<\/li>\n
- My registrar did a complimentary one year renewal for me even without charging me, so nsrd.info got extended until December 2015.<\/li>\n
- I\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0get a\u00a0renewal notification this year and I’d even scheduled payment, but in the meantime because it was\u00a0approaching 12 months out of renewal,\u00a0whois queries started showing it as having a pendingDelete<\/em> status.<\/li>\n
- My hosting service monitors whois and once the\u00a0pendingDelete<\/em> status was flagged stopped hosting the site. Nothing was deleted, just nothing was served.<\/li>\n
- I went through the process of redeeming the domain on 10 November, but it’s taken this long to get processing done and everything back online.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So here’s what this reinforced for me:<\/p>\n
- \n
- It’s a valuable reminder of\u00a0uptime<\/em> vs\u00a0availability<\/em>, something I’ve always preached: It’s easy in IT to get obsessed about uptime, but the real challenge is achieving availability. The\u00a0website being hosted was still up<\/em> the entire time if I went to the private URL for it, but that didn’t mean anything when it came to\u00a0availability<\/em>.<\/li>\n
- You might be able to put your services in\u00a0public-cloud like scenarios,\u00a0but if you can’t point your\u00a0consumers to our service, you don’t have a service.<\/li>\n
- In an age where we all demand cloud-like agility, if it’s something out of the ordinary<\/em>\u00a0domain registrars seemingly move like they’re wading through treacle and communicating via morse code. (It took almost 4 business days, three phone calls and numerous emails to effectively\u00a0process one domain redemption.)<\/li>\n
- Don’t rely on Apple’s iCloud\/MobileMe\/.Mac mail for anything that you\u00a0need<\/em> to receive.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
I want to dwell\u00a0on the final point for\u00a0a bit longer:\u00a0I use Apple products quite a bit because they suit my work-flows. I’m not into (to use the Australian vernacular),\u00a0pissing competitions<\/em> about\u00a0Apple vs Microsoft or Apple vs Android, or\u00a0anything<\/em> vs Apple. I use the products and the tools that work best for my work-flow, and that usually ends up to be Apple products. I have an iPad (Pro, now), an Apple Watch, an iMac, a MacBook Pro and\u00a0even my work laptop is (for the moment) a MacBook Air.<\/p>\n
But I’m done \u2013 I’m really\u00a0done<\/em> with Apple Mail. I’ve used it for years and I’ve noticed odd scenarios over\u00a0the years where\u00a0email I’ve been waiting for hasn’t arrived. You see, Apple do\u00a0public<\/em> spam filtering (that’s where you see email hitting your\u00a0Junk folder),\u00a0and they do\u00a0silent<\/a><\/em> spam filtering<\/a>. \u00a0That’s where (for whatever reason), some Apple filter will decide that the email you’ve been sent is very likely to be spam and it gets\u00a0deleted<\/em>. It doesn’t get\u00a0thrown into your Junk folder for you to notice later, it gets\u00a0erased.<\/em> Based on the fact I keep\u00a0all of my auto-filed email for a decade and the fact I can’t find my renewal notification last year, that leaves me pointing the finger for\u00a0the\u00a0start<\/em> of this mess at Apple. Especially when, while trying to sort it out, I had half a dozen emails sent from my registrar’s console to my @me.com<\/em> account only to have them never arrive. It appears Apple thinks my registrar is (mostly) spam.<\/p>\n
My\u00a0registrar may be slow to\u00a0process domain redemptions, but they’re not (mostly) spam.<\/p>\n
A year or so ago I started the process of migrating my email to my own controlled\u00a0domain. I didn’t want to rely on Google because\u00a0their notion of privacy and my notion of privacy are radically different, and I was trying to reduce my reliance on Apple because of their\u00a0silent erasure habit, but the events of\u00a0the last week have\u00a0certainly guaranteed I’ll be completing that process.<\/p>\n
And, since ultimately it’s still my fault for having not noticed the issue in the first place (regardless of what notifications I got), I’ve got a dozen or more calendar reminders in place before the next time\u00a0nsrd.info<\/em> needs to be renewed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Regular visitors will have noticed that nsrd.info has been down quite a lot over the last week. I’m pleased to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1229,13,22],"tags":[133,1255,1056],"class_list":["post-5748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud","category-general-thoughts","category-site","tag-availability","tag-site","tag-uptime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t