Status update: some downtime expected

As Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look pre­pares to cel­e­brate its 21^st anniver­sary, we are prepar­ing to trans­fer the splicer.com domain to a new reg­is­trar. This is a pret­ty sim­ple admin­is­tra­tive change, but it’s quite pos­si­ble that there will be some time between the change in reg­is­tra­tion and when the new reg­is­trar pub­lish­es the name ser­vice infor­ma­tion and as that infor­ma­tion prop­a­gates across the Internet.

The servers will be run­ning the whole time, but may not be acces­si­ble from some loca­tions. It’s not cer­tain exact­ly when the trans­fer will occur, but it ought to be in the next few days. Depend­ing on the tim­ing and some oth­er fac­tors, it may be pos­si­ble to make the nec­es­sary changes on our end imme­di­ate­ly. If not users may expe­ri­ence errors when attempt­ing to vis­it the site.

Why the change? It’s most­ly orga­ni­za­tion­al. I’m try­ing to keep all my domain reg­is­tra­tions with one reg­is­trar for ease and sim­plic­i­ty of man­age­ment. I moved most of my web­sites from a Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Serv­er on Dreamhost a few years ago after a series of down­time inci­dents as their busi­ness grew faster than their capac­i­ty. These sites were moved to Host­way (Dreamhost’s ser­vice has recov­ered in the mean­time; I have very lit­tle good to say about Host­way) and then to Lin­ode, where they are cur­rent­ly run­ning quite reli­ably. At some point in the future the top­ic of VPSes will be revisited.

Some­time after I moved most of these web­sites and data­bas­es I began to use anoth­er reg­is­trar: Namecheap. As the name sug­gests, their prices are quite com­pet­i­tive. I also found their online tools for man­ag­ing reg­is­tra­tions to be excel­lent and their cus­tomer ser­vice to be top-notch. As the expi­ra­tion dead­lines for domains have approached, one at a time I’ve moved exist­ing domain reg­is­tra­tions (sep­a­rate from host­ing) to Namecheap. My only com­plaint is that their name makes them sound like a fly-by-night oper­a­tion — which they are not.

I regard Namecheap high­ly enough to include an affil­i­ate link here. Grant­ed, it’s the bot­tom of the page, but you might start see­ing them up above as well.