The Irish Internet Association’s website has been offline for most of today.
Why?
Well put simply the domain has vanished from DNS, so it’s impossible for anyone to reach it.
The domain is held by Esat’s nameservers, but at some point in the last 24 hours someone removed it completely from their nameservers and as the IEDR’s offices are closed today there is no way to move the domain to another set of nameservers even as an interim measure (ie. there are no reloads or changes to the .ie zonefile today)
I spoke to the IIA’s CEO Fergal O’Byrne a short time ago and he explained what had happened.
It transpires that the IIA have a free account with Esat, but that their billing department seems to have raised an invoice 4 years ago for services. Although the invoice was flagged as free and to be removed it obviously wasn’t …
End result being the site is offline due to a billing error.
I’m sure Fergal is very impressed!
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
Footer
Site hosted in Ireland by Blacknight - Content copyright Michele Neylon
Perhaps the good people of IEDR might have mobile phones and could help? A quick redelegation and reload of the zonefile could restore the IIA to the internet.
Ouch! That is so bad and silly. Why do something like that on Holy Thursday when half the country is off work the next day?
It’s like the old chestnut about launching a new product at 5pm on a Friday… it’s bound to go wrong and cause all sorts of pain.
John – It was solved eventually …
Donncha – It’s an odd one
Of course, this would never have been such as big deal if they’d just automate the reload rather than doing it manually. Jeeze, you’d swear Ireland was still the back of beyonds…
Details of this particular incident aside, who hosts with Esat these days? and why? (inertia say inertia)
Esat.net crashed through the 5000 domains hosted barrier (Biz/Info/Org/Net/Ie/Com)in March. It loses about 250 domains a month now. Most of them are deletions rather than renewal. It is hard to say why people stay with Esat but it is probably inertia due to bundled services. Esat may be concentrating on its dedicated and high end hosting but the second generation hosting service providers have obliterated it in the market.
Ambrand – IIA are not hosted by Esat. They have the domain and DNS from them – nothing more
Michele