So after entirely too long, TigerTails Radio is back where it belongs on the .co.uk domain. www.tigertailsradio.co.uk is BACK!
So what happened? Well, for a long time, the TigerTails Radio domain was hosted by a company called Just-The-Name. They were a cheap yet well featured registrar who had powerful URL masking and good customer service. They allowed you to point your domain at anywhere on the Internet so while the site was hosted on simbaspaws.org it would never have been known. Then Just-The-Name was purchased by Plusnet. Now, I’m not suggesting that Plusnet are a bunch of useless cowboy hacks and the company should be avoided at all costs but alarm bells rang out loud and clear in August 2016 when, after renewing the domain, the domain forwarding broke. So I raised a support ticket and was pointed to an off-site status page which revealed the forwarding had been broken since late 2015. There was some back and forth which resulted in my following message to them:
“Having also had a look at the site status page, I am attempting the fix suggested in July to see if it’ll have any impact. I’m not holding out much hope, but I’m trying it. I would also very much like to know what exactly your technical people have been doing since November 2015 to fix the issue. I know technical difficulties can be hard to fix, but this has been going on for the best part of a year now. Occasional “still investigating” messages just don’t cut it. What exactly has been investigated? Why has it taken 8 months to reach a fix that has a low success chance, and why on month 9 are “investigations” still taking place? I’ve been with you guys since 2002 (ironically for the one domain that’s still working properly) and things have never previously been as bad as this. What happened? And, while on that chain of thought, perhaps someone in your marketing/management team would like to confirm why web forwarding is still an offered service, when the site status page seems to indicate that this is something you can no longer provide. At the very least a big warning message when I was renewing, warning me that web forwarding was experiencing technical issues and the ETA for its remedy would be somewhere between soon and the eventual consummation of our planet by the sun – that would have been appreciated. Things had been working okay before then, so there was certainly no need to check the site status page (or, indeed, to even notice it existed). And when you consider I use Just The Name primarily for the web forwarding service, this has been an unexpected, unwelcome, and unhelpful occurrence.”
I eventually spoke to our web host, as they also offered domain hosting, and they assisted in fixing the issue. Because they’re useful and not a bunch of useless, clueless, morons.
Then came the news that Just-The-Name was closing. The end was due to happen near the end of Season 10, but there was time to get the domains transferred away to another registrar. Or at least there would have been, had Plusnet actually responded to ANY of the transfer requests sent. So when the company finally closed, the DNS tables reverted to default and promptly stopped working. Helpful. In the lead up to the closure, it was well advertised that the domains that weren’t transferred away would be moved to Easy’s Internet services and an extra year of registration would be applied. This came as a surprise to Easy’s support, who knew nothing of this when I tried to get control of the domains back from them. It turned out that they weren’t the company that took the domains over. So all the TigerTails domains were now lost in the void of the Internet.
Thankfully, Echo works in the field of online things and was able to inform me that Nominet had an online portal which could be used to get control back. So began the task of getting things fixed. Nominet were able to confirm who had the domains and provide contact details. However firm wanted too many forms of personal document that I was never going to be providing to a company I’d never heard of, so I used the tools provided by Nominet to use them to wrestle control of my domains back for me. While this was going on I was also firing off many support tickets to our web host to prepare them to receive the domains. Finally, Nominet finished the task and I could now work with them to transfer the domains to their new home. Thankfully that wasn’t needed as within hours of requesting the transfer it had been completed. A quick DNS refresh later and boom – TigerTails Radio and TigerTails Gaming are back online at their .co.uk domains.
So what next? Well, we finish rebuilding the studio to start with. There’s still a little piece of horrifically expensive equipment to purchase which will happen in late March, so by Mid-April we should be ready to bring TigerTails Radio Season 11 to the air. So long as nothing else breaks.
And I can’t promise that nothing else will break.
