And now a message from our poor overworked web admin, Thomas King:
We’re back online! Well, technically the site never went offline but more on that below. At least the most problematic technical difficulty the site has had recently had the decency to wait until after the season had ended before kicking off.
Upon renewing the domain as it was about to expire, TigerTails Radio fell foul of an issue that had been with our domain registrars for quite some time. The pointers that they used to get the .co.uk address pointing to the website were no longer pointing. So they site would still be up and running, but no one could get to it via the .co.uk address. Naturally, as an efficient and helpful registrar company, they gave fair warning when renewing the domain… Oh no, wait. No they didn’t. The issue was kept hidden on a tiny Site Status link on their homepage (which you bypass when going straight to your domain login panel) and wouldn’t manifest until work on the domain had taken place. In this case, the renewal was the trigger. This was on top of them taking so long to process the renewal in the first place that I had entered talks with Nominet to ensure the domain wouldn’t get taken by a squatter.
An angry email conversation ensued whereupon I was eventually put through to someone either more competent or more important who informed me that I would have to seek assistance from the web hosts, and the registrar was unwilling to release further information about the fault. While I won’t name them, I will say that since Plusnet took them over a while ago, their customer service had gone downhill. The email exchange resulted in the sending of “At the very least a big warning message when I was renewing, warning me […] the ETA for its remedy would be somewhere between soon and the eventual consummation of our planet by the sun […] would have been appreciated” before assistance was given by someone a little more helpful. Shocking customer service. By the time I got a useful answer out of them, TigerTails Radio had been unreachable by the .co.uk address for 18 days.
The same can not be said for our website hosting company, who have been fantastic throughout. After a couple of days going through the various potential solutions and waiting for the DNS to update, I finally opened a support ticket and was given clear instructions on exactly what I needed to do, once I had explained what had happened and what I’d been experimenting with. The result is, after 22 days, TigerTails Radio has a working .co.uk again. For how long? Hard to say, but it seems to be stable for the time being.
So, with a massive thank you to the team at GBServers, it’s now business at TigerTails Radio as the studio is reformatted ready for Season 10. Testing shows for which are currently scheduled to begin in mid-November. Watch this space, or keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter pages for updates.
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