Jalaj

This morning when I opened the blog stats page, I was surprised to see that for last 4 hours there were only 3 page views! But that was a trend in the early days of blog and never occurred for last many months. I opened IE to check and found that error “Host not available” is being shown… tried with three other browsers but the same thing repeated.

The first thing I did then was to set the blog url back to wordpress.com sub domain using wordpress.com dashboard. This way, while blog would be available at jalaj.wordpress.com, jalaj.net whenever gets OK, would redirect to it. That done, fear ran over me! Why was domain not working? Am I facing same problem that David Airey faced with! Acting fast I opened my domain control panel and to my relief found the domain there!

Now it was time to find the problem and thus the solution. Since wordpress.com sub domain is not wholly indexed by search engines now, there was no way traffic following SERPs would be, at the moment, reaching the destination. I pinged jalaj.wordpress.com that returned the IP address as 72.232.101.42. I, then opened up the DNS management tool on my domain control panel to find that the “A” entries for the whole site points to “71.19.202.100″ the IP address where my blog was supposed to be hosted at.

So now it was clear that the blog has been shifted to some other server and if I had given the name servers specified by wordpress.com, the shift would have been seamless, and since I was doing DNS management on my own it’s me who could get things right back. I deleted the old entries and created new ones with new IP address. A few minutes later tried browsing a blog page on jalaj.net and as expected the page redirected to corresponding jalaj.wordpress.com page.

Going back to the wordpress.com dashboard I changed settings to point blog again to jalaj.net and thus the blog is back in action with downtime of few hours may be about 4.5 hours and while wrote this post I could see the statistics getting populated with fresh views sent through SERPs.

This post is here for the reason that there may be some other wordpress.com blogs too that are inaccessible if all of the conditions below are met with -
1) They are using Domain upgrade of worpress.com
2) The primary blog url is the new domain name
3) The domain is registered by their own and did not register through wordpress.com
4) The name servers are not mentioned as those given by wordpress.com and using DNS management tools on their own.

While the original title was something else I changed it inspired by Lorelle VanFossen’s recent post Blog Struggles: Recovering From a Traffic Spike, hope Lorelle finds it OK.

Update 14.02.2008 : Struggle didnot end that easily. As already cautioned by Lloyd in comments below, setting up A records on basis on ping result was not a good idea, and the IP changed again on 13th and bought down the site for many hours on 13th and a few on 14th.

I planned to end up the problem by pointing the nameservers to wordpress.com but that would create problem with existing hindi subdomain and is expected to bring down the mail system for quite sometime until I am able to enable email from within worpdress.com dashboard. So it was not a good idea either.

Only ray of hope was a CNAME record but I was not sure of where to point it. I checked up the worpress.com forums and got a hint that setting up a CNAME to point to the wordpress.com subdomain (for my blog, jalaj.wordpress.com) will work. I did it and thankfully it seems to work fine for now. Please suggest if this step is OK or not.