Why My Site Was in Internet Purgatory for the Last 24 Hours

Lemme tell y’all what happened. These past couple of months, I’ve been breaking my own traffic records. In fact, since July, my site traffic has doubled. I’ve been getting ALLA THE PAGEVIEWS! And I realized that I needed to upgrade my hosting account.

I got the BRIGHT (read: really dumb) idea to make this change yesterday. I went against my own better judgment and decided to do it at 9pm. This is something I would never advise any of my clients to do. Because I know better and I’d tell them to never make major settings changes in the middle of the day, or when there’s hella people on their site. It was about to become my highest traffic day EVER. Was. But almost doesn’t count.

So I chatted with my web host, let them know I wanted the upgrade and asked if it’d be seamless. They told me there’d be no downtime. Which made perfect sense because I’ve moved my clients from hosts or to different servers without ANY downtime multiple times. In fact, I’ve moved my own website 4 times this past year and there was never interruption in my site being up. SEAMLESS DINNAMUG. Like a good quick weave that’s LAIDT like piano keys.

But I had forgotten that I recently made another major change to my site that negated the advice I was given. And I forgot about it. If you aren’t a techie, ignore my next paragraph (the part in italics) and skip over it.

I had actually changed my nameservers to a CDN’s (CloudFlare) in October. So instead of me changing the A records to my new IP address, I deleted my site from CloudFlare and changed the nameservers back to my web host in GoDaddy. And this is why my DNS took so long to propagate around the web.  

Long story short, the change I made in the upgrade process led to a 24-hour delay where my website was still pointing to my old settings instead of the new.So it was literally internet purgatory for a whole gahtdamb day! And people able to load (or not) my site, based on where they were located in the world. Some people could access it as early as this morning, but most were still getting an error message, keeping them from my awesome. *facepalm*

This was me:

I was calling my hosts constantly, wondering if they could do something but really, it was my fault. I just had to wait. I kept telling myself “YOU KNOW BETTER!!! WHY DID YOU DO IT LIKE THAT?” I’m like a plumber who went to fix her own toilet and turned it into a bathroom flood situation. I’m the doctor who drank Four Lokos for breakfast. No excuse.

But I was my mistake. An expensive one. Because I was losing money with every minute my site was down. Literally. Especially since yesterday, a huge YouTube named Elle Fowler had linked to my Poptart Tragedy post, and was bringing me thousands of visitors. You know how much ad dollars I lost??? There was no *wall slide* big enough for me to hit.

This was a lesson in patience. There was nothing I could do but wait for these settings to catch up. And finally, they have.

Longest day EVER.

The moral of this story is:

* Don’t make a major setting change in the middle of a day or when many people are hitting their eDougie on your site.

* Don’t take yourself for granted and treat yourself like you’d treat others. I know this is the opposite lesson that folks usually need to learn. But I would have been more careful with this change had it not been my own site. I’da double-checked everything. I was all “Eh. Whatevs.” Yeah, aight.

* Go with your gut. Like Olivia Pope does. Well, lately her gut has been wrong. But really, trust your instincts. It doesn’t lead you wrong too often. Apart from if you’re Huck and you don’t realize that Becky’s insane. Can you tell I miss Scandal?

* When life gives you lemons, call your webhosts and say you wanted strawberries.

* Oh, and don’t tack on 100 years to Mother Cicely’s age. Her spirit will punish you. The God of Meshack, Shadrack and ALL them billy goats don’t like ugly.

I’m sorry, Ms. Tyson! I will make amends to your first cousin, Father Abraham. I’S SO SORRY! Ashe to the ancestors.

Anywho, I’m back. Did you miss me? I got another post coming today.

P.S. If you get an error message or bug of some sort, please email me at luvvieblog at gmail dot com and let me know what it is.