Tried to view responses to some posts this AM and got a screen that state stated "Account Suspended" contact the host for more details.

I bet something is wrong with the site. I couldn't get on it either.

The Internet:

What you are viewing can be extinguished in a second.

PC

It was up and running Monday night at around midnight........

I have always marveled at how few people seem to know this fact.
Streaming, online content, 'magazines' online, people act like all that stuff is engraved in stone and will/can never go away.
But yeah, all it takes is someone saying, "Nah, that's enough" and your content is gone. Poof, just like that.

Thanks for that posting Lee.

A group that I help with their website recently had it go out of service unexpectedly.

It turns out that two bills came in, one from the ISP and one for the domain, and they paid the ISP but misplaced the bill for the domain.

Poof, and its gone!

Fortunately they figured out the error and it is all fixed now.

Renewals are particularly important because there are outfits that buy up unrenewed and available domains and charge large fees for their subsequent use.

PC

Hi,

A buddy of mine let a domain expire by accident. Two days later it was a link to X-rated crud. They wanted $2,000.00 to sell the name back to him.

It's a hazzard of the media.

Doug vV

My phone has been ringing off the hook, txts and pms and email flooding my inbox. As former co-owner of railroad.net, I'm here to say I have no contact with the current administrators, and I know as much about the situation as you do.

-otto-

If this give you a cold chill go on networksolutions.com and check your own website to see when the domain name expires. At least through Network Solutions (if you do it directly through them) has a non-transfer feature you can get now. Use the WHOIS feature. Some WHOIS records will show you, some are concealed, but expiration dates and hostname are given, at least, so you can see if you or your ISP did the domain registration.

But they'll also allow people to try to contact you to buy your domain for $10 and also be notified if the thing ever expires without renewal. Heads up.

Needless to say, if you're posting a lot of content on a URL you don't control, you're at someone elses mercy, too, if they get careless.

One of the true flaws of domain management is the contact person or email on the WHOIS record. I've now had two previous employers that messed that up and the domain went feral when the IT manager quit or was fired - company had no idea the domain was in the wild as the contact information was then invalid. Tempting to hijack just to prove a point, but didn't do it. It's also a life's lesson to never, ever, ever have a personal locked email in that contact record, use a business generic one with an assigned personal alias like 'contact@yourgroup.org' with an alias of johndoe@yourgroup.org, so that if John Doe quits, the email still makes it through and no records have to be changed. Same with software registrations.

The other thing to do while you're feeling uncomfortable is to make sure that somebody, somewhere has good backups of your website - hopefully the ISP, website developer, or yourself. Our own ISP was surprised to find out their backups were unreadable when a drive crashed, I had a backup, but that was the only thing as the last line of defense.

works for me..(didnt know there was a prob but never accessed it for a little while till this check)

Checked a few minutes ago and railroad.net looks normal again.

Did not see any notices regarding what happened this morning.

PC

It was definitely offline for a while. The error message said something about "This website is offline, please contact your hosting company".

That type of error message can come from a number of causes, temporary outage for repairs or upgrades, changing the DNS etc. One of the more common reasons is lack of payment, either due to oversight, or in many cases, the credit card that you set up for them to bill monthly has reached the expiration date they have on file.

They typically send you reminds of such things, and many spam filters just as typically regard them as spam.

Most hosting companies would far prefer to keep you as a paying customer rather than make an enemy out of you, so while they may pull the site offline, a good host will keep it on the server for some time before deleting it, in hopes you'll discover the error and fix the problem.

There was a short announcement posted yesterday:

"Sorry for the outage, folks. Had to pay a bill..... :P

Hey, it happens!"

http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopi ... 8&t=164643