An update: Things should be more or less normal now. To steal a line from Hitchhiker's, "Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem."
(For the record, I'm something of a tech consultant for Star. I'm the guy who owns the "nerdramblingz.com" domain.)
Last week, around the 1st or 2nd of December, it became difficult or impossible for some users to access the site. Star messaged me around Something in the morning telling me he couldn't access the site. At the time, I dismissed it as a minor routing issue, as I was able to access the site, and the outage pattern (who could and could not access the site) seemed to fit; people from certain ISPs couldn't access it, people from others could, and it seemed relatively contained to a specific geographic area (namely, south-eastern-ish PA), so I kept it in the back of my head and dismissed it as "one of those things" that happen. Routing is fairly arcane thing, and prone to fuckups in weird ways, so it was not entirely out of the question. I noticed some odd behavior on my end (a few bounced emails here and there, Kickstarter bitching about not being able to get in touch with me, stuff like that), but again, nothing that didn't indicate "weird routing issues" to me.
Now comes the part where I'm not quite sure what happened. Over the weekend and up through today, odd things were happening in terms of access to the site: some people could go directly to the IP address of the server to get to these boards, some could go directly to my domain name, some could go through proxies to access the site. However, the strange part was that it seemed to happen at complete random; Star was telling me about people literally in the same room who had different access situations through the same ISP. I was baffled, but poked strongly at the various things on my end. Having poked, I was certain that the issue was external, and would just clear up in time. (For those curious, we run our own DNS server here, as I tend to deal chase on Registrars, but nothing was out of the ordinary. This tidbit will make what happened next slightly clearer.)
This afternoon, Star messages me with four words I really don't want to see in the middle of one of my classes (I am, no surprises, going for my Comp Sci bachelors degree): "Nerdramblingz.com is hard down". At this point, we do what we can to get in touch with our equivalent of the Omnissiah, the man who runs the actual physical servers (I simply manage the software side), Nullav. It's at this point that everything is dead; the name "nerdramblingz.com", as far as the web and DNS protocols were concerned, didn't exist. I stopped getting email, and nobody could even access the site through the IP address. This, at least, was a simpler problem to diagnose; while it's certainly more inconvenient for you, "nothing works" at least makes problems easier to figure out.
Eventually, Nullav wakes up and figures out the problem: our VPS provider changed our IP address without warning (we're unsure when, or if this was a different, unrelated problem to the access issues earlier).
All told, everything should be fine now. As I write this, the various updates are propagating around the internet, and by the time this post is a few hours old, this incident should be nothing more than a memory.
