First, my apologies for the issues that we’re having and the confusion surrounding it.  We’ve isolated the issue and have taken steps to resolve it.  In this blog post I’m going to explain what happened and what we did to fix the issue.

What Happened

A few weeks ago we decided to bring our DNS services in house after having them hosted by a third party for the last year.  We configured our zones in our new DNS servers and did testing against them.  Everything was working properly, so we switched our DNS servers with our domain registrar.  Our old DNS hosting was still up and running at this point.  Unfortunately, when our account period with our old DNS host expired they changed the IP addresses on our record to one of their internal IP addresses.  I believe it’s their way of disabling an account.  Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, as we had changed our DNS servers well before that to point to our own DNS servers.

Unfortunately, we had an issue with our DNS servers that we didn’t notice during the changeover.  The serial number on the records on our DNS server was lower than the ones on our old DNS hosts records.  This caused some DNS servers to continue to look to our old DNS provider for records, thinking that our new servers had out of date information.  When our old DNS provider changed the IP addresses to disable the account, some mail senders picked up that change.

What We Did To Fix It

We have updated the serial numbers on all of our domains to be newer than the serial number on our old provider’s DNS servers.  This will allow DNS servers to pick up the proper, current records from our DNS servers and see them as valid.  I’m not sure exactly how long this will take for DNS servers that have cached incorrect information, so if you are still seeing issues with senders having trouble getting the correct DNS information for our gateways you’ll need to have them force a DNS cache update to get the newest information.  Feel free to point people to this blog post for an explanation of what happened.

We will be issuing all customers a 10% credit to their account based on the services they have with us.  For example, if you have a DomainProtect account at $6.95 per month, you’ll receive a 70 cent credit.  If you have a ServerProtect account at $39.95 per month, you’ll receive a $4.00 credit.  You should see the credit on your account in the next couple of days.

Once again, I’d like to apologize for this oversight on our part and assure you that we’ve learned from this situation should we need to transition DNS services again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under General, Service Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.