Normally, moving code and data from one server to another is something I try to do in the middle of the weekend (e.g. late Saturday night). Alas, even the best-calculated schedules sometimes are thrown awry. In this past weekend's move--a.k.a. "migration"--I was actually ahead of the usual curve of permissions not being correctly set up (which is normally the biggest show-stopper). But then my connection to the server would drop intermittently.
I've chosen the new hosting company for this application (and others yet to come) largely based on the fact that customer service is a matter of sending an email or picking up the phone. Not punting a form submission into a queue picked up halfway around the globe.
True to form, debugging has been ongoing since Saturday evening, and the preliminary diagnosis is a DNS issue.
Now, if you're not in I/T, the only thing you really need to know is that DNS (or the Domain Name System) basically functions as the phone book of the internet. Networked servers, just like phones, are known by a number. But we humans know the people (and companies) associated with those phones as names. So, just as you would search WhitePages.ca by name (and city) to find a number, your web browser queries a DNS server to translate the human-readable "www.duckduckgo.com" to the network address "107.21.1.61."
That lookup and translation happen so immediately and (usually) so seamlessly that it's easy to take for granted. (Unless, of course, you're a Rogers customer.) Until it doesn't work and a website you know is legit. 404s.
Unlike many other networking issues, DNS problems can take a long time to completely resolve. The reason is that when a web URL moves from one server (which is a number, remember!) to another, it can drop off the internet's radar. That's because not all DNS servers update at the same rate--some of them can take up to 72 hours. It's the price we pay for the decentralisation (and thus the robustness) of the internet.
But boy howdy, does a potential 3-day lag ever slow down debugging. Not to mention that having a key feature of the modern internet move so glacially feels more than a bit ironic when everything else has been speeding up over the past 20+ years. But it's not like irony and the internet are strangers, right?
