this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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https://www.whois.com/whois/vlemmy.net
Porkbun LLC is a DNS registrar, so maybe somebody didn't pay their bill?
Well, not being owned by a profit-driven evil stab-us-in-the-back company going IPO has advantages and disadvantages :-(
How bad could the bill have been? Was there any prior mention of server costs/donations before this?
I don't think it is a payment issue. At least in Brazil (where I live), a registration (which can be done directly with the .br registrar, not necessarily third parties) costs less than 10 USD a year.
vlemmy.net was registered less than 2 months ago, for 5 years. I suppose (hope) it was already paid for 5 years.
it's strange that it's parked at a dynamic dns service though
I know I’ve forgotten to turn on auto-renew on a domain before. It sucks and caused a lapse. I think most registrars have a cooldown period where you can pay a fee to get your domain back before they release it back into the general pool. It’s usually like 90 days or something.
Yeah, I just thought perhaps it was part of a packaged deal or something. You can get a dot com for about that much. I can't imagine .net is much more.
How odd. Could it be an account hack? Server malfunction?
The server isn't malfunctioning. Rather, the name
vlemmy.netisn't given you the IP address of the server anymore. Does anyone have the IP? We could test if the server is still there.Could be a dns server malfunctioning (or rather misconfiguration).
After all, "it's always DNS"
"It's not DNS. There's no way it's DNS. It was DNS." My favorite haiku ever
I checked historical data for the A record and came up with this, no clue if this is the original server address
Ran a ping on it and it timed out so I am guessing u/pyarra just pointed the dns to the park page while they figure out what's going on with this server
I also found that record, but I have no way of knowing how accurate it is. I can confirm that it isn't responding. We might have to wait and see if/when it returns.
Really weird.
dynu.com is a dynamic dns service. I don't think the maintainer of vlemmy.net would be running the instance from a dhcp (variable) IP, to justify using dynamic dns.
Or is it usual for people to run instances from their homes using common ISP subscriber variable IP addresses?
Even more strange that it was registered just last month, according to whois. Is vlemmy.net that new?
No. That that would be absolutely ridiculous for anything beyond an ephemeral CounterStrike server.
I found some posts from the creator around the beginning of June letting people know they had just set it up, so it does seem to be fairly new.
https://lemmy.eus/comment/111442
Aren't many of these instances a product of the reddit migration? I don't expect the one I'm on to be much older.
That makes sense. I'm a reddit refugee, just recently joined. Should have checked the domain registration date. I suppose there will be a lot of new instances dying or not being properly maintened in the near future.
Edit: when I couldn't access vlemmy.net, I signed up to feddit.nl. Just checked the domain registration date; June 1st 2023. Bummer.
Do they have an Open Collective page or something similar? Transparency about servers and costs? Those are the first things to look for in an instance.
Also, for all we know vlemmy could return. We have no details yet.
If you’re self hosting at home yes dyn dns is far cheaper, and from a users perspective there’s no difference