Since Friday, February 23, we’ve had some technical difficulties with the prwdot.org domain which may have prevented people from sending us email or visiting our website (or any other website in the prwdot.org domain). If you are reading this message, then for you the problem has already been fixed (at least on the computer and internet connection you are using at the moment). For others, our site may be inaccessible until as late as Saturday, March 3. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a comment on this post letting me know that you were able to read it, so that I know who is once again able to visit our site.

If you’d like a more technical explanation, read on.

On Friday, February 23, the IP addresses for the server that all prwdot.org sites are hosted on were abruptly pulled from our hosting provider, Site5. Apparently they had been incorrectly assigned to Site5 by their upstream network provider. prwdot.org has received a new IP address, and I have updated our domain name records so that they have the correct IP address. However, other domain name servers and computers around the world may have our old information cached for up to one week. That means that some people may not be able to access our website (or any of our friends’ websites hosted at prwdot.org) or send us email until these changes have propagated.

Unfortunately there is not much I can do to speed this up. The one-week expiration time is something that I had set up for our domain a while back, and is a fairly standard time limit. Even if I were to lower the time limit now, domain name servers around the world would still have the one week limit cached and would not pull in any new settings until that original record expired. Normally, the one-week time limit would not be a problem, since I would have had one week advance notice to get things ready for the changeover. Unfortunately, there was zero notice, so we are left in the lurch.

I would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about the prwdot.org site status blog. This blog is run in a separate domain on a separate server, so that if there are ever problems that specifically affect the prwdot.org domain, we can keep our readers up-to-date. You can find a link to it on the top left side of any page on our site. I’d suggest subscribing to it in your favorite feed reader, or at least bookmarking it.