Pro tip: my '5 minute' DNS fix ate my whole Saturday

I was troubleshooting a client site in Austin that kept dropping connections. Thought it was a simple DNS cache issue, so I cleared everything and waited. Three hours later, still down, so I checked the registrar and found the nameservers pointed to a host I cancelled in 2019. The old host's support line had a 45 minute hold, then they told me the domain was actually set to auto-renew with them. I paid $14 to transfer it properly. Has anyone else had a stale third party nameserver setup quietly destroy their whole afternoon?

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skyler_kim1mo ago

Ugh, that is brutal. I used to be so cocky about DNS, like "oh just flush it and move on," but this kind of thing totally flipped my view. Once I spent a whole evening chasing a ghost on my own blog, only to find out the A record was still pointing at an old VPS I'd shut down two years prior. The registrar said everything looked fine on their end, but the domain itself was like a zombie, still walking around with the old address. Now I always double check the registrar's nameserver list first, because that hidden layer is where time really goes to die. Did you at least keep the old host's email confirmation for your files?

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