Site partially unavailable from around 11PM to 7:45AM 28-May

[Mike Ratledge]

I'm not really certain exactly what happened last night, and the technical support people can't tell me precisely why, either.

However, as of 7:45 this morning (Eastern/NYC time) the website should be fully available again. The truly weird thing is that about 1/2 of our users still found the site. I'm thinking a bad DNS (Domain Naming System) update went out that misdirected part of the people looking for the website to the wrong IP address.

Oddly enough, even this morning when I first got up I was able to access UC without any problems from my cellphone, but if I tried to do the same thing from my laptop I got a typical "parked domain" page that sometimes had 'advertising' links on it, sometimes just a grey-haired guy with a couple other people to his left and the place where the advertising links appeared was blank.

As always, I wish I could say I'm sorry for the down time, but until I figure out what and why - I really don't know what the heck happened. I do know that a new free service named "CloudFlare", which is a website accelerator that works like a CDN (Content Delivery System) was supposed to be installed at midnight. I was told that there would be absolutely no interruption of availability and that the transition to the accelerated delivery would be completely transparent. Who knows? It looks like it was partially done and my best guess is that when I go review the DNS settings I'm going to find some artifact of the "CloudFlare" installation that either was incomplete or just plain wrong.

The SSL certificate (enabling HTTPS or encrypted access so we can have a sub-domain that includes completely encrypted financial transactions) was also supposed to occur and that does not appear to have been done either.

Just for the record, for those technically inclined: UnitedCardists.com has our hosting on Host Gator in Dallas. The website's IP is 192.185.230.176, so if you have trouble using the DNS in the future try http://192.185.230.176" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; and see if you get in. If you do - we are having Domain Naming System issues - again. I *did* find an orphaned DNS pointer to a "CloudFlare" related redirection, and the more I think about it something went wrong during the installation of that acceleration service, apparently one hour early.

[badpete69]

Yes that was weird. I could access the site late last night from my tablet but from my PC I was directed to a dead site

[volantangel]

It was definitely a strange thing, it has gone away completely for me after 2 hours or so.