LD Resources

My sincerest apologies to anyone who attempted to find this web site and got a domain parking service. The site never went down, the domain “ldresources.org” did.

It was my own oversight. For those interested, let me explain.

How it works
Web sites live on computers called web servers. A web server usually sits in a “server farm” (possibly hundreds of servers) at a web hosting company and thousands of web sites live on those servers.

Each web site has a specific IP address which can actually be used to find it on the web. IP addresses look something like this:

104.222.33333 (not a real one, don’t try using it)

A domain name, like www.apple.com or www.ldresources.org has to be registered and it lives on a different kind of server called a DNS server (domain name service).

In the registry for each domain on the DNS server is contact information for the person or company who owns the domain and, most importantly, a pointer or an association between the domain and the IP address where the web site that corresponds with that domain lives. That might be:

www.ldresources.org = 104.222.33333

So, when a user like you types “www.ldresources.org” into their browser, the browser sends a request out which is routed to a DNS server which looks up that address and finds the corresponding IP address and takes you to (well, gets information from) the web server holding the site.

So, if for some reason a DNS entry for a particular web site goes down then access to that web site goes away, even if the web site is still running fine on its web server.

What happened?
What happened was a simple oversight on my part. I’ve had the two domains: “ldresources.com” and “ldresources.org” registered for close to ten years. Billing happened through an email address associated with the domains: richard@ldresources.org. Each year a bill was sent to that address and I paid it. Simple.

When I switched my email to a gmail account I had gmail pick up mail send to “richard@ldresources.org” but about a year ago I somehow thought that no one is sending mail there anymore, all that address gets is spam, so why check it, why not just kill it? So, I deleted the piece of gmail that checks that account and of course, missed the domain service bill.

My domain expired through lack of payment. When I figured it out it was this past weekend so I had to wait until today to call the company hosting my domains to pay the bill and get things working again.

That’s the story. It has absolutely nothing to do with learning disabilities, everything to do with making a mistake. I forgive myself, I hope you will forgive me too.