A very interesting thing has happened in the last week; I thought there might be someone here who'd like to know.
It started about a week ago when the Big Boss came in and opened his morning e-mail from our system, and the ads and products in the letter didn't show up. We thought it was just PEBKAC or client configuration, but it soon became apparent that one of our servers (the one I'm talking about being moved soon) was inaccessible.
I was connected to it via SSH, so I knew it was running. I checked httpd, no issues. From another server, I tested ping. No name resolution!
Now, DNS is hosted with a Very Large Well Known Provider(tm). We contacted our "network admin" (who works for someone else now but's still on retainer to "do stuff" for our small outfit) and had him look into it. He thought it very unusual for the VLWKP to not be serving our DNS. I found the VLWKP on Facebook and made a comment. Their reply was similar to "our engineers are attempting to mitigate a very high-traffic situation".
By the time we'd done all this, it was only a few minutes until DNS began to resolve again. (Yay, engineers ... notwithstanding the question why it happened in the first place).
Skip forward a week. For some time, one of our sites has been #1 on Google for certain combinations of search terms we think are beneficial to our mission. For whatever reason (probably vanity 😉 ) I decided last night to Google these terms from home. We didn't show up. At all. I searched for the name of our site without the TLD. We're always second for that. Also no result. I searched for some specific products. No results in the top 100 and I didn't look any further.
So, I got into work this morning and passed up Google's Analytics for their "Webmaster Tools" instead. It told me we had "severe health issues" on our site; looking at the details, it was apparent that we were unreachable a week ago (during the DNS incident). However, according to it, we were reachable now.
But Google had apparently removed us from its results --- at least, we're not charting where we were. I'm taking some steps to try and mitigate this; hopefully next time their build an index, or at least within a couple days, we should show up again.
I'm definitely going to ask our "network admin" about more DNS servers. And I'm holding my breath on the [thread=10385753]server move[/thread].
