10th
How our startup POWNED the Libyan War
Yesterday Textingly made the switch from .ly a Lybian top level domain to Textingly.com. It was a very unexpected and abrupt change brought on as a direct result of the war in Libya.
Much has been written about this, in both Techcrunch, and WSJ over the past week.
Friday morning Greg dropped me an email saying “Is the site down? I’m getting a DNS error”. By time I got into the office it was working again.
Because the issues were intermittent, I figured it was a DNS issue with General Assembly. We have trouble accessing google from time to time. So the team called a few people outside of the office to ask if everyone could access the site. All seemed ok.
Later in the afternoon, I got an email from a partner saying:
PARTNER @4:35PM: You guys having site issues?
ME @4:43PM: We did see a DNS blip earlier. Can you not access it?
PARNTER @4:45PM: I went to www.downornot.com and it said down then up and it’s still not working…
Now I know you’re probably thinking “why didn’t you have a domain monitoring system?” Well we use Pingdom, and the challenge with detecting a DNS related outage is that the server that routes the ping must be routed through one of the down servers. So we never received any failed pings from them.
We renewed our domain name a few weeks, ago and assumed that we were all set as indicated by our domain registrar. However, just to be safe, I immediately called them to rule the Libyan, issue out and they notified me that they have not yet been able to get our domain approved because they have not been able to get in touch with anyone at the appropriate office in Libya, and that they were going to try to call on Monday. I pressed them to figure out when the last time they were able to get a domain approved, and they would not give me an exact answer. The best answer I was able to get from them was “about 2 weeks ago”.
Bottom line, our domain registrar doesn’t know when they will be able to renew Libyan domain names.
We had concluded that our domain texting.ly was being de-provisioned across the internet, which is why most were able to access the site, and some were not. That fact also explained why we were receiving some emails, and not others. We concluded that by sometime on Saturday, Texting.ly would no longer be available.
So, we realized at 5pm on Friday what was actually happening. No notification from our domain registrar. They had no answer for us. So what did we do? Grabbed two six packs of Buds, and a bunch of junk food - and went to work.
- We whiteboarded all of the areas that we needed to update, server scripts, SSL, application, emails and so forth.
- We created the new amazon cluster that Textingly.com would point to.
- We tested debugged.
- We went live.
- We notified our users of the switch.
We worked on the first half of this on Friday evening. Before we made the actual switch we wanted to wait until the morning to 100% sure that this was necessary.
Yesterday we completed the process with minimal downtime, and notified all of our users.
Dear Valued Customer,
Due to circumstances beyond of our control, the domain http://www.texting.ly is no longer active. You will no longer be able to access our website using that address.
The Textingly website can now be accessed at:
http://www.textingly.com
Rest assured, you account has not been affected and all of your campaigns are running smoothly. If you have any questions regarding this matter, please reach out to
David Dundas at textingly@textingly.com
We thank you again for your continued support.
Best,
The Textingly Team.
We received great feedback from our users, some funny responses, some curious about why made the change, all supportive.
Think you want that cute .ly domain for your startup? I have already advised a few people against it. The hassle, and potential exposure, and the increasing stigma is probably not worth it.
If you already have a .ly domain, you should be fine as long as your domain is not up for renewal anytime soon. I would suggest registering your domain for the next 2 or 3 years in advance just to be safe.
The real lesson here: BUY AMERICAN :).
This may sound a bit strange, but part of me actually enjoys these challenges. Startups are awesome because we solve problems every day, Its almost like you complete a new puzzle. After a while its just all in a days’ work. I guess that’s why I love what I do.
Textingly 1, Libyan war, 0.
