Sometime in late 2021 I lost access to this site. At the time it was being hosted by Media Temple. Media Temple made a whole series of rather complex server changes and changed DNS settings for websites. They also stopped providing easy to access support. I sat on the phone many an evening, but at three hours still waiting would give up.

It seems these moves by Media Temple were in anticipation of their buy-out/acquisition by GoDaddy.

I did still have access to my files and backups, so I downloaded everything. I changed my hosting to Dreamhost and even moved my registration from Register to Dreamhost just to get everything in one place.

We started by trying out multiple DNS refreshes, yet the URL and its hosting were not propagating. That took quite awhile to resolve. Once that was addressed, all I could get to was a “Stay Tuned/Coming Soon” website and if I clicked on the link there, a cPanel site.

This went on for… well months. I thought, maybe it was the old Media Temple encryption certificate taking me back there. Not really possible, but who knows. Then I thought, maybe if I just completely destroy the Media Temple account that would resolve it. No luck. Went down several ‘help’ rabbit holes without success.

Finally, a really great tech at Dreamhost helped me out. Cherry E. and I discovered a problem by running traceroute and ping from my computer. I flushed the caches on my computer and found some old IP’s in my hosts file. Cleaning those up finally got me back in. I restored my backups for which I used and continue to use Updraft Plus. Easy – which was great. Some settings needed restoration. The right Template had to be re-set.

I also realize that people, besides me, were likely getting to the site and seeing no activity, wondered what happened. While I have been regularly posting on Facebook, YouTube, and my parish website — Holy Name of Jesus in Schenectady, NY I missed sharing here. I am happy to be back.

For now, I am posting things I missed that I would have ordinarily have shared from September 2021 to today. I will take a bit of time.