The Empress of Belly Dance recently outed herself on another thread, so the time has come for the Queen of Belly Dance Web Sites to come out of hiding.
Here's what I found with a bit of creative whois probing:
- "Whois" on www.networksolutions.com says that she registered her domain through a different company (ie, not Network Solutions), for a 5-year period extending from August 8, 2002 through August 8, 2007.
- "Whois" on the site that she is registered through shows that her registration was last updated on August 13, 2007. (At some point, other registration sites like Network Solutions will be updated with this info too, it just takes time for it all to propagate.)
- "Whois" on the site that she is registered through shows she has a new expiration date of August 8, 2008.
My interpretation of the above facts:
When the time came for her to renew her registration, it didn't happen. I don't know why, could be a lot of things. Could be that she bought the original registration through a web site design company who went out of business sometime in the last 5 years, and therefore her renewal notice went to a now-defunct address. Could be she registered it herself but moved more than a year ago (thereby making her forwarding address obsolete), and her renewal notice went to her old address. Could be that she received the renewal notice, but it got buried in a pile of mail and went unpaid. And so on.
In any event, they probably shut off the web site routing info once it expired. It takes 3-4 days for such a change to make its way through the entire Internet because a worldwide network of zillions of domain name servers have to be updated, which could explain why it quit working for some people sooner than for others.
It appears that once she discovered it was shut off and people no longer able to access her site, she hustled and paid the renewal fee, which as noted above was processed earlier today.
I would expect that it will start working again sometime over the course of the next 3-4 days, and I would expect that some of us will be able to get into it sooner than others. Again, it takes time for each and every domain name server around the world to receive updates and they don't all happen simultaneously.