Less than an hour ago there was about a ten minute interruption for our site in which readers might’ve encountered a “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN” error when trying to load National Zero. It was resolved quickly, but ten minutes feels like an eternity when we’re used to reliable service for our readers. Our site is both hosted and its domain registered with NameCheap, a brand we like as a less spammy bullshit alternative to GoDaddy’s comparably priced services.

Like many, or even most, large tech companies, the Arizona-based NameCheap relies on a workforce spread across the globe to maintain its stack, and as many readers are aware, they host our site in Iceland. However, different from past outages, what happened on Wednesday was not a hosting issue, it was with the domain (which is why the page immediately said “DNS PROBE FINISHED NXDOMAIN” instead of struggling for 20 or 30 seconds). While we can’t be 100% certain this was the result of a power outage wrought by Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s electrical grid, we have a strong suspicion it was, NameCheap’s open job listings in Ukraine indicating that at least some of their domain infrastructure is maintained there. What isn’t in doubt is that the support staff are based in Ukraine, as confirmed by a NameCheap social media rep who responded to a Twitter message from National Zero asking why nobody answered our messages.

Now, we’ve been tempted to ditch Namecheap over past outages, some of which were upstream from them because of that “CloudFlare” bullshit that’s good for bricking half of the internet every year or two. Then there was the Great Spartan Fuckup of 2022 when a certain jackass forgot to turn on auto-billing for National Zero’s annual hosting fees, leading Namecheap to pull the plug for about 35 minutes on us, which even though it was that certain jackass’s fault, the staff weren’t very helpful. Now that it’s apparent that those support staff weren’t helpful because they might’ve been running to an underground shelter as cluster bombs rained down on their city, we’re thinking we should just shut up and deal with it next time there’s an outage. Yeah, it sucks, but it doesn’t suck nearly as badly as what the people of Ukraine have had to deal with for the past nine months.

We’ll stick with NameCheap as long as they stick with their employees there. Slava Ukraini ??????.