Our link redirection service became inaccessible during our DNS migration yesterday. We invite you to read about what happened and how we plan on dealing with issues like this in the future.
Lead up
So, yesterday, March 17th, we changed the DNS for the MyGrailWatch domain and subsequently all of the sub-domains to Cloudflare’s nameservers. While our host’s nameservers served us well for the past few years, we made the change for our upcoming MGW Figure Search service.
The migration wasn’t supposed to be newsworthy.
What happened?
We never registered the redirection service (out.mygrailwatch.net) with Cloudflare. In failing to do so, it became inaccessible for everyone. The reason we didn’t notice the issue was because the blog was accessible. We thought everything was too.
Solution
The solution was simple. We needed and did create a CNAME entry for the forgotten service. A few minutes later, everything was fine.
Note: If you still can’t access it, please clear your DNS cache.
Future
Our service went down due to our mistake. Mistakes are mistakes, they happen. But it stayed down due to our failure in checking that
everything was all right. We learnt an embarrassing lesson of being more vigilant to prevent issues like these. In addition, we realized the need to quickly identify and alert our users of them, when issues occur.
With this in mind, we’ve setup a status page for MyGrailWatch’s services with Freshstatus. What it does is monitor our services for outages or degraded performance. You may access the page at
status.mygrailwatch.net.
It’s currently monitoring the following:
MGW Blog Where you are now.
MGW Redirection Service The service which redirects you to retailers
MGW API Our API system is currently used to deliver currency data to the blog, which is in turn used in the pre-order guides.
It will also monitor the status for the upcoming figure search service.
Now that everything is said and done, we deeply apologize for the trouble we caused you yesterday. Thank you for your time.
—TalkingHead#3
