Late yesterday night, I tweeted about my website disappearing into thin air. In case you missed it, here are the tweets:

A good handful of people have been asking me how exactly you “lose” a website (and on a side note, another good handful have taken this opportunity to persuade me to switch to their host, which I’m not going to do), so I decided to outline what hap­pened that caused my website to disappear.

A while back, I signed up for Cloudflare, which is a service webmasters can use to enhance security on their websites. One of the things Cloudflare does is reroute your traffic through their servers, which helps block malicious users. On top of that, Cloudflare gives you the option to store copies of static files on their local servers so data spends less time traveling to visitors and loading times decrease.

One of the downsides of Cloudflare is that it’s not quite easy to set up if you’re not thorougly familiar with your server’s set-up, and once it does get set up, there are a lot of things that you have to change during your normal usage, such as using the “direct” subdomain when accessing ports, and using the “ftp” subdomain when accessing FTP (rather than just using your regular domain name). Each of these individual services must be documented within Cloudflare, and if one of them isn’t properly added in your Cloudflare domain settings, it will not work properly. For example, if the IP address of your web host’s server is not set properly, Cloudflare will not work properly.

Keeping this in mind, and knowing that my web host switched servers, I knew that I would eventually have to change the settings in my Cloudflare domain settings. Trying to prevent any downtime at all, I updated the IP address to that of the new server as soon as possible. Unfortunately, just changing the IP address is not enough for it to continue working properly, and apparently there was something else I had to change that I did not know about. Shortly after updating the IP address, my website went down.

From this point is when I basically “lost” my website.

Seeing as Cloudflare was no longer able to find my website at the provided IP address, it started serving a cached version of my pages and showed an alert that said my website was offline. After fiddling a­round with my domain name settings some more, I had the faint idea that I possibly was not supposed to update my IP address on my own, and that Cloudflare would do it automatically. So, I reverted my changes and switched my IP address back to the old one.

That didn’t work either.

I knew that my website was somewhere on the Internet, but I wasn’t able to find out its IP address so I wasn’t able to figure out where I would go to access it. To make things worse, there’s this thing called DNS cache, where the link between the domain name and the IP address is cached so changes don’t update globally in real-time. Basically, I was forced into a trial-and-error situation, but between each trial I had to wait anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours to figure out if the trial had worked; to make things even worse, if it did not work, I would have no idea if it either was still updating settings, or if it had already failed to work.

At this point, I was getting extremely frustrated, so I removed my website entirely from Cloudflare and started from scratch. I added my domain to my account as if it were my first time using Cloudflare, and went through the initial set-up wizard so Cloudflare could detect my website’s configuration itself.

But that would be too easy.

That’s better.

After Cloudflare successfully alerted me that Cloudflare was offline in a Cloudception-like manner, I raged a little bit, went to the kitchen to get myself a snack, figured out how terrible aged cheese tastes, itched the top of my head a little bit, then came back to see if Cloudflare was back up.

Knowing my luck, you would probably expect me to say “it wasn’t,” but surprisingly, it actually was back up.

I ran the initial set-up wizard again, waited a little under a minute, and got my results. Cloudflare’s con­clu­sion? It couldn’t find my website either. It asked me to finish setting up the configuration myself.

After almost-literally-but-not-quite falling out of my chair, I removed all traces of Cloudflare from my website, changed my nameservers back to those that point directly to my web host, made a face at my laptop screen, then went to sleep. I figured that if I try this hard and still can’t find my website, it can go die of dehydration.

When I checked again this morning, like an abandoned cat making its way back home, my website re­appeared out of nowhere and worked fine. And, like an abandoned cat, I couldn’t really ask it where it had been.

So that basically sums up this story, as well as the story of my life: try really hard to figure something out, epic fail and take a nap or go to sleep in frustration, then notice the next day that there was a pathetically easy solution to the problem and realize that I wasted several hours the previous day.

Based on my experiences from the past few days, I have compiled a list of things that can go wrong while going to your circuit clerk’s office to submit some paperwork.

The first thing that can go wrong is that the receptionist who answers the phone when you call to check business hours has no idea what she is talking about, and tells you that the office is open the day after Christmas, even though Christmas was on a Sunday and the day after Christmas is Christmas Day Observed.

“We are open every week day.”

“Are you sure? Even though this coming Monday is the day after Christmas?”

“We are open every week day.”

“I am going to be very disappointed if you guys are not open.”

“We are open every week day.”

Guess what they were on the day after Christmas?

Closed.

Guess what I was?

Very disappointed.

Earlier today, I stopped by the office for my second attempt. Everything seemed to be going as planned, except for the fact that the circuit clerk’s office is so concerned about security that the only way to communicate with the person with whom you are working is to talk through a five-inch hole in a safety-glass panel and pass papers through a tiny slit towards the bottom of the panel.

Whoever built the glass panel apparently also thought it would be a good idea to make it soundproof as well, because I wasn’t able to hear half the things the receptionist was saying unless I shoved my ear directly up into the tiny hole.

After finally managing to marginally understand what she was saying, I figured out that I was apparently supposed to show more papers to a judge. Although I was slightly confused, I agreed and headed over to the court room.

After checking in with another receptionist, I was put into a waiting list along with other people who were waiting to see the judge for other random reasons.

The line seemed to be going relatively fast until a random old man started having issues.

Apparently, from what I was able to pick up, the issue was that the man didn’t comply with the requests of the security officials who were guarding the entrance of the building. Normally, you’re supposed to remove all items from your pockets and place them in a box, and take off all heavy outerwear, then walk through a metal detector while your belongings go through an x-ray machine (similar to what you do at an airport). Supposedly, the man thought it would be a great idea to not remove his jacket, even though he was told to multiple times.

After he was done wasting everyone’s time, two old women went up to the judge and started having another argument. Apparently, one of the old women’s daughters was supposed to show up to plead guilty or not guilty to a traffic violation she had received, but instead of showing up to court, her mother and her grandmother came on her behalf.

After another good handful of minutes of the judge explaining that the person who receives the violation must show up in court and there can be no substitutions, the old women finally gave up and the daughter was given another opportunity to show up to make her plea.

After over half an hour, it was finally my turn to spend five seconds giving the judge a sheet of paper.

Because I’m sure that story made you as frustrated as I was when I was in the circuit clerk’s office, here’s a random picture I took today of a tranquil lake to soothe your nerves.