This morning, I received an email from Atom notifying me the nameservers for one of my domain names was not correctly set up. I remembered to change the nameservers when I added it to Atom, so I was confused by the email. I visited the domain name, and as Atom told me, the domain name resolved to its Afternic listing rather than its correct Atom listing.
A visit to my Namecheap control panel showed me what happened. While I had correctly changed NS1.Afternic / NS2.Afternic to the required Atom nameservers, I inadvertently left the Afternic verification nameserver resolving instead of deleting it. This caused the domain name to occasionally resolve to the previous landing page instead of the new one.
Complicating this a bit is that I kept the domain name listed for sale on Afternic at a higher price than the Atom listing. This higher price is a requirement of Atom and it also serves to cover the increased commission rate charged by Afternic should the domain name be sold and not have Afternic nameservers. Because it was still listed on Afternic, the domain name continued to resolve to the GoDaddy BIN landing page I previously had set for it.
When I make change to landing pages, I usually do it with multiple domain names. Sometimes these domain names are registered at different registrars, so I make the changes manually instead of in bulk. This error was completely my own oversight and should have been caught by me rather than by Atom. Hopefully it’s a mistake I don’t make again. By mentioning this issue to readers, hopefully they don’t make the mistake at all.
