I was chatting with a business friend yesterday, and I mentioned one of the domain names I recently acquired in the context of the number of registrations with the keyword. He mentioned DotDB.com, and I generally use DomainTools for that type of search, but that is taking things off topic a bit. When I mentioned the domain name to him, he remarked that it was not resolving anywhere. I had a look and confirmed what he was saying. Yikes.
The domain name was supposed to resolve to a standalone landing page, which you can see by visiting Erasmus.com if you would like. The landing page is much like several other one page landers I have, and they all reside on the same server. The other domain names, to my knowledge, were operational, so it had something to do with this specific domain name.
I spent a bit of time emailing my hosting provider, and they said it likely had something to do with the DNS. I thought that was peculiar because I had transferred the domain name to GoDaddy and the only thing I changed was the nameservers. A quick look at the DNS showed that there was a DNSSEC record I had not created that likely stuck after transferring the domain name. Had my friend not taken a look at the landing page, it almost certainly would have persisted until I visited or someone else mentioned it to me.
When you use your own self-managed and self-hosted landing pages, you bear sole responsibility. If there is any downtime, it’s your fault. If there are typos, bad links, spelling mistakes, missing images, or any other issues, it’s your fault.
I like having my own customized landing pages for quite a few reasons. Ensuring uptime is my responsibility, and I have nobody to blame but myself when things aren’t working correctly. It’s another consideration to make when going at it on your own.
