Webhost down

Once in a while it happens that technical problems occur in the data center where your sites are hosted. If you're a customer since years already, your webhost will try to comfort you as fast as possible. How fast that can be depends upon what is broken or malfunctioning. In the last few days I did receive error messages more often. The webhost always answered, they had already fixed it.

Well, can't tell whether they fixed it and something else has broken now, or whether they could not fix it. Fact remains that quite a lot of sites running over that web account are down, indicating connection problems to the database. What remains for me, is to hope they can fix it again soon, so all my sites are back online. I wouldn't dream of having to relocate my bigger sites to other hosts.

Having an alternative source of information for the members and readers of your forums running on another webhost, that is not likely to break down at the same time is always a good thing. There you can inform about the problems and what you might do to solve them, like setting up an alternative at another host etc.

If you use a separate host for your domains you might even have the possibility of redirecting the domain to the alternative site, where you set up a backup to keep your forums running.

But sometimes these host problems catch you at a bad moment, where you don't have a very recent backup at hand! And with the size of your site also the difficulty grew to keep everything backed up, like attachments etc.

A tough decision is, how long to wait for the webhost to sort things out, before you take things in your own hands and move to another host.

What'll become of the Korat sites with those lots of new gTLDs ahead?

ICANN is putting a huge number of new generic and special top level domains on the web this and next year. Almost any word that has found some significance on the web in the past two decades will be used as a domain ending, like .link, .blog, .forum, .mail, .news etc. In my opinion this will change the internet drastically.  Websites with long domain names will lose their significance, subdomains almost become irrelevant,

 And the .com domain, that  used to be the master and top demanded for ages now will lose its importance slowly. More focus will be on the signifying word after the dot. Domain speculation that had lost its profitability over the years will pop up again - until the next round of new domains where you'll be able to get a TLD for even the remotest village, not just those like .amsterdam, .barcelona, .berlin, .london, .madrid, .moscow, .miami, .nyc, .paris, .sydney, .wien, .roma, .tokyo etc. A .korat to my knowledge hasn't been planned yet, neither is a .bangkok in sight, but it is probably just a question of time.

What will become of the numerous .coms then with korat-this and korat-that before the dot?

Honestly, I can't tell right now. Highly developed sites will probably not lose any or much of their status, they just might get a load of fresh competitors. But as Google favors those with the longer known domain and content, they might still be as important as before. That is, if they had gained some importance already.

The sun will rise for .date on April 1, 2014, and others like .wed for individuals with the necessity of their own domain for the wedding photos etc. will be available even before that. With the .memorial domain I suppose one can set himself a gravestone in the virtual cemetery. And I can also imagine what.dating, .party or .love will be for.

Presently in the Sunrise Phase is .buzz. Now I wonder who'll grab "korat.buzz"?