Squarespace's Dirty Trick

My website is finally accessible again, after being down for a week.

(This problem caused my blog RSS feed to be unavailable, which is why my dpThoughts subscribers didn't hear from me last week. To all of you: my sincerest apologies!)

Everything was working fine with my website.

Then I made the mistake of paying attention to a banner on my Squarespace Domains Dashboard that looked like this:

I thought to myself, "You've identified a problem, you say? Well, I don't want any problems! Let me go ahead and click that "Update DNS Records" button..."

Except, as best I can tell, clicking that button changed the settings from those for my ACTUAL webhost (Wix) to Squarespace... and chaos ensued.

Of course, it's my fault.

My website was working just fine, and I should have left everything well enough alone.

But I thought Squarespace was trying to be genuinely helpful.

They weren't.

It seems Squarespace was using a dirty trick to fool me into initiating the process of moving my hosting business away from my existing provider.

I'm reasonably tech-savvy, but DNS Records are outside my area of expertise. I attempted to correct the DNS settings back to their original confirguation, but I made a mistake...

... and since it takes up to 48 hours for DNS settings to propagate, I didn't know I had made a mistake until Monday, when things SHOULD have been working again, but were not.

Back to the drawing board.

I adjusted the settings again.

And made another mistake. And lost another few days of website traffic.

I finally got the right settings in place, and my website once again became accessible.

But how many potential consulting clients, employers, media interviews, or other interesting opportunities have I missed out on as a result?

I'll never know.

But I do know this...

... it's unlikely I'll ever move my website to Squarespace.

I can't say companies that rely on dirty tricks to improve their bottom lines never win...

... but I certainly don't need to contribute to that.