Where oh where did our board go?

Sorry folks but this is probably the most commonly asked question but it's never applied to our board so now it's my turn to ask...Where did our board go? http://outlawstoughcrowd.com/

I am one of several admins at this board but not the 'owner' of the board. The owner went missing several months ago just after the rest of the admins and a few members helped pay for another year. I realize that only the owner of the board can get the straight facts from Dreamhost, that none of the other admins will be allowed to have the owner's password. All we want to know is "what happened to our board?" So all I'm asking here is 'where do I have to go/who do I have to contact the obtain an answer?'

Any help/advice anyone can give will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
T

From Whois, your domain name lease expired on 12-07. You will need to contact the registrar and see if you can renew:

Record last updated on 2007-08-07 00:00:00
Record created on 2004-12-06 00:00:00
Record expires on 2007-12-07 00:00:00

Registration Service Provider: AplusNet(APRO)
apro-n4e-racc@abac.com

http://www.aplus.net

Registrar: NAMES4EVER, http://www.names4ever.com

Thank you for such a quick response! What troubles me is one of the members has notified me that the board did come up for her yesterday, albeit only briefly. What does that mean? Sorry, don't mean to keep throwing questions out here but as I mentioned the owner of the board went missing shortly after we helped pay for last year's dues in May, 2007!

The member probably had the board cached in her browser or something and when it tried to update the content and discovered none was there, it displayed the error the rest of you are getting.

Do any of you have backups of the forums/board? If you do, you may consider registering the domain (once it's available) and/or setup a temporary domain name while you're waiting to re-register it.

Thank you Mousee. I doubt anyone's been backing up. Looks like all may be lost. :(

The hosting and files with DreamHost is separate from name registration with aplusnet/names4ever. If the hosting is paid up - DreamHost can tell you - the files are still there.

http://www.dreamhost.com/contact.html

Once the domain name expires, there are games. I'd contact the current register, and consider a different "sniping" service to grab the domain back if you want the same name.

The files probably are still there, but it's highly unlikely that DreamHost will turn them over to someone who is *not* the owner.

One approach to the domain is to contact the registrar and offer to pay for another year of registration, even though you're not the owner. This will at least hopefully give you more time to work this out.

-Scott

Yeah, if you can get the domain hooked up again you can at least take a database backup via the admin interface and preserve the content of the board.

I had a brilliant idea, but it fell apart:

From poking around, it's possible that the DreamHost account that hosted this site expired. I tried doing a nslookup here for the domain, but it returns nothing.

I was hoping to suggest that the user(s) manually add the IP address to their local hosts file, then point the browser to the site, thus bypassing the nameserver. If DreamHost is still hosting the site, then the Apache server would still respond to a query to that domain name.

This didn't work, either:
garth:~> curl www.outlawstoughcrowd.com
curl: (6) Couldn't resolve host 'www.outlawstoughcrowd.com'

This isn't looking good.



-Scott