If you discover that you can’t reach big chunks of the Internet today, it’s not your fault or your ISP’s. Network Solutions appears to be down.
NetSol is the company that administers the .com piece of the net, and is far and away the largest domain name registrar on the Internet. For many years, it was the only place to go to buy a domain name. It’s fair, even now, to call it one of the Internet’s cornerstones. In a lot of cases, people who buy (OK, rent) domain names, just let NetSol handle the technology that translates a people-language domain name (like www.danrosenbaum.com) into the numeric name that the Net itself actually uses.
But when NetSol goes down, all the sites that use that service become unreachable. This is one reason that Network Solutions really really really really is not supposed to crash. Which it has. Bummer.
Fortunately, even though I use NetSol as my domain registrar (old habits are hard to break), my domain name service happens elsewhere. Whew.
[Update: NetSol came back a couple of hours later. As Fred Allen once said, "There’s nothing wrong with putting all your eggs in one basket. Just watch that basket!]
