News Home Page National Latin America Sections Special Reports Travel/Tourism Real Estate Business Health The Internet Letters Opinion Columnists Leisure EroTica Entertainment The Take! Learn Spanish Photos Editorial Letters Opinion Columnists Public Forum Who We Are About Us Contact Us Advertise with us Subscribe to our Newsletter Links Page     < Back   Send this Page To a Friend Friday 19 November 2004  Dear readers, A little while back we made the decision to move insidecostarica.com to new servers, mainly due to the high traffic demand that we've experienced the past several months and to introduce more features, that will make insidecostarica.com more interactive with our readers, like a forum where readers will be able to express their opinions, good and bad about Costa Rica, our site and just about anything else> We will also be running polls to obtain a gauge on public opinion on topical issues, like the corruption scandals that have taken over Costa Rica's headlines for the past month or more. There will also be some new sections and some revised sections. All with the aim to bringing you a balanced diet of news, information, entertainment and well, something to do first in the morning. The transition from one server to another was to have gone seamless. The "techies" promised us that you wouldn't even notice the difference. Well, I suppose, if you logged in once in a while, there would be no difference. But, for the daily readers, that was a different story. Readers on Wednesday and Thursday could not access the website. Neither could we. Some thought we were out of business. One reader wrote in asking if that was the case. Sorry to disappoint, were are still here kicking. The problem it appears was in the DNS control. Without getting technical, the DNS - Domain Name Server - is the way the internet connects all computers with each other. Each internet server provider (ISP) maintains a DNS server that contains all the domain names on the internet. The DNS is updated regularly, as changes to websites and domain names are made constantly. Once a change is made, it takes from 24-28 hours for the DNS to propagate and everyone is up to speed. In our case, the DNS got stuck pointing to the old server. When you asked for insidecostarica.com, the old server could not fulfill the request and automatically sent back one of several different messages, including "You are not authorized to view this page". It was more complicated than that. The most important thing is that the site is up an running and we can now concentrate on the next thing. I thank you for your patience and understanding. I hope you will like the faster serving of the pages and will like the additions we are planning. Pura vida! Enrico Cacciatore, Editor @ Insidecostarica.com