DNS weirdness

My hosting provider has moved to a new server, and I'm finding that there's some cyberspace confusion as the Domain Name Service (DNS) record for www.batesline.com is moved from pointing to one machine to pointing to another.

On the Internet, a diverse and diffuse system, such changes are not made instantaneously across the Internet from "Internet Central Control". (Internet Central Control doesn't exist. In fact, that is the key design feature of the Internet.) Instead, a change to the correspondence between a domain name (www.batesline.com) and a numeric Internet Protocol address (63.247.72.82 -- the new address) spreads through the Internet like ripples through a pond, as one DNS server tells several others about the change.

Ultimately, your ISP needs to find out about the change, as does software in your own computer. At the moment, my computer at home and work still have batesline.com pointing to the old address, while my laptop is pointing to the new. This creates certain side effects -- I've posted to the blog from home, and it goes on the old server, but I don't see the post from my laptop, which is somehow pointed to the new server, which has the site as it was when the ISP moved my files over.

This will just be a weird couple of days, I'm afraid, until the DNS change is fully propagated, so bear with us. I will try to post to both old and new servers until the changeover is complete.

The good news is this -- the move to a new server is necessary because my hosting provider -- BlogHosts -- is doing a great job of providing affordable hosting, so they're winning lots of new clients. I recommend them highly.