On January 15, 2023 I deleted an old Linode as I helped migrate an old website I hosted to a new provider and webmaster. This went as seamless as poss

Dangling domain abuse.

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Style Pass
2023-01-23 15:30:08

On January 15, 2023 I deleted an old Linode as I helped migrate an old website I hosted to a new provider and webmaster. This went as seamless as possible with zero downtime - I asked all WordPress contributors to hold on writing - did an rsync of all contents and one quick export/import of database and I was done.

The short TTL I had on the domain led folks to the new host extremely quickly and for those contributors who didn't respect TTL - I had a draft blog in the old site titled - "This is old - do not write here.". I kept the old site up for about a week for stragglers then deleted the Linode as mentioned on January 15.

Five days later on January 20, 2023 I obtained an alert that a new owner was verified in the Google Search Console. I was pretty busy at work on that Friday, so I only started piecing together this mistake on the weekend.

So maybe not exactly a week as mentioned, but on January 10th I turned that Linode off and on January 15, 2023 I deleted it. This action immediately freed that IP address (96.126.126.141) and unaware to me started the cascade of mistakes.

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