Wha?

Today I was mostly doing more church website work. I put the website live, but then my browser kept bringing up the old site. I thought it must be due to DNS propagation delay, but actually it seemed that I just needed to close my browser and then re-open it.

After I had the site working (now the evening), I wrote an email with all the info about the site, what had been implemented, what hadn't, what could be, etc to send to the person that had asked me to work on the site. One of the pages had a notices section with no notices, I was waiting for these to be emailed to me. So I thought I might as well login and just comment out that empty section before I send my email.

I logged in, but then when I clicked on the Pages link to edit the pages, I received an error page that said:

Error The requested URL /wp-admin/edit.php was not found on this server.

So I checked the server, and that file definitely did exist. I did some googling, thinking the problem might be something due to role scoper. I thought maybe I had a setting wrong somewhere and role scoper was making this error come up as the user didn't have sufficient permissions.

I didn't find any info, so I tried my local copy of the site - it worked fine. I decided to try going back and logging out of the live site, and then log in again as the admin user. But now I got a not found error for /wp-admin/.

I tried the main page of the website, and it had reverted back to the old website! I logged into the control panel of the old host (who I think the domain is also registered with), and checked the DNS settings. They were now empty! So the DNS changes I had made were active for a few hours, but then had reverted back to the old settings.

It's a good job I took so long to write my email, otherwise I would have sent out an email saying the new site was up, and when they came to check it, they would have just seen the old site.

I opened a ticket with the old webhost, though it looks like they only have support mon-fri. The more webhosts I deal with, the more and more it seems like Webfaction are the only hosts who actually know what they're doing.