Where is our Site?
The last few days & weeks have been rather painful. There was one question I have gotten more times than I can count: “Why is your website offline?”, and today I want to talk about exactly that.
So, as you all know, we recently switched from our original domain “cynthiaai.de” to “cynthialabs.net” as it will fit the direction this is going way better. Cynthia AI was simply our first product and we never expected to make more so that was our first domain. Either way, we got our new domain idea and were looking for where to register it. After a few short minutes, we came to the conclusion that we would be going with NameCheap which as we now learned, was a big mistake. So we bought the domain, hooked it up, prepared all the redirects, and waited for the DNS servers around the world, the global nameservers & Cloudflare to reflect these changes. After a day, everything was entirely done. We were officially live on our new fantastic domain. We successfully rebranded and added new content. But here is where things started to go downhill:
Exactly 8 days after we switched to our new domain, an email could be found on our server saying “Site offline” in the description. Simultaneously, a few people messaged us on Discord & other social media platforms asking where our Site would be and what was going on. We had no clue what they were talking about but upon checking for ourselves, it was offline, impossible to be resolved. So, we contacted Cloudflare and NameCheap to see what was wrong. Cloudflare quickly told us “nothing on our side” so we put our full focus on NameCheap.
The first Suspension
We had just gotten our first suspension from NameCheap. No email informing us about that, no warnings prior to it. It was simply offline. The domain was suspended until we were to open a ticket, so we quickly did. After a long wait, we finally got an answer from a Support agent who politely told us that one of our pentesting programs, the “Discord Weaponizer”, which has been with us since pretty much day one of this website, would not be allowed according to NameCheap’s ToS. We talked to the support agent for some more, explaining how we are not acting with any malicious intent, and how we just distribute pentesting tools and other open-source security applications but all that did not help. It had to go, so we took it offline for now.
The second Suspension
Not even 48 hours later, we got another suspension. At this point, we realized the big mistake of going with NameCheap. The new suspension had once again, no warning, no reason, nothing. We had to once again ask them to be told what was wrong. So, we did and waited. The support agent linked the Toolkit download. We were visibly confused as that link wasn’t even working. We went ahead and just told them “yeah, it’s gone” and the suspension was lifted. (Can you see the pain already?)
The third Suspension
I wish I was joking but sadly, I am not. Not even half a day later we got another suspension. We opened a ticket and it just got closed again with our domain being unsuspended. No response, no interaction with us. We asked “hey what’s up?” and they closed it and enabled the domain.
The last Suspension
We felt troll’d. Massively. It was exactly 3hours and 48minutes since the last suspension that we to this day, don’t know the reason for. Something changed this time tho. We have finally gotten an email detailing what’s wrong. That honestly did not make it any better tho. Attached was an image of the Attiny85 development board schematic that we use on our Site. That was all. Apparently talking about an Arduino-like development kit is not allowed. No word of the scripts for it, just the board itself. We officially had enough and that is why we put our domain into maintenance mode.
We looked into better alternatives and found one we were all happy with (hopefully this will stay true). OrangeWebsite offers privacy-friendly freedom-of-speech accepting domains & registrar services so whenever you will read this, we will have moved to them.
That’s it for today.
