If you tried to access this site (or its many RSS feeds) recently, you probably received a lookup error. "Oh my goodness," you must have thought, "Martey has decided to stop blogging." At this point, your eyes began to mist up. "He did not even say goodbye with a last post. No cryptic hints of a dissatisfaction with computers, nor a tearful video.
Alas, the real reason was far more horrible. As you, dear reader, may remember, this website originated on a server owned by 1&1, the European web hosting company seeking to make inroads in the United States (I missed their "three years of free hosting" promotion, but that is not important). After some dissatisfaction, I switched to WebHostingSol, which seemed to have better pricing. Since I was canceling my 1&1 Hosting package, I decided that I might as well cancel my 1&1 Domain package as well (keep everything at the same place, and all that). I contacted WebHostingSol about transferring my domain. They never responded, and I forgot about it/assumed it was taken care of.
So, come the one year anniversary of my website registration, my domain expired. Luckily, when your domain expires, it enters a "redemption period" from whence the domain registrant can pay an expensive fee (in this case, $80) in order to recover it. Since I did not want to wait until late March, I paid. I also took this opportunity to switch to a new webhost, Revise Media, which I first heard about back in October on redemption in a blog.