Several years ago I became connected with Tay House and, shortly after, found myself developing the troop’s website. At that time, we had the domain name tayhouse.org. Through my work, the troop was able to develop a new communications mechanism and gained highly favorable search engine placements rather quickly. We got lots of great comments from our scouts, parents, and alumni–and then one night it all disappeared.

Due to a number of snafus, we lost our tayhouse.org domain name. The story was about the same as every other “lost my domain name” story I’ve heard: I simply tried to make an update to the site one morning and the site wasn’t there. I knew the server was up because other sites on it were working fine. After exhausting my entire list of things to check, I did a whois lookup and found the name had expired. We never heard about it because, at the time, the name was registered to the business of a parent of a scout and the email address attached to it belonged to an employee that no longer worked for him.

Before we could rescue our name, the registrar dropped it and, of course, a squatter grabbed it right away. I eventually found that tayhouse.net was available and registered that (another cybersquatter had tayhouse.com already) and that became our new address. Eventually tayhouse.com became available and, when I noticed it, I registered that as well.

Old names die hard, and to this day I still find things that reference tayhouse.org and still refer to it erroneously myself—so I continued to feel a need to get it back. In March the name finally expired. As the expiration approached, I continuously checked the whois records hoping it would not be renewed. Then I watched as it sat in redemption for two months, checking daily to see if it had been dropped. Finally, yesterday afternoon, as I glanced at the Post-It note attached to my monitor and realized I hadn’t yet checked on it, I was greeted with the words I though I’d never see “tayhouse.org may be available for registration.” I immediately headed to my registrar’s site and grabbed it back and within 20 minutes had it resolving to our site once again.

I now feel as though I’ve found a long lost friend.