Disaster avoided

It's been one hot 24 hours here at Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino.

Kathy, a blogger friend, notified me that something weird was going on yesterday when she couldn't access my URL.

Sure enough when clicking on aglioolioepeperoncino.com this is what I'd be redirected to:

The scary screenshot that appears when a domain is expired

Panic.

I won't get into how Google and domain registrars work (mainly because I didn't even know what a domain registrar was four hours ago).

To make a scary story short, my aglioolioepeperoncino.com expired May 29th, despite having paid the automatic renewal on time.

As my darling friend and cyber-expert Sara informed me, "most domain expirations are not immediate, and the domain goes into a "grace period" where they can be easily renewed by the current owner before being released as available on the market again."

After a few heated emails, a teary phone conversation with an eNom operator, and lots of venomous tweets, I finally regained ownership of my website, my followers, my subscribers, my friends and fellow bloggers for whom I've had the honor of posting for the past 2 and a half years.

Thank you for your moral and technical support in this crisis.