Out of Band Communication is Actually Good
January 13, 2009
When you’re starting a new website, it’s really tempting to get an email address set up for that site and plaster it all over everything. Ostensibly, this is so people see “how serious you are” about the new venture. Well and good.
But let me point out one place you absolutely do not want to use that fancy new email address: your registrar. Why? Because if your mail server or name servers go down and you forget your password . . . how exactly are you going to get that password reset email, hmm?
I learned this lesson painfully today when, in a fit of irony, the domain used by our nameservers for ActsII.org expired, meaning they no longer worked. The admin email address was an @actsii.org address. We forgot the password for the registrar’s web admin interface. And the answer to the secret question. Luckily our phone number hasn’t changed in forever, so we were spared from having to do something ridiculous like fax a change request on “company stationery.”
So the lesson is this: never use a channel you administer to administer itself. That’s like the oriental idea of the world-snake eating its own tail. And do you know what that forms? Zero. Nothing. Which is exactly what you’ll be left with eventually if you do that. Find something out-of-band and use it instead. Nobody’s going to know the difference except you — and it might just save your bacon.
