Is Neocities down?!
For the past few hours, Neocities has been 'down' from the perspective of many users, and yet here I am writing this entry from the Neocities editor! How can this be?
I first noticed that I couldn't connect to neocities.org or any *.neocities.org subdomains, but I was able to access my website, and any website using a custom domain. Firefox mentioned it could not connect to server, so this seems to be a DNS issue.
Thankfully, DanQ on the Melon Forums shared a cool trick: if you can edit your host files, you can reconnect to neocities in your browser! Just edit /etc/hosts (on most OSes) or C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (on Windows). Add a line that says 198.51.233.1 (which is Neocities' IP address), followed by a space, followed by neocities.org, optionally followed by any other neocities sites (with spaces separating them all). For example, if I wanted onio.neocities.org to resolve, I would add the following line: '198.51.233.1 neocities.org onio.neocities.org'. After following these instructions, I was able to access my account, and of course download a backup of my website and make these updates :P
DanQ also says, "If you add a line to your hosts file, just remember to remove it (or comment it out) when Neocities is back to normal. Otherwise, if they ever CHANGE the IP address Neocities is at, then you'll get "left behind" on the old one and you'll be really confused and nobody will be able to work out why you, specifically, are getting excluded!"
Thanks, Dan!
Regarding why this is happening, this post on Neocities' Bluesky offers some insight: "We're working on the DNS outage. It's not technical - someone is trying to legally attack us and Namecheap took down the domain. More details later."
One commenter mentions that it may be a full 24 hours before the neocities.org domain works normally again. If you want to access your files and download your website just to be safe, try using the method outlined above. It worked for me.
- Onio