…apparently forgot to renew his domain name.

Bill, this Bud’s for you:

Might as well update this with what I had in the comments, since they basically tell my theory on what happened.

A) He let it expire on accident. I don’t think it would be on purpose, as he gave no indication that he was leaving the blogosphere.

B) Some scumbag ad company picked up his domain as soon as it had expired and want to charge him exorbitant amounts to “buy” it back from them. This would probably have to be settled in court, as is usually the case with scumbag companies.

C) Someone “hacked” his site by using a scumbag registrar to pick up the domain the very moment it expired, similar to what happened with Al Jazeera after the dead U.S. soldier photos controversy. This isn’t really hacking–it’s fraud.

D) He just didn’t pay the bill.

—

I checked the whois information, and the contact for the domain is the same as of 10:40am today. The domain was set to expire on the 14th (Monday), but is marked as updated on the 15th. Now it is not set to expire until 4/14/2009.

I guess the real answer to what happened lies with Mr. Dennis. If he registered using enom.com, he should be in the clear. If he didn’t, well, looks like someone else did.

UPDATE:

Upon further investigation, it seems his site WAS snatched up by one of these scumbag ad companies, called nuseek.com. They have almost 85000 other websites registered under their IP.

Bill, if you need some temporary hosting, I’ve got plenty of space. You’ve got my email address.

This entry now falls into another category: scumbaggery.

UPDATE:

Bill has the story on how it went down here.

But it looks like I was right–the domain expired and some scumbag company picked it up.

UPDATE:

Yay, a happy ending!