Did hsts in the new .htaccess just break everything?

[alexcapes 52]

Hi,

I enabled hsts in the new .htaccess file in latest version of PW (as described here https://processwire.com/blog/posts/pw-3.0.135/#step-4-decide-whether-to-to-enable-hsts-section-9f)

Everything seemed okay but realised my subdomains had gone offline ('This site can’t be reached') and now both our main business website has gone offline and our emails (done through Google Apps) have stopped working). 

Could hsts be responsible for all this? I removed the new .htaccess and now have the old one, I also tried resetting Chrome to remove the hsts domains but nothing works.

Funnily I can't access our hosting now (Digital Ocean) because I have no access to my email.

Please can any help shine a light on this? Can hsts be this dangerous?!

 

[alexcapes 52]

Ok so I think my panic on hsts was a little misguided.

What seems to be the issue was transferring DNS records over to a new hosting company which has not happened seamlessly. 😕

 

 

[netcarver 2,446]

@alexcapes It might turn out to be instructional if you could let us know what went wrong with the transfer and how you (eventually) get it sorted out.  Regardless, I do hope this is fixed for you soon.

[alexcapes 52]

Thanks @netcarver

I'll update here on progress. 

The situation was that we had all our DNS on an old hosting company — I set this account to be closed and copied over all the DNS records to our new hosts (DigitalOcean).

However the old account was taken offline earlier than expected so the TTL values are all high and so everything needs to propogate. Couple that with being locked out of DigitalOcean because I can't verify my login, means I'm stuck waiting to see if this all works out and everything comes back.

Life lesson: switching anything to do with DNS should be done with great care and planned for. It's not nice when everyone is looking at you as why their email stopped working and there's nothing to do but... wait.