If you ever need a lesson in the importance of picking a good domain registrar, then read about Rosetta@Home recent problems.
Dear Rosetta@Home participants,
We — like many of you who have contacted us — have been extremely
frustrated by the long project downtime. We (bakerlab.org) had a domain
name registration verification lapse, and our registrar (dotster.com)
and ICANN turned off DNS for bakerlab.org. We went through the steps to
getting it verified again Monday afternoon. What should have been a
quick procedure is now stretching into 4 days. We apologize for the mass
emailing which we have tried to keep to a minimum throughout the course
of the project, but this is an extraordinary situation and we have no
other way of reaching all of you now.
Since being down we estimate that we have lost a total of around 3.1
million computing hours and continue to lose around 540 computing hours
per minute.
We greatly appreciate your help and contributions! With your help, we
have been making rapid progress in our research which has been
attracting considerable attention, for example:
NOVA:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/origami-revolution.html (the 8
minute segment on our work starts at 20:30)
The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21716603-only-quarter-known-protein-structures-are-human-how-determine-proteins
The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/unravelling-lifes-origami/513638
Geekwire:
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/big-data-rosetta-protein-puzzles
which is titled “Big data (and volunteers) help scientists solve
hundreds of protein puzzles”
Thank you very much for your continued contributions to and support of
Rosetta@Home!
David Baker