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The morning the websites took a breather — and the safeguards the fellowship built out of it

HighWordPress sites 2 min readBy Christopher W
TL;DR: For a few hours both PIR® websites went dark. The cause was ordinary and human: a hosting renewal invoice ($299.90, due October 7) slipped past its due date, and the provider suspended the account. Nothing was lost — payment restored everything within minutes. What came out of it matters more: the board is turning on auto-renewal, billing notices will reach a role mailbox instead of one personal inbox, and hosting now has a place in the fellowship's break-glass plan.
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🌑 What happened

On the morning of October 14, both psychedelicsinrecovery.org and service.psychedelicsinrecovery.org began serving the hosting provider’s parking page instead of our sites. The root cause was not a hack, a crash, or a bad deploy — it was an invoice. The annual hosting renewal (invoice #20007218114, $299.90) had come due on October 7, its warning emails had landed in one person’s inbox, and the provider suspended the account for non-payment.

A trusted servant noticed, escalated to the Treasurer, and the invoice was paid. The sites came back within minutes of payment — nothing was lost. The provider keeps 90 days of backups even in the worst case, but the worst case never came.

🔍 What we learned

The websites, the store, and every @psychedelicsinrecovery.org role mailbox live on that one hosting account. Its renewal notices went to a personal inbox — which makes a single person’s email the one thread the fellowship’s whole web presence hangs from. The provider also auto-deletes accounts after 7 days unpaid; we were never close to that line, but there’s no reason to ever walk near it.

This is precisely the kind of single-point-of-failure the fellowship’s succession and break-glass planning exists to catch. This week, it caught one.

🛡️ The safeguards

  1. Auto-renewal goes on. The card already on file will now handle renewals automatically — proposed to the board, and the first vote came back within minutes: a yes.
  2. Billing gets a watchdog. WPX billing notices will be forwarded to board@psychedelicsinrecovery.org, while the account’s own email stays exactly as it is (the provider ties the account to it, and we’re not moving that). A copy, not a move.
  3. A calendar backstop. A reminder roughly two weeks before every renewal, so the automatic isn’t the only thing watching.
  4. A place in the break-glass plan. Hosting billing now sits alongside the 2FA recovery codes in the succession documentation, so the next trusted servant inherits the map, not the mystery.

☕ While we were dark

Here’s the part worth remembering: the fellowship barely noticed. Meetings ran on Zoom as always, WhatsApp threads kept flowing, and the Discord community stayed connected — because the fellowship was never really the website. The website is just one of its lamps.

One day at a time — and, when needed, one invoice at a time.