DNS, CNAME, and name servers

I use Blogger for my blog. Blogger wants me to use Custom Domains rather than SFTPing content over to my server. That's fine. Let their servers handle the immense strain my blog is under from its abundant audience. Or at least let them dynamically host and regenerate labels pages and so forth, rather than spending minutes (MINUTES!) of time generating and copying them over to my server, where they'll just waste space anyway. Also, I don't have the most bandwidth. (So close, though.) Is it sad that I used more bandwidth in publishing my blog than I did in serving it to readers?

So, the other month, I set it up. I created the appropriate CNAME record, which can be used to redirect requests for, say, some subdomain (oh, blog.kosmokaryote.org) to some other, more canonical name, like ghs.google.com, where the content will actually be located. The swell thing is, unlike HTTP redirects and such, visitors still see it as hosted at my domain, and not at Google's. Hurrah. The deception (except for this post) is complete!

Or, it would have been complete. After making the change, for the the last 6 weeks, my blog has had downright sketchy availability. I mean, more than half the time I tried to visit it, it was unavailable. I tried to investigate a few times. Tried reapplying the CNAME change. Why not go back? Well, something with Blogger's SFTP transfer seemed broken, in that for the couple weeks before that, I hadn't been able to copy over anything anyway. So, have a blog that can't update or one that can update but is only available half the time?

Investigating again, trying to find out what could be the possible cause of the CNAME being findable sometimes and not others, and assuming that it wasn't the fault of the DNS system in general (originally, I thought that there was some annoying lag in the record's propagation, but no), I finally discovered that two very relevant nameservers were out of sync, and one of them was just not updating to know of the CNAME record. Ugh. It's been resolved now, so hopefully by tomorrow, all blog.kosmokaryote.org will be found, mwahahaha!