Highport orbital control

When a site is unavailable

Occasionally the board reports a site as unavailable instead of bringing it up. There are a small number of reasons, none of them yours, and the screen tells you which one you have met.

There are a small number of reasons a site hosted here stops answering, and you can tell them apart by what is on the screen. Most of them are the site owner's to fix, not yours. One of them you can fix, which is the one that asks you to sign in. One of them is ours.

None of this is yours to fix. Orbital Control keeps the log, the screen in front of you has the summary, and the one case you can do anything about is the one that asks you to sign in.

What you see, and what it means

Nothing is published here yet

This is the 404 you get when the address reaches Highport and no site is being served for it. It names the domain, says it points here but that nothing is being served for it right now, and adds that the site may not have been published yet or may have been taken down. A last line is addressed to the domain's owner, not to you, and points them at Highport to publish, or to check where their domain has got to.

Four different situations produce that one page, and they are deliberately indistinguishable:

• the domain has never been registered here;
• it is registered, but nothing has been published to it yet, or the site that was there has been deleted;
• the owner released it;
• it was suspended or blocked by whoever runs the service.

Telling them apart on the page would turn it into a way of finding out which domains are claimed and which have been taken down, so it does not. If you need to know which of the four it is, the site's owner is the only person who can tell you.

Two details worth knowing about the timing. A site that has just been taken down usually stops within a second or two, but on a domain with steady traffic it can keep answering normally for up to about two minutes before this page replaces it.

The other direction works the same way and is shorter. A site that has just gone live can stay hidden behind this page for up to a minute on our side, and your browser holds the page for thirty seconds on top of that. One reload after a minute or two is worth doing before you conclude anything.

If the domain has been pointed somewhere else entirely, you will not see this page at all. You will see whatever is at the new address, or a DNS failure, and neither has anything to do with Highport.

When only the page is missing

This page is not part of this site is a separate 404 and means something much smaller. The site is being served normally, and the particular address you asked for is not part of it. The wording continues, "The address is right for the site but wrong for the page. Check the link, or start again from the site's home page." A site can supply a missing-page design of its own instead of this one, so a not-found page in the site's own style means the site itself is working.

How allowances work

Every response a site here serves is measured, and its bytes are counted against a monthly bandwidth allowance. An allowance belongs to an account, not to a site, so one allowance covers everything that account publishes and, separately, that person's reading of sites which ask readers to cover their own bandwidth.

Whether anybody is ever turned away for bandwidth is decided by whoever runs the service, and turning nobody away is the default. The two refusals below are what a reader meets where that has been switched on.

Allowances run on UTC calendar months and reset at midnight UTC on the first, not on an anniversary of when somebody signed up. The boundary is the same everywhere, which is why the reset time printed on the out-of-allowance page below is an exact time and not an estimate.

How large an allowance is, who grants it, and the separate, smaller budget an owner can set for readers who have not signed in are the owner's side of this, and they are on Limits and quotas.

Your own allowance and where it went are in the Observatory, at https://hub.highport.space/observatory, once you have signed in to the Hub. That is a different sign-in from the one a site asks for, and signing in at a site does not get you the page. Nothing warns you as an allowance runs down, so that page is the only place it is visible before something stops working.

Sign in to read

You are sent to a sign-in form at the site's own address, on a path beginning /_bard/oauth/login, in three cases: the site's budget for readers who have not signed in is spent, or it was set to zero, or the page is one the owner has put behind a sign-in. The form is headed Sign in to read followed by the domain, and it returns you to the page you asked for once you are done.

Signing in is the fix, and it is also what makes you the payer. Where the site asked because its budget for readers who have not signed in is spent or was set to zero, what you read there comes out of your own allowance from then on. Where the page was one the owner has put behind a sign-in, that page is drawn from your allowance whatever arrangement the owner has for the rest of the site. The form says as much, in those terms, before you sign in.

Images, stylesheets and scripts are refused instead of redirected, so a page that arrives with its pictures missing is one of the ways this shows up. Sign in from the page's own address and the missing parts arrive. What the form asks for, what the site's owner learns about you, why the missing pictures are refused that way, and what happens if you would rather not, are all on Sites that ask who you are.

Out of allowance

When a whole allowance is spent, as opposed to a site's budget for readers who have not signed in, no sign-in helps and you are not offered one. You get a small unstyled page with a 402 status, a heading and one sentence:

Out of allowance

      The bandwidth allowance for did:plc:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is spent for this month. It resets at 2026-10-01 00:00 UTC.
      

(The identifier and the date are examples. The wording, and the format of the reset time, are what the page actually uses.)

The identifier names an account, not a person's handle, which is why it is a string of characters and not a name. If it is not yours, the site's owner is the one who has run out, and there is nothing you can do. The reset time on the page is the earliest the site comes back on its own. If it is yours, your own allowance is spent, and the same reset time applies.

Running out yourself does not always end in this page. A site that gives readers who have not signed in some of its own bandwidth also covers a signed-in reader who has nothing left, and you are served on the owner's allowance instead. A site that gives them none of it refuses you.

This page is served for everything on the site, including images and stylesheets. So a page elsewhere that embeds something from an affected site will have holes in it, with no explanation for them.

When nothing loads at all

If the browser reports a security or certificate problem and never gets as far as showing you a page, no certificate has been issued for that domain. Certificates are only issued for domains that are fully set up here, so this is what a domain that was registered and never finished looks like. The owner has one more step to do. It is also what a released or suspended domain looks like eventually: the certificate it already has keeps working until it expires, and nothing replaces it.

There is nothing on your side to fix and no way to work around it. The domain's owner is the only person who can finish the setup.

When the trouble is ours

One case looks different from all of the above: an error with no page in it at all. A blank 503, or a site that connects normally and then answers nothing, means something on this side is broken. It is not about the domain, the site or anybody's allowance.

https://highport.space/status.json is where that is reported. It carries three entries, one for serving sites, one for the Hub, and one for picking up new and updated sites. Each reads ok, degraded or down, and where one is not ok, there is a sentence about what a reader will notice. Trying again later is all the advice there is.

What you can do

None of these is a fault in your browser, and none of them is helped by retrying harder.

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