The Problem Three
(or: what I learned debugging something that should have worked)
Many projects have a moment where progress stops being creative and becomes infrastructural.
This was one of those moments.
I had three domains that refused to behave.
They weren’t broken in obvious ways.
They resolved.
They loaded.
They even had valid certificates.
They just… went to the wrong place.
The Setup
At this point in the project, I had:- multiple servers
- cleanly separated roles (production, personal, archive)
- consistent document roots
- working DNS
- valid SSL certificates
And yet:
One domain insisted on loading content from the wrong server.
The other two returned 404 despite correct paths.
I started calling them “the problem three.”
The Worst Kind of Bug
These were the kind of bugs that don’t announce themselves.
No error messages.
No obvious misconfigurations.
No red flags.
Just… wrong behavior.
- your understanding of DNS
- your sanity
- whether you changed something three days ago and forgot
The False Leads
I checked everything:- DNS records (multiple times)
- Nameservers
- Document roots
- SSL certificates
- Server configs
- File permissions
- Cache behavior
- Browser behavior
- Different networks
Everything said the same thing:
“This should work.”
It didn’t.
The Actual Problem
The issue turned out not to be my configuration.
It was an internal binding issue inside the hosting provider’s system — a mismatch between what the control panel said, and where the domain was actually pointing.
The UI showed one thing.
The server was doing another.
And because the system looked correct, nothing auto-fixed.
Once support re-bound the domains internally, everything snapped into place instantly.
No code changes.
No DNS changes.
No redeploy.
Just… correct wiring.
The Lesson
This wasn’t a technical failure.
It was a systems lesson:
When enough layers exist between you and the machine, certainty becomes an illusion.
And also:
If something behaves irrationally for long enough, assume the abstraction is lying.
Why This Matters
This moment reinforced something that quietly underpins this whole project:- Complexity accumulates invisibly
- Tooling hides state
- “Working” and “correct” are not the same thing
- Control is often an illusion created by good UI
It also reminded me why I like building things slowly.
If this had been a production system under pressure, I would’ve been rushing.
Instead, I could stop, observe, document, and learn something useful.
The Aftermath
Once the issue was resolved:- All domains resolved correctly
- SSL behaved as expected
- Folder structures made sense again
I trusted the environment enough to keep building
And more importantly — I wrote this down.
Because this is exactly the kind of thing you forget until it happens again.