The IP change was surely motivated by a hardware failure. It is hard to plan for your hardware failures one week in advance.

Granted, there are better ways to deal with a hardware failure than updating DNS. But I assume that the pool of machines that PerlMonks gets shuttled between from time to time is being used for a lot of things other than PerlMonks so changing a machine's IP address isn't an easy thing to do.

But I find it hard to be overly critical of a service that manages to be so darn helpful and fun at such a bargain price.

What sort of hardware failure ties up an IP?
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Snazzy tagline here

The kind that forces you to move the service onto a computer that is hooked to a different network (the IP address changed from 206.170.14.76 to 63.150.14.148).

Actually, I have no inside information that it was a hardware failure. I just know that the service was down for a while before it came back up with a new IP address. I also know that similar things have happened in the past (down time followed by an IP change) and that those were caused by "being forced" to move the service in order to get it back up (either because of a failure or for other resource reasons).

PerlMonks is a bit of a tag-along and so appears to get stuck on whatever machine has about the right amount of resources to spare after taking care of the computer's primary responsibilities.

It ain't the best way to run a web site, but the frequency and duration of failures is acceptable to me based on what I'm paying and how well it works the rest of the time.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")