Fix NullReferenceException if one provides fake url as a server

[trams]

[initialcontext]

Not a bad idea here. iirc at Etsy it was handy to fail fast if someone deployed with a bad server URL we might not want to mask that completely, but could handle it better than NPE. Any thoughts about doing something in between? Any Etsy folks have input on this?

[trams]

I am okay with either solution. We could throw a distinct exception instead of NPE

[initialcontext]

My instinct is a better error message would be the play here, but I'll defer to the Etsy folks to decide that as they can merge. Nice find, thanks for the contrib!

[nixsticks]

@trams Thanks for your contribution! We'd love to add a distinct exception/informative error message, as @initialcontext suggested.