Moved webhosting and cannot access website from my laptop but i can with other devices?

Question

Ok heres whats happened.

I moved to new hosting company (siteground). I installed wordpress. Changed name servers on domain. Tried to login to wordpress website....but all i can see are old server files.

looked at new website on my phone (which is connected to same router) and can see everything perfectly. Looked on Tablet - can see website perfectly.

Siteground (my new hosting company) said everything is fine on their end, they can see the new website.

so i have flushed DNS on my laptop, cleared cache, i have run tracer ip and it fails to connect to new website. It still shows old web host files.

The problem it seems is to do with my laptop....but no one can help me. Even technical support with my ISP was stumped.

can anyone help me?

I can see my site on every other device on earth apart from my own laptop.

Answer 1

There are several settings on your laptop that could be preventing you from connecting to your new website.

Delete from /etc/hosts

The most obvious choice might be an entry in your /etc/hosts or (hosts.txt on Windows). You might have created an entry that pointed your laptop to the IP address of your old website for testing purposes. Remove any line that has your website domain name from the file and try again.

Use ping

Next I would open a command line and ensure that when you ping your website you get the expected IP address:

$ ping example.com
PING example.com (93.184.216.34) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 93.184.216.34 (93.184.216.34): icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=19.3ms

Is the reported IP address the IP address of your old or your new website? If it is the old site, check your /etc/hosts file again. It could also be a local DNS server that you are running.

Use dig

Another command line tool I find useful is dig. It will query your DNS server (bypassing /etc/hosts). Using it you can get an idea if the problem is local or with your DNS server. It will also report the IP address of the DNS server that it uses so you can check that it is what you expect as well.

$ dig example.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.        6419    IN  A   93.184.216.34
...
;; SERVER: 127.0.1.1#53(127.0.1.1)

Check:

• Your website IP address (93.184.216.34 for example.com in this case)
• Your DNS server (127.0.1.1 for me)
• The TTL on your domain (6419 seconds in this case)

DNS time to live (TTL)

If dig reports that the IP address is incorrect from your DNS server, it could be because DNS has not yet propagated. Dig will tell you how many seconds you have to wait before it refreshes.

You can test that your DNS server is returning the correct results by querying it directly. First look up the name server and then use that information to query the nameserver directly

$ dig NS example.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.        2333    IN  NS  a.iana-servers.net.

$ dig @a.iana-servers.net example.com
...    
;; ANSWER SECTION:
example.com.        86400   IN  A   93.184.216.34

Add to /etc/hosts

If you can't figure out why the IP address on the command line is your old one, you can work around by adding a line to your /etc/hosts file with the new correct IP:

93.184.216.34 example.com

Browser Plugins

If everything on the command line is correct, it could be an issue with your browser. Try using a different browser. Try starting your web browser in safe mode with all plugins disabled.

Proxy Settings

Check your web browser setting and ensure that you don't have a proxy set. Using a proxy server (or an auto proxy configuration (PAC) file) could be causing the problem.

Answer 2

The 'hosts' file was the culprit for me. It was probably altered by MAMP to point to the old dns address. Difficult to edit too, it's very locked. Once the errant address was deleted I got the site back. Thank you! Spent many hours trying to fix this.