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I have a pretty serious issue when i goto my "example.com" website it gets redirected to a random wordpress website, i was using a virtual server from a company a couple weeks ago and having the domain point to there server.

I've since cancelled there service and the domain wasn't pointing to any website.

Today i went back to the website address to see if both www.example.com and domain.com returned "site cant be reached", but to my surprise when i type example.com i get a website page and www.example.com i get site can't be reached.

I have basic skills of getting a website up and running, i was trying to install drupal on ubuntu with no success. So i closed the server and chose a different route. So forgive me if i've made some blatant mistakes that are obvious to you.

Right now my dns records are empty as i've deleted all, in hopes it would solve the issue which it didnt. What might be causing this?

Update:

I have tried multiple computers on the same network to access domain.com all return "site cannot be reached" except for one computer shows the website.

I ran intodns.com and got the following errors

  1. ERROR: Some of your DNS servers do not have A records at all. I could not find any A records for the following DNS servers:

2.Oh well, I did not detect any MX records so you probably don't have any and if you know you should have then they may be missing at your nameservers!

  1. ERROR: I could not get any A records for www.domain.com! (I only do a cache request, if you recently added a WWW A record, it might not show up here.)
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  • Where are the nameservers pointing?
    – Steve
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 22:05
  • when i run a whois search it shows there pointing to the company i registered the domain with.It shows i can use a custom namespace server though
    – Gh88
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 22:18
  • well maybe you should change the nameservers to point to somewhere else so you have full control of DNS. Have you looked at intodns.com to see what DNS settings look like?
    – Steve
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 22:27
  • Ok first iam going to update my original post with this but for some reason that website page doesnt show up when i goto domain.com on my phone(4G),but also my second desktop thats on my same network that all my computers are on.Only my current computer iam on does this website page show up when i goto domain.com.
    – Gh88
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 22:48
  • These are the errors i get with intodns 1. ERROR: Some of your DNS servers do not have A records at all. I could not find any A records for the following DNS servers: 2.Oh well, I did not detect any MX records so you probably don't have any and if you know you should have then they may be missing at your nameservers! 3. ERROR: I could not get any A records for www.domain.com! (I only do a cache request, if you recently added a WWW A record, it might not show up here.)
    – Gh88
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 22:50

1 Answer 1

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You say that only one computer/browser still redirects away to another website, and that the redirect is gone on all the other machines you've tried. This sounds to me like maybe that one browser cached a 301 redirect, and is using this cached redirect without even trying to look up the domain in DNS at all anymore.

The way to test this is to use an alternate web browser and/or incognito/private mode on that one computer that's still getting the redirect. If the redirect does not happen in the other browser, then you know it's a browser cache issue.

A way to fix this would be to clear the browser cache. There are ways of clearing the 301 cache for one specific URL, too, at least in Chrome:

https://www.ryadel.com/en/clear-google-chrome-redirect-cache-for-single-url-page-howto/

If the fix works, then you can be pretty much 100% certain that it was a caching issue on that one machine.

It's worth mentioning that it could be a DNS caching issue too, if you set your TTLs high and the server you had it pointed at is still responding. In that case, the solution is just to wait out the full time of your TTL so that the DNS entry drops out of the cache.

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  • I tried clearing the cache and went into incognito mode still the same issue,i even went ahead and installed a new web browser i never used before and still the issue persists.I did however have the dns records TTL at 10800.
    – Gh88
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 23:22
  • @Gh88 Definitely wait out the 3 hours. Sounds like a DNS caching issue to me.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 23:24
  • Ok will do i will report back what happens thanks
    – Gh88
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 23:26
  • If you do troubleshooting querying directly the authoritative nameservers you have nothing to wait for you should be able to see changes immediately. If not using dig locally you have online troubleshooting tools such as dnsviz.net or zonemaster.net; the question is unfortunately lacking many useful details, starting with the name involved, without which we can all be lost in multiple hypothesis. You shouldn't use a browser to do DNS tests, specifically now that they bypass everything and do DOH in your back.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Commented May 12, 2020 at 23:38

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