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I made a website, and it works for everyone except for the site owner, who cannot access the site. He gets a "server could not be found" error. I went to his house and the issue occurs for all of his devices (PC, laptop, iPhone using WiFi) when I turn WiFi off on the iPhone it works.

So I thought it was a problem on his router, so I reset his router to default factory settings but it still does not work. I have flushed his DNS cache and his browser cache, but nothing seems to help. He cannot even PING the server using the domain name. However, when he uses the IP address, he can see the site fine.

I looked in cPanel for an blocked IP addresses but cannot see anything. What could be stopping just him from accessing the site via domain name and not the IP address?

Site details are: PHP, osCommerce, and it is hosted by site5 on my reseller account.

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  • Did you check if there's anything weird in his hosts file? (On review, this seems unlikely to be the cause since it happens across devices; might be worth a look anyway, though.) Can he access other sites that are IP/server neighbors on your account?
    – Su'
    Sep 9, 2012 at 9:42
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    Bizarre that it would be just the site owner! Whilst developing the site did you need to configure anything so that he could see the site-in-progress? What DNS does his router use? Tried changing to Google's for instance... 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ?
    – MrWhite
    Sep 9, 2012 at 10:14
  • @Su' Thanks for the suggestions I will try them out. Yes he can access other sites on that same server/ip ok I updated the name-server over 5 days ago. It should have well and truly finished propagating by now right? whatsmydns.net says it has propagated around the globe. Maybe I need to wait a few more days.
    – Daveo
    Sep 9, 2012 at 11:11
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    If it's all devices on wifi, it's probably an issue with his ISP. They must be caching the DNS on their side, I would get in contact with them to ask.
    – endyourif
    Sep 23, 2012 at 0:06
  • I agree with w3d, use an alternative DNS service. I'd recommend OpenDNS (www.opendns.com): 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220. It could simply be that his current DNS source simply does not update properly.
    – InanisAtheos
    Sep 24, 2012 at 9:22

5 Answers 5

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Every time I've run into this, its been due to caching. Normally the client has visited an older (non-functional) version of the site, and this has been cached in their browser. This is enhanced if it is an older browser. or especially if they are behind some sort of proxy. Having a reverse proxy on the site, such as CloudFlare, would also cause this caching.

Point it, they most likely have an old copy cached. Either it is a browser cache, a proxy cache, or even at some point along the way, a DNS cache. Figure out how to clear/reset that, and you should be good to go!

Based on the issues across multiple devices, it is apparent that it is almost certainly a DNS caching issue, with an old request from before the site was set up being cached somewhere along the way. Try using an alternate DNS provider (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for Google), and flushing their DNS cache (sudo dscacheutil -flushcache on a Mac).

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You should try taking one of your devices to the client's home (it could be a laptop or just a smartphone) and connect it via wifi.

  • If the web works, we can assume the problem is related to your client's computers configuration. I could be that he has the same antivirus installed on all the devices.
  • If you can't connect to the web, it must be a ISP-related problem. It might be a ban or just an issue of DNS caching.
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If domain name just registered better will be wait for 72h

Anyway you can run traceroute on PC and find where is the problem.

tracert domain.com

If you don't understand output clean first two octets with xxx.xxx.1.1 and post it in you question.

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Is your host site an apache host site? Are you running an .htaccess file? And possibly mised up your allow from and deny from statements.

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Configure the dns with the dns hosts of your site5 account.

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