Why You Can’t See Your Website But Others Can

A company I contract my services out to had some problems recently with not being able to access one of their websites, while everyone else outside of their company network could.

It was a headache with trying to process orders and manage customers when there was no way to view the actual orders, much less the payment information.

If you’ve ever experienced this same problem, you’ve probably pulled out your hair, fighting with the customer support personnel of your website hosting company, probably getting nowhere (because truth be told, most of them don’t really know what they are doing beyond what they were trained to do).

A Solution To Your Website Viewing Issue

If you’re having this problem and white-listing your public IP address doesn’t help, then the problem has nothing to do with the server settings your website is hosted on.

The problem most likely lies with the name servers owned by your internet service provider.  When an internet service provider’s nameservers aren’t resolving IP addresses to their respective host names, this prevents you from seeing your website.

To fix this issue, simply following the steps outlined below:

1. Click your “Start” menu (Windows Orb on the taskbar of Windows 7 & Vista).
2. Select Control Panel.
3. Double-Click Network & Sharing Center or Network Connections Icon.
4. Click to Open “Local Area Connection”
5. Click “Properties”
6. Choose Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), then click “Properties”
7. Click the radio button that  says “Use the following DNS server addresses” and type in one of the below listed IP addresses in the “Preferred DNS Server” and “Alternate DNS Server” fields.
8. Click the OK button, the close all of the open windows.
9. Click on your “Start Menu” again.
10. Click “Run” on Windows Vista or earlier, or type the following into the search field in Windows 7.
11. Type cmd & hit the enter key.
12. Type ipconfig /flushdns
13. When it says that your DNS has been successfully flushed, close the window.
14. You should be able to access your website via your preferred internet browser.

If you’re not using Windows, you can find a list of steps to following here:

www.opendns.com

List of Available DNS IP Addresses

You can use any of these available IP addresses you want.  It doesn’t matter who your internet service provider is.  I’d recommend OpenDNS over any of the others.

OpenDNS

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

Genuity

• 4.2.2.1
• 4.2.2.2

Level3

• 209.244.0.3
• 209.244.0.4

DNSAdvantage

• 156.154.70.1
• 156.154.71.1

Google

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

DynDNS Internet Guide

• 216.146.35.35
• 216.146.36.36

Have you ever had any issues like this?  How did you solve the problem?