Site can't be accessed through specific locations - dns

Since last Saturday, my website accessibility has been very fragile from my location. From the states though, everything worked perfectly. Now the situation is better, but from time to time it's unstable here and from the states it's solid.
What do you suggest me to do? Is it related to the hosting company? Domain company? Local ISPs? DNS issues?
I'm really at a loss here, need your advice.
Thanks

This is your DNS issues. Trying fixing it or report this to your host provide for changing your DNS to one that is up and running. I hope this help solved your issues

This is impossible to say. You must find sample sites to compare to, such as: other site on same hosting company's servers, other site in same country, access Internet through another ISP or with/without Wi-Fi, pass through a proxy, etc. By comparing to those samples you'll MAYBE notice differences and similarities. Through logic you should then be able to exclude some hypotheses and finally nail down the problem.

Related

SaaS DNS settings

I run a small e-commerce platform, and over the past two years have grown customers.
There's around 100 customers now and their domains point to our server IP by the use of two A records (# and www).
I'm not experienced in this area so I need someone who's knowledgable about setting up major SaaS projects.
The worry I have is, if for whatever reason I change host, wouldn't I lose the IP address? And surely at that point, I may need to ask over 200 customers to change their DNS settings to point to our new server?
A friend said to me about using a CNAME (pointing to a domain I own), but another professional server contact told me that it's not ideal. What further confuses me is this:
If my point remains true (and that an IP isn't able to be owned), then how come Squarespace and a few other major players have an option to instruct their users that they can use an A record to point to their (squarespace/wix..) IP address? Do they know something I don't (do they own an IP?)? What happens if squarespace for whatever reason have to change IP, surely 100,000's+ customers would need to change their IP A records? This seems very impractical and not realistic. It really confuses me.
I'd really appreciate some enlightening in this area, because I need to know sooner rather than later if I dig myself into a hole if I get over 500 customers and for whatever reason I end up having to ask 500 of them to change DNS settings.
Thanks.

How can I find where was my website hosted

Ok it may sound strange, but I forgot where is one of my websites hosted.
I remember the domain name and I have access to setup the DNS server, but I don't remember the nameserver. It was something like ns113.icndns.net but I checked and the domain is not there.
When I use that tool I see my domain name listed there: https://viewdns.info/reverseip/?host=nemo.icnhost.net&t=1
But what are the dns server names? Is there an easy way to find or am I missing something general knowledge? Please help.
p.s. I don'g have access to the hosting account and the guy having it will return at the end of the week, but it is too late.
Some website do the job for you, such as https://who.is
it will give informations regarding a specific url.
You can also use command whois from nslookup tools to resolve those kinds of problems
https://www.manpagez.com/man/1/whois/
cheers

How to block users accessing site outside of UK?

Searched the web and unable to find a solution. I have an umbraco site using IIS to host on a Windows server. Any ideas on approach to block users accessing site outside the UK? Htaccess approach would be too slow.... thank you in advance!
That's quite hard to do accurately, as you could have someone based in the UK using a European network provider, which means that they might appear to come from say Holland instead of the UK. It's also possible for people to spoof their location fairly easily if they really want to get at your site.
As Lex Li mentions there are plenty of commercial databases and tools for looking up a user's location, but the accuracy of these varies considerably, not to mention the fact that some of them only support IPv4. Any of these options are going to be slow though, as you'll have to check on every request. You also have to make sure you keep the databases up to date.
Another option would be to proxy your site through something like CloudFront or CloudFlare which both support blocking traffic by country.

username.website.com OR website.com/username

I'm developing a new website with membership. Do you think any of these has advantages or disadvantages? I thought today that a mobile version will be available and I was planning m.website.com for that but in "username.website.com" case, this won't work. On the other hand, I think website.com/username is ugly.
I need and also want to know your ideas about this.
Thanks.
From a management standpoint, username.website.com will surely be greater. You have to create a new DNS record for each user. In order to do that programatically, you are going to have to manage your DNS with a service that has a API. I am pretty sure registrars like GoDaddy do not have this. Amazon has something called Route 53 that might?
username.website.com will never work as domain names are propagated via DNS servers and through millions of network devices. Any change to the domain name takes time.
Usually, if you want to handle users you can do something like this: www.website.com/users/bob so mobile version will differ only by m. prefix.
It's a lot harder to make a script that sets up subdomains than it is to make a folder for a user.
If you have a mobile site, you could fix the m.username.domain.com by making it username.domain.com/m, if you really want the subdomain.
My half a cent.

How to simulate browsing from various locations?

I want to check a particular website from various locations. For example, I see a site example.com from the US and it works fine. The colleague in Europe says he cannot see the site (gets a dns eror).
Is there any way I can check that for my self instead of asking him every time?
This is a bit of self promotion, but I built a tool to do just this that you might find useful, called GeoPeeker.
It remotely accesses a site from servers spread around the world, renders the page with webkit and sends back an image. It will also report the IP address and DNS information of the site as it appears from that location.
There are no ads, and it's very stream-lined to serve this one purpose. It's still in development, and feedback is welcome. Here's hoping somebody besides myself finds it useful!
Sometimes a website doesn't work on my PC and I want to know if it's the website or a problem local to me(e.g. my ISP, my router, etc).
The simplest way to check a website and avoid using your local network resources(and thus avoid any problems caused by them) is using a web proxy such as Proxy.org.
Well, DNS should be the same worldwide, wouldn't it? Of course it can take up to a day or so until your new DNS record is propagated around the world. So either something is wrong on your colleague's end or the DNS record still takes some time...
I usually use online DNS lookup tools for that, e.g. http://network-tools.com/
It can check your HTTP header as well. Only a proxy located in Europe would be better.
Besides using multiple proxies or proxy-networks, you might want to try the planet-lab. (And probably there are other similar institutions around).
The social solution would be to post a question on some board that you are searching for volunteers that proxy your requests. (They only have to allow for one destination in their proxy config thus the danger of becoming spam-whores is relatively low.) You should prepare credentials that ensure your partners of the authenticity of the claim that the destination is indeed your computer.
DNS info is cached at many places. If you have a server in Europe you may want to try to proxy through it
It depends on wether the locatoin is detected by different DNS resolution from different locations, or by IP address that you are browsing from.
If its by DNS, you could just modify your hosts file to point at the server used in europe. Get your friend to ping the address, to see if its different from the one yours resolves to.
To browse from a different IP address:
You can rent a VPS server. You can use putty / SSH to act as a proxy. I use this from time to time to brows from the US using a VPS server I rent in the US.
Having an account on a remote host may or may not be enough. Sadly, my dreamhost account, even though I have ssh access, does not allow proxying.
The only thing that springs to mind for this is to use a proxy server based in Europe. Either have your colleague set one up [if possible] or find a free proxy. A quick Google search came up with http://www.anonymousinet.com/ as the top result.

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