A business owner checks their own website from home and it looks fine. A customer rings to say the site won’t load, or looks wrong, or shows information from months ago. The owner checks again and still can’t see what the customer is talking about. What is going on?
This is one of the more challenging problems a website can have, because “it’s not working” can mean completely different things depending on who’s looking and when, and troubleshooting requires some technical knowhow.
DNS is often the cause
DNS is the system that tells the internet where to send someone when they type in your domain name. It sits behind your domain, hosting and email, and most organisation owners don’t need to think about it until something goes wrong.
When DNS is incorrectly configured, different people can see different versions of the same site, depending on which record their own device or provider is using. Someone whose computer has an old record cached will see an old version of your site. Someone whose provider has already picked up the new record will see the current one. Neither person is imagining it.
What’s usually going on
A few common causes turn up again and again.
A recent change hasn’t fully taken effect.
After a DNS change, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours for the update to reach everyone. This is called DNS propagation. During that window, different people may see different versions.
Two providers are pointing in different directions.
This happens when a domain was registered through one company and hosting was set up through another, and the two were never properly connected, or when a business has changed web developers and the old and new setups are both still partly active.
A cached copy is being served.
Browsers and some hosting providers keep a saved copy of a page to make it load faster. If that copy is old, it can look broken or out of date even though the live version is fine.
Emails are following the same broken trail.
Email delivery uses DNS records too. If your emails have stopped arriving, or bounce, or go missing for some senders but not others, the cause is very often the same misconfiguration that’s affecting your website.
Who runs into this most often
We see this most with businesses that have changed web developers or hosting providers recently, or that don’t know who manages their domain name and don’t have their own login for it. It’s also common where the domain, hosting and email were set up by different people or providers over time and the configuration hasn’t been documented.
What to check
Log into your domain registrar account, if you have one, and check who the nameservers point to. If you don’t know your registrar login, or don’t have one in your own name at all, that’s a more pressing problem to fix, regardless of whether anything looks broken today. Do I own my website? covers what “owning” a website and domain actually means in practice.
If you’re not sure how domain registration works or want to check whether yours is set up properly, what to consider when registering a domain name is a good starting point. And if a renewal notice arrives that doesn’t look quite right, we’ve written about the domain scammers who send them.
If you can’t get access to your own domain
This is unfortunately more common than you’d expect, and it’s fixable. A domain registered in someone else’s name, or hosting you can’t log into, or an email setup only one person understands, all mean the same thing: you don’t currently control an asset your business depends on.
Getting that control back usually costs very little and takes far less time than the problem suggests. If you’d like a hand working out what’s going on with your domain, hosting or email, get in touch.
