Hostmonster Frustration
Filed Under (Misc.) by Kirby Witmer on 05-05-2008
Late last week I requested a static IP address from my web host, hostmonster. Supposedly this would be a simple change that would go off without a hitch. And it did for the most part, except for one problem. The A name record for blog.kirb.com was somehow erased, which simply resulted in this website being down. The solution of course is to update the A record. Simple, right? Take a peak at these conversations with Hostmonster Support.
jschwalbe [6:39:00 PM]: Welcome to our real-time support chat. How can I help you today?
Kirby Witmer [6:39:00 PM]: My website blog.kirb.com is unavailable for the last servral hours.
jschwalbe [6:39:23 PM]: Ok. let me check on that please. just a minute
Kirby Witmer [6:39:30 PM]: it doesn’t seem to even resolve when i ping it
jschwalbe [6:43:50 PM]: ok. kirb.com seems to be working just fine. let me check why the subdomain isn’t pulling up
[6:49:51 PM]: i’m still working on it. bare with me please.
Kirby Witmer [6:49:56 PM]: ok
jschwalbe [6:54:52 PM]: for some reason it isn’t able to find that subdomain. i’m going to try to delete it and ad add it again
Kirby Witmer [6:58:14 PM]: i actually deleted it myself from within the control panel and added it again earlier today.. but that hadn’t made a difference for me
jschwalbe [6:59:36 PM]: Okay. Lets see what happens.
[7:07:30 PM]: I’m still working on it. Seems to be a quite hard to get issue. I apologize.
Kirby Witmer [7:18:59 PM]: no problem. hope you can get it fixed!
jschwalbe [7:19:14 PM]: i found what happened
[7:19:29 PM]: you have your wordpress configured to redirect to www.kirb.com/Blog
Kirby Witmer [7:19:59 PM]: ohh really?
jschwalbe [7:20:19 PM]: yes
Kirby Witmer [7:20:42 PM]: i haven’t changed anything recently that i know of…
jschwalbe [7:22:11 PM]: Let me see what i can do
Kirby Witmer [7:22:12 PM]: it used to be kirb.com/Blog but i changed it to blog.kirb.com and added the following lines to my wp-config.php file.
[7:22:14 PM]: define(’WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://blog.kirb.com’);
define(’WP_HOME’, ‘http://blog.kirb.com’);
[7:22:43 PM]: which override the wordpress settings
jschwalbe [7:23:01 PM]: i’m sorry, but it seems you’re going to have to fix that. Right now it just redirecting into a dark room and not going anywhere
Kirby Witmer [7:24:44 PM]: I dont’ want to be a pain or anything.. but take a look at this http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/traversal.ch?domain=blog.kirb.com&type=A&token=11a0aba66da33b3d25d2b49601999019
[7:25:00 PM]: it says there is no A record for blog.kirb.com]
jschwalbe [7:25:17 PM]: http://www.hostmonster.com/cgi-bin/dig?query=kirb.com
Kirby Witmer [7:26:05 PM]:this just happened since hostmonster setup a static ip for my account… it worked fine before that
[7:27:12 PM]: right there is the problem.. http://www.hostmonster.com/cgi-bin/dig?query=blog.kirb.com
[7:27:18 PM]: there is no a entry
[7:27:32 PM]: compare that with this http://www.hostmonster.com/cgi-bin/dig?query=search.kirbtech.com
[7:27:41 PM]: which is another of my subdomains
jschwalbe [7:34:17 PM]: Ok, at this point i will start a ticket to get this issue escalated to an Administrator.
Sigh. Its pretty bad when you have to tell the support people what to do to fix the problem.
mdocea [12:14:45 PM]: Thank you for choosing Live Chat. Please allow me a some time to review and respond to your question. If you have not already provided your Main Domain name please do so now along with any additional details you feel I should have. I take multiple chats at once. There will be a short delay between my replies.
Kirby Witmer [12:14:45 PM]: My website has been unavailable for a whole day now, and it needs to be resolved. I’ve tried numberous support chats, and trouble tickets, but it still hasn’t been resolved.
[12:15:22 PM]: domain in question is blog.kirb.com
mdocea [12:19:17 PM]: Wow there are a lot of 500 and 404 erors on top of that a lot of redirects.
[12:19:21 PM]: To find out more about what cause the error message you will have to log in to your control panel and look at your Error Log. You might want to have your web designer take a look at this. If you do not have a web designer that can help you with this task we are partnered with a great company called eDynamo that provides design/development solutions for our customers. Here is a link to one free quote from them: http://design.bluehost.com/design/get_free_quote.php
[12:19:25 PM]: However most of the time these errors are caused by incorrect coding in your .htaccess files. My suggestion would be to rename your .htaccess files temporarily in order to see if this is what is causing the problem.
Kirby Witmer [12:20:19 PM]: it happened yesterday after you guys set me up with a static ip address
[12:20:35 PM]: it has not worked since
mdocea [12:21:23 PM]: That would indicate that you had some of the configurations set up to use the old IP. Please change them to use the new IP.
[12:21:27 PM]: Did you have any other questions for me today ?
Kirby Witmer [12:22:23 PM]: you are not understanding the problem. it has nothing to do with my configuartion or anything. blog.kirb.com doesn’t even resolve to an ip address.. Try pinging it yourself.
[12:22:40 PM]: take a look at this http://www.hostmonster.com/cgi-bin/dig?domain=blog.kirb.com
[12:23:09 PM]: there is no A entry like there should be.
[12:23:32 PM]: for example take a look at another of my subdomains which is working properly http://www.hostmonster.com/cgi-bin/dig?domain=maps.kirb.com
[12:23:37 PM]: see the difference?
mdocea [12:25:01 PM]: Good point.
[12:25:06 PM]: Let me re-push that out.
[12:26:53 PM]: Here is the direct link to the blog subdirectory:
[12:27:18 PM]: as you can see because of an .htaccess redirect it’s redirecting to: http://blog.kirb.com/2007/07/23/blog-changes/ so we can’t really view it.
[12:27:40 PM]: I did fix the A record entry problem however that redirect might prevent you from viewing your subdirectory correctly as well.
[12:27:55 PM]: Please allow 1-4 hrs for that A record re-push to propagate.
[12:27:59 PM]: Did you have any other questions for me today ?
Kirby Witmer [12:28:08 PM]: ok. thanks. That’s what i needed.
It should be noted at this point that this still did not fix the problem. After almost two days of downtime I finally called Hostmonster direct and they resolved it while I was on the phone. Very frustrating.
