Due to some snafus, my domain name has expired. Apparently, it’s going to take 24 hours to work the problems all out. I cannot access my email, URL, or anything else using my website’s name (peterpawinski.com). I can access my email and FTP using the IP addresses listed on my account control panel with my hosting company. If I try to just http:// into that IP address (the FTP and www IP addresses are the same–the email IP address is different), I get a 403 Forbidden error. Is there any way for me to direct people to my website using that IP address, or do I have to wait for my peterpawinski.com registration to point to the current (non-expired) name server?
If I am missing some key points of info, let me know. I’m not 100% clear of how this all works, but I have some idea.
Your site probably shares an IP address with lots of other sites. On a Windows server, using IIS, the admin would add a “host header” for your site’s entry in IIS which would point the server at that IP address to the proper location of the files in the file system when using your domain name. The same thing can be done with an Apache (Linux) web server but I don’t know the terminology.
Anyway, there’s no way for you to fix this because you’re on a shared IP. Your registrar won’t tell ISPs what DNS server to use and thus what IP address your domain name should be at, so no one will be able to come in to your site’s server via your domain name.
You can fix this locally by going to your C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts file and adding an entry for [your site’s IP] [your domain name] but that’ll just work for your computer (or anyone else who does it on their computer).
I was also going to suggest this as a temporary local “fix”. However, it won’t really help you with delivering mail to your own domain. Even though you can resolve the hostname of your mail server through the hosts file, you still don’t have a binding MX record to your mail server for your domain without DNS. There’s really no way around that unless you can configure your mail server with a static SMTP route for that domain. I’m guessing that you aren’t running your own mail server, though.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I assumed (well, maybe not quite with that level of technical sophistication). Looks like I’ll have to wait 24 hours for it to resolve. Hopefully, quicker.
(Long story short, auto-renew credit card expired, never received emails from my domain name registrar, everything got sorted at about noon CST, but I guess I have to wait 24 hours for it to update, or whatever it does.)