DNS oversight equals out of date website
I received two gratis tickets to the Better Homes 2007 exhibition, and buoyed by the fact that Eddie Hobbs might be there, I tapped in the URL for some more info, this is what I got:
Better Homes 2006 – betterhomes.ie
I thought this was a little silly, to have lots of promo for the event, but an out of date website, I checked the flyer again, and noted it was www.betterhomes.ie , but that shouldn’t make a difference, should it ? It did.
Better Homes 2007 – www.betterhomes.ie
Thats the correct site, but I’m still surprised there are two different locations for the same site, this can easily be fixed with a simple DNS update.
Correct DNS Settings
Name TTL Class Type Data
betterhomes.ie 86400 IN A 82.195.155.153
*.betterhomes.ie 86400 IN A 82.195.155.153
This would direct everything (*) .betterhomes.ie to the correct location.
After a little more digging, it appears the two websites are sitting with different hosting providers.
betterhomes.ie DNS
www.betterhomes.ie DNS
What this looks like is the domain is registered through H365, but the site has moved to Adnet.ie and someone has forgot to update all the DNS settings.
If you go to the trouble of organising an event, and promoting it, make sure the website is accessible to all users, especially those like me who rarely bother prefixing domains with WWW DOT.
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Hi Barry
I came across your comments regarding the Betterhomes website whilst doing a search, and thank you firstly for bringing the problem with my website to my attention. I am not an expert when it comes to the internet and pay professionals to do same for me, however it seems to be a bit of a minefield trying to find the right person for the job. Anyway I am currently in the market for a talented web designer for two major projects and was wondering if you knew of anybody that maybe interested ?
Hi Conor,
If you’d like to drop me a quick email with some details. I’d be happy to give you some advice.
barryhand(at) gmail(dot) com
Unfortunately a LOT of sites suffer from this problem and worse. In some cases the ISPs don’t even create A records for domain.tld, so people can’t reach the site without the “www” which is a bit mad. I know there is an old RFC that some of them use as an excuse, but it still costs people.
Another issue is shadow dns zones, which are leftover when domains are moved from one provider to another.
It makes it all quite messy
Michele