After an IP Change
I had a strange problem last month that lasted the entire time I was out of town and trying to access my website. I have used a new hosting service, and they promote the use of cloudflare as a CDN, which I had been using previously anyway. (Although it was hooked up differently when used from a “partner site”). I kept getting the hosts 404 and “site down” pages no matter what I did. Following the support tech’s advice (over and over) to empty the browser and computer caches… I still had the redirects to their 404 pages, etc. It took about a week and a half to finally get the instructions to access a place inside my computer where I had to manually delete the old IP which caused the redirects. (Through the terminal utility in my Mac) . Even giving the terminal commands to “flushcache” did not work. Here is what finally solved the problem:“1) Open the Terminal. It should be located at /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app 2) Enter the following command: sudo nano /private/etc/hosts 3) This command is using nano, the built-in command line editor to open the Hosts file. You will be asked for your password because root privileges are needed to edit the Hosts. 4) You will now see the contents of the Hosts file. It has one entry per line, with the hostname followed by the IP address. Hashed lines (#) are comment lines and are ignored by the system. Use the arrow keys to move the cursor. when the file is opened, navigate (using the arrow keys of your keyboard) to the IP address in question, then delete the two lines and save the file by pressing Control + O (which is the letter o not the digit 0) then exit by pressing Ctrl + X.”Although I had to additionally look up some instructions which had me end with “y”. Eventually I succeeded to exit the terminal screen and save the modifications. For someone who has no idea why the cache won’t flush and yet the host is serving the pages… it was a long drawn out, frustrating experience. There are other instructions for those who use a Windows PC computer.
This problem is caused by “There is a hosts file entry which instructs your OS to overwrite the DNS records for the domain name”The display inside the terminal looked and worked like the “pico display” on this page, which tells how to navigate around in it through commands. Pico Text Editor
