My own website says Website Temporarily Unavailable

When I try to view my own website from my MacBook Pro (Early 2011), I get a Website Temporarily Unavailable screen. Viewed from my phone or any other computer, it's up and running. My site is greenearthphotography.com, it's hosted on SiteGround and I use Chrome, though I get the same screen in Safari and Firefox.


I've done everything that I've found online. First I contacted SiteGround. They did what they could and suggested I contact Apple. I cleared the cache, the history, cleared the local DNS cache, rebooted the router. Nothing has helped.


Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.




MacBook Pro

Posted on Dec 5, 2018 7:58 PM

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Posted on Dec 13, 2018 7:13 AM


BobTheFisherman, I restored hosts to its original file removing the IP addresses and I can still see my website. Btw, SiteGround hosts my site and its registered with GoDaddy, whose DNS points to SiteGround. I think it's a shared hosting plan and a public DNS? Anywho, I really appreciate your help and I'm so glad this has been solved.

I suggested you restore your hosts file and you did that to solve the

issue you were having. You are now discussing another issue regarding

accessing your site by IP Address. As I said, you are on a shared

hosting plan and as such you share an IP Address with multiple sites and

that IP Address can change at any time. To get a dedicated IP Address

you will have to discuss that with your hosting company. They likely

will charge you more for a dedicated IP Address.

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26 replies

Dec 7, 2018 12:00 AM in response to dialabrain

Hi dialabrain, Thank you for your suggestion.

I don't have any antivirus software or Little Snitch installed. Do you mean try running one of these while in Safe Mode? I'd rather find a free solution before I pay for a software that may not solve the problem.

I have tried fsck -fy in Safe Mode. That didn't work.


I think there's something in my Library that needs to be removed possibly. Any ideas?

Dec 10, 2018 12:56 PM in response to ktinco22

Flush your DNS cache, and try your browser access again. As you're on OS X 10.13 or later, you can use the following Terminal.app command to flush your network caches:


sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder


This command is benign, though it'll initially slow down some subsequent network accesses, until the DNS translations are re-retrieved and re-cached.


You'll have to use an admin password for the sudo.


Why? The web server is told which web site to display based on information accessed from and routed to and then sent over from your web browser client. If your local system has cached an old DNS entry or—as was mentioned earlier—the hosts file was modified, then the wrong IP address can be targeted or—and this detail is not applicable in this case, though this is how virtual hosting is implemented on the web server—the wrong host name can be sent over from the web client to the web server.


The Time To Live (TTL) for your DNS entry from your DNS provider is set to 19332, which means that translations will usually be maintained in a local cache for roughly five hours.


Another possibility here is that the Mac is using a different DNS provider than the other devices you're testing with, and the DNS provider that the Mac is using has not updated its translation caches.


When moving a web site around, it's common to lower the TTL values leading up to a server or address or network migration, and to then increase the values after the migration. This increases the load on the DNS servers and slows access traffic, but it makes for a quicker change-over when the new translations are available. Some folks will go as far as gradually lowering the TTL. Returning the TTL to a larger value after the network transition has completed speeds frequent user access, as the DNS translations can be cached for longer.

Dec 12, 2018 6:33 AM in response to ktinco22

The only reason to be in hosts is if you want to direct, redirect or misdirect domain names to IP addresses, without using DNS.


The hosts file is a hand-maintained, unsynchronized, manual means of getting from a name to an address.


So too is DNS. Though DNS is automatically updated across all hosts either using the same local DNS server pool, or all hosts using public DNS.


You’re getting in trouble here because you’re overriding DNS, with stale translarions in your hosts dile.


You can either keep manintaining these entries as the hosts chane IP addresses and on each system that needs these translations, or you can use a local DNS server pool or—for public hosts and addresses—the public DNS system.

Dec 12, 2018 9:19 PM in response to MrHoffman

I have removed the IP addresses from hosts, and restored hosts to its original default that my Mac came with:

##

##

# Host Database

#

# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface

# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.

##

127.0.0.1 localhost

255.255.255.255 broadcasthost

::1 localhost

fe80::1%lo0 localhost


I can still see my website on my own laptop. I'll stick to using the public DNS system. Thank you for pointing this out, MrHoffman.


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My own website says Website Temporarily Unavailable

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