Advice for Wordpress users who cannot access domain or cPanel

My domain and both of my websites have been barred from me for nearly 48 hours.  Finally, Bluehost figured out the problem.

I’m going to tell you what it is in case you ever go through the same frustration–because I know what it’s like to search the Net for an answer, but nobody has one that works for you.

Sure I e-mailed the tech team right away, but it took them this long to figure it out.

So if even techs have trouble with it, you non-techy bloggers can’t be expected to know what to do.  Of all the sites I surfed, while this problem came up often, none of them had this answer.

I could not log into my websites using my home computers.  I could use my cell phone (which couldn’t do much of anything because it’s not smart), other people could see my site, I could use a proxy, but I could not use my home computer’s IP address to connect.

It didn’t matter what computer or browser I used.  Filezilla could not connect.  I could not even get into my cPanel without using a proxy.

I tried flushing my DNS and clearing my browser cache.  I did a traceroute, which showed the carrier dropping around the time it should have connected to Bluehost.  (If you ever run into this situation, you will quickly find out what these terms mean as you deal with tech support.)  None of this changed a thing.

I searched the Net and ran various diagnostics during most of my free time, while the techs tried to sort it out, to see if there was some trouble on my end.  Was it my router? some coding problem? the recent upgrade to Wordpress 3.8?

Finally, the answer: I was somehow blackholed.  I never heard of this term, but it apparently makes the host keep dropping you without a word.  The techs discovered this, fixed it, and now everything is back to normal.  😀

And when I run a traceroute, it goes all the way to the end without a problem.  🙂

So if you run up against this, suggest this to your tech support and maybe it’ll get fixed in 4 minutes instead of 48 hours.  🙂


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