photo credit: striatic

I’ve been at it all day with Charter Cable and Hostgator. I can’t figure out who to blame. This problem is so strange and it hits you when you least expect it. Here are the symptoms.

• You have a shared web site host like Hostgator.
• You have Charter Cable as your ISP.
• You have a web site up for months with no problems.
• You don’t make any changes for months.
• All of a sudden the web site and email go offline one day.
• You check the site through a proxy service like Anonymouse.org. and it works just fine from some place like Germany.
• You check the site with the ip address that your host provides. The site comes up fine.
• You call the idiots at tech support and both Charter and Hostgator and get nowhere. They treat you like you have a brain disorder.

I spent most of the day with sleepy heads at tech support that just read from a monitor. I would have to say, “Yes I’ve unplugged my modem. Yes, I’ve taken my router out of the loop.” When you’ve been in a tech field for a couple of years, that stuff becomes old hat.

After I realized tech support wouldn’t help me, I only had one chance left. I had to pound Google until I could get some kind of answer to my symptoms. Luckily after about three dozen searches, I finally found this post at DSL reports talking about how flaky Charter Cable’s DNS servers are. I checked wikipedia for some refreshment on the DNS root zone.  I was reminded that there are 13 root servers that act as parents to the rest of the lower DNS servers out there.

Charter must get updates from these servers every so often. My speculation is that the dns entry for my host’s name server somehow keeps getting lost by Charter. I know the site is up. I know people with other ISP’s can reach the site. I know I can access sites like CNN with my Charter account. What I can’t do is reach my site the way I’m supposed to by typing in something like www.mySite.com.

The article at DSL reports suggests that you enter 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3 in addition to the crappy DNS servers that Charter provides you with. You can go into your Network preferences for most systems and get to the area for TCP/IP.

For Windows, it’s somewhere in “Network Connections” and then “TCP/IP“. Sorry, I wish I could tell you more.

For my Mac, it was “System Preferences“, “Network“, “Airport” (you may be on Ethernet). Then hit the “Advanced” button and then the “DNS” tab.

What are 4.2.2.2 / 4.2.2.3? Research shows that it’s some DNS server owned by Verizon that most people consider a good free alternative. Alas!  You don’t have to use Charter’s incomplete DNS. You can use another DNS server.  The minute I added those addresses, everything worked great.

Now here’s the problem.

I put a band-aid on my problem, but what about all the other people who are using Charter Cable to view my site?  I asked around and found ‘DNS Made Easy’ which is a service people hosting several web sites should check into. In normal situations, you buy a domain name from somebody like GoDaddy and point it towards your host like HostGator. DNSME plays the part of a robust middle man. You go to the registrar where you bought the name and point it towards DNSME. Then DNSME will do the job of translating the domain name to your host’s ip address.

It’s more work up front, but the piece of mind is the pay off. DNS Made Easy is much more robust than the name servers at Hostgator. I was given 5 different name server addresses instead of the two Hostgator gave me. The Made Easy system has a good deal more redundancy than Hostgator’s local DNS system.

Another Gem, OpenDNS.com

While on my quest, I was told about another great service called OpenDNS.com. This service is more geared towards your home or business. Instead of using Charter’s DNS, you add the Open DNS server addresses to your computer or router. By doing that, you send all your traffic through their system. They can filter out porn, gambling sites, phishing, redirects and other junk from the armpit of the internet. There are other great features like “shortcuts” that let you do things like type “GOO” for “http://www.google.com/ig”. The shortcuts work for all the computers in your house. The system can also give you statistics on the traffic you bring into your home network.

The lesson learned is that not every ISP or web host is going to have rock solid DNS service. If you own some web sites and want to keep your site up as much as possible, I would recommend using something like DNS Made Easy. If you are a business or home owner who wants to filter incoming traffic, then OpenDNS is a great tool to hook up.