Help! BT blocking a website i was building!

[countrypaul]

I have tried putting the IP address in the hosts file and both Firefox and Edge can then access the website. To me this does indicate the problem is that the BT DNS servers have not yet propagated the entry for the website yet, rather than any active blocking.

Using the hosts file  to define an IP address for web development is a common technique if waiting for a domain name to be registered or wanting to test changes to a web site by over riding the DNS entry.

@sheltonjb you can easily try this for yourself by editing the hosts file as administrator and found in windows/system32/etc/hosts.

If you have someone else that wants to test it and still having problems with BT obviously they could also use this method but remember to remove this from the hosts file when finished testing, Ping should work, but nslookup probably will not as I believe that always uses a DNS server (but I might be wrong on that belief).

[Steve_M]

Sorry Shelton 🙂

I think Charlie has the full answer so I'd give him a call back.

Steve

[licquorice]

@countrypaul it also could indicate that BT are blocking the site by virtue of the web address attempting to make a DNS lookup.

If it was purely BT's DNS servers not updating you would be able to access it via Cloudfare/Google/ etc DNS servers and you can't.

It has to be BT blocking the lookup.

[countrypaul]

@licquorice   reading this thread: Solved: Potential DNS issue - BT Community suggests you could be right but raises the question does @sheltonjb have BTWeb protect turned on whether by intention or not?

[licquorice]

Its not just web protect that blocks sites. I don't have web protect enabled.

It looks like 'Charlie' has the answer. 😀

[Steve_M]

BT were blocking (responding with nxdomain) the site from our own DNS servers only:

# nslookup mattyedgell.com 81.139.56.100
nslookup: can't resolve 'mattyedgell.com'

# nslookup mattyedgell.com 8.8.8.8
Address 1: 69.163.142.58 apache2-jolly.pdx1-shared-a3-07.dreamhost.com

This is because the domain appears in a threat feed we receive.

Steve 

[sheltonjb]

No, web protect and parental controls are off.

I also don't know who Charlie is. But I will call back the guy Nasyeem, who left me a text message.

In the meantime the new router i demanded has just turned up, but it seems it's likely to not be that as now I've discovered anyone on BT accessing the site is blocked, not just me.

[licquorice]

But it is blocked by Cloudfare and Google as well unless using DNS over HTTPS

[licquorice]

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@sheltonjb wrote:

but it seems it's likely to not be that as now I've discovered anyone on BT accessing the site is blocked, not just me.

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Well yes, we knew that from the start.

[sheltonjb]

Hi Steve, what do you mean 'were' have you unblocked it? It still wont load for me..

also, why is it in a threat feed? I started making it 2 weeks ago, it's a normal wordpress site for a guy who bakes cakes, there's no threat.