Domain Not Found?

#1

Hello,
I’ve very new at building websites and I’m trying to put one together for my artwork. I am hosted with DreamHost and use FireFTP. I tried installing wordpress which, after a few days of troubleshooting, finally worked. Yesterday I was miraculously allowed to finish downloading wordpress and even begin customizing my website! However, after a few minutes my website went back to the 404 error page. This happened after I “parked” my website so that people couldn’t visit it while it was under construction.

I went to the wordpress forums and explained what happened. They informed me that this was most likely an issue with DreamHost and that my website wasn’t fully hosted (how did that happen??). I logged back into my DreamHost account, took it off “parked” and reestablished my hosting options for my website http://www.prairiepariah.com/

However, instead of giving me the 404 error page it takes me to the “Domain not found” page with shaw, which was what was happening before I realized I needed to actually register and buy my domain name, which I did yesterday just before it started to work for me. I can’t get to the wp-admin.php page to log into my wordpress account because the domain does not exist.

As far as I know I purchased my domain name, it’s fully hosted, not parked and everything seems to be working ok. Wordpress is installed (I can see the files in my FTP) but I’m just at a loss with what to do right now. I would really appreciate any help! Remember, I’m new at this so please use layman’s terms when you’re explaining something.

I have been working at this for several days and haven’t been impressed with how complicated things are. I am not blaming DreamHost or wordpress since I am a novice but I wish I knew what I did wrong to lose access to my website. I have a 2 week trial and if I can’t get something out of this I’ll have to cancel and look into other avenues.

Thanks for your help!

#2

I’m currently able to see your website at http://www.prairiepariah.com/blog/

Your issue was, and one thing to be aware of is that you make changes to domain settings (such as parking it, then changing it back to full hosting) you are actually making changes to the DNS entries for the domain. After you make a DNS change it takes time for propagation (pushing the changes to 1000’s of nameservers around the world) to occur, this is not a dreamhost thing this applies everywhere it’s how the internet’s DNS system was designed, and it could take 12-24 hours or longer to occur, and the change doesn’t happen at the same time for every user on the internet.

Like all things in life, they are only complicated until you become more familiar with them. :slight_smile:

If you wish to restrict access to your website while it’s under development that can be done easily, ask for help on that. If you “park” your domain it becomes parked for everyone, including you.

#3

Thanks LakeRat. I am able to view my website but unable to access wordpress through the wp-admin.php so I can’t log in and change anything. The good people at wordpress didn’t have an answer for me sooooo… still at a loss shrug I can say at least it’s showing up but that’s a very small success.

#4

I went back to your site and added /wp-admin to the end of the URL and was correctly re-directed to a login page.

So please tell us more what you mean when you say you can’t access wp-admin? Are you unable to login? do you see any error messages? blank screen?