Member Avatar for brittany.kellim

I recently bought a domain and hosting through iPage, and iPage helpers available via phone and chat tell me that everything is well on their end when they try to access my wp-admin page to log in and edit my site, but when I try entering in mydomain.com/wp-admin, I keep getting the error (on both Firefox and Internet Explorer), "Server Not Found." I have absolutely no problems loading other websites -- it's only this one. I even tried accessing the page on my husband's computer. I have been trying to figure this problem out with iPage ALL day to no avail. They had me delete my cookies, restart my computer, they sent my case to someone more experienced to no avail. I tried overwriting the downloaded wordpress files on iPage by downloading it again, to no avail. I have checked my firewall settings and proxy settings. What else should I try? I am so confused.

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Quick expert note: because reports that iPage staff can load the wp-admin page while the site shows "Server not found" from multiple machines/browsers, this points to a DNS or network-resolution problem rather than a WordPress file issue. and are correct to focus on connectivity and DNS checks; the following checklist shows practical next steps and what to collect before escalating to iPage.

Basic local checks and diagnostics:

ipconfig /flushdns
notepad C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
tracert your-domain.com

Also try opening the site by numeric IP in a browser (for example http://<server-ip>/wp-admin) to see whether the server responds when bypassing DNS. If the IP loads but the hostname does not, DNS is the clear culprit; if the IP fails, it may be a server-side firewall or hosting problem.

Further tests and fixes: temporarily switch the machine/router DNS to public resolvers (8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1) to rule out ISP DNS caching. Test the site from a different network (smartphone on cellular data) to check whether the issue is limited to one ISP. Verify registrar settings: correct nameservers and an A record pointing to the iPage server IP. Remember DNS changes can take time to propagate (often up to 24–48 hours depending on TTLs).

What to give iPage when asking for help: the tracert output, the hosts-file contents, results from the alternate DNS test and the mobile-network test, and whether accessing by IP succeeded. Ask them to confirm the server IP, run remote DNS lookups, and check for any IP-level blocks or account/WHOIS issues that could prevent name resolution.

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Member Avatar for Rik_

Open up a dos box by typing cmd in your start menu search box and press enter. In the dos box, type ping www.(the site you cannot access) and press enter. Let me know the result.
As an example, ping www.google.com, the space between ping and www must be there.

Edited by Rik_
Member Avatar for rubberman

You can also use nslookup to see if your host name is recognized by DNS. Open up a cmd.exe window and enter the command "nslookup www.mydomain.com", using your host.domainname. If it can't find your domain, you will get an error something like this:

*** some.dns.server can't find www.mydomain.com: Non-existent domain

This is better than using ping since some hosting services will block pings to their networks to avoid a number of types of denial-of-service attacks.

Edited by rubberman
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