The mystery of the double homepage

January 23, 2006 7:35 AM

Why would users be seeing two different home pages?

We switched servers (to Dreamhost) on Thursday evening and now some people are seeing the "live" site, while some are seeing a site that is not showing up on Dreamhost but has been updated in house since the transfer, what gives?

If it helps, other sites within the site are showing up correctly and pinging correctly, whereas when you ping our site proper it says it can't find the site. How can I find the IP of the wrong front page without using ping? Please help solve this mystery!

posted by stormygrey to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

DNS takes a while to propagate. Some ISPs cache stuff pretty long.
posted by cellphone at 7:53 AM on January 23, 2006

Second cellphone's comment-- it's probably a DNS propagation issue. Is the site that's showing up on the machine which was previously the official server?
posted by justkevin at 7:56 AM on January 23, 2006

Response by poster: justkevin, yes, one of the sites, the one I see, is the one which was on the previous server, but has been updated both before and after the transfer, and neither of these updates shows up on the page that the other half sees. The page they see is propbably a month old home page.
posted by stormygrey at 8:16 AM on January 23, 2006

maybe (a hunch), you have different pages for http://yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com?
posted by Izzmeister at 8:51 AM on January 23, 2006

Response by poster: ok, we are on the right track now. The people who see the page hosted on the new server can see it on http://mypage.org, the people who see the other page get an error page on http://mypage.org but see www.mypage.org correctly.
posted by stormygrey at 9:22 AM on January 23, 2006

You can probably set up a permanent redirect so that www.mypage.org is bounced to mypage.org automatically to avoid this in the future. I did this on an Apache server to kill the needless www on my departmental website. Permanent redirect also means that web spiders will toss the old address and cache the new one instead for search engines.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:04 AM on January 23, 2006

so why not "mark as best answer"? :)
posted by Izzmeister at 11:29 AM on January 23, 2006

Check to see if you have multiple default or index pages in the base directory. ie index.htm vs index.html or index.php

Technically shouldn't make a difference, but better safe than sorry.
posted by dantodd at 3:22 AM on January 24, 2006

I have seen that happen with index.htm vs. html. The default is html, but if you link (or type) htm, you'd get a different page if they don't match.
posted by unrepentanthippie at 5:43 AM on January 24, 2006