Able to visit site from domain name but not IP address

Question

We have our website running with IIS7, a very strange thing happened just recently.

I'm able to visit the site without issue with the domain name (www._.com e.g. ), but if I actually enter the IP address (64.xx.xxx.xxx), it does not work and gave me a 404 resource not found error.

So I went to IIS on the prod server, it's even more strange that I could not even go to the site with the domain name either. So Neither the domain name nor IP address would work on the actual server, but on an external computer the domain name would work.

I then tried the "Browse Website Links" on IIS and it does seem to direct to the right file path however it keeps telling me the connect was reset and still failed to display the site.

Any thoughts on what could lead to this?

Thanks!

Solution

This sounds like you potentially have issues with both your DNS and bindings.

For the first issue, not being able to hit the site by IP, this is likely because you've only bound the site to a host name, you don't have a default binding for the IP address. You'll need to add an additional binding for the site that includes the IP address but not a host name, and stop any other websites that have conflicting bindings (if they exist and are running) and you should then be able to hit the website by IP.

Not being able to hit the site by domain name from the web server most likely means that it can't resolve the DNS for that domain name. Try an nslookup from the command line to see if this is indeed the case.