Cleared all of my cache but still seeing old website

Question

I have a website setup on a free host called 00webhost. i was previously using a free web host called wink.s. i have a .com domain purchased from 1and1. i had wink.ws's dns servers pointed to the domain (my .com). 2 days ago i changed the .coms dns's to the 000webhosts dns's. for some reason, i still keep seeing the wink.ws one even though my domain isnt pointed to their dns servers. the thing is, everyone else who accesses the domain can see the new website host (000webhost). so i figured it was a cache problem. i cleared all my browser cache, ran ccleaner, and flushed dns in cmd prompt, restarted computer, and still cant get to the new website, it keeps taking me to the old one. im honestly out of ideas on what to do. any help would be great. thanks!

Answer 1

It may be that the DNS changes haven't yet propagated to the DNS server you are using.

You can try using a different DNS server temporarily until the changes have spread everywhere.

To do this:

• Go to Network Connections in the Control Panel
• Double click on the connection that is being used
• Click Properties
• Double click Internet Protocol Version 4
• Set the new server addresses:

The one I have set in my example is one of Google's DNS servers - 8.8.8.8.

Answer 2

Your browser may no longer be caching the old site, but there could be multiple servers between you and the wider web that are erroneously caching the site.

What IP address to you get if you use PING or NSLOOKUP on that domain name? Old or new?

If you want to cheat and avoid (rather than solve) the problem, you can add an entry to your hosts file, which will force your PC to go to the new server.

Answer 3

I've had this same problem before, and it was so annoying to see my page looking horrible. The worse part is that, the html and php contents will have the new changes applied but files like css and javascript won't have any changes, but remains at the old state.

Simple trick to permanently avoid these error is to do something like this:

instead of applying style tag like this <link href="/sample_style.css">

Use some server side trike to apply some param. For me, I'll use PHP for my sample.

example <link href="/sample_style.css?<?php echo md5(time());?>"> sample output <link href="/sample_style.css?d1ae421f76277556cf7af464a6ec5761">

It will force the browser to load the file every time as a new file.

Try it, it works perfectly for me.

Answer 4

You should understand that DNS too has caching, and that this is probably outside of your control.

Your old DNS record will have had a TTL which says for how long caching DNS servers can keep the old IP address cached. Until that much time has passed, there is no way to force the DNS server you are using to fetch the new address.

(Well, if you control the DNS server, then of course you can force it. But not the other servers in the world which you don't control.)

If you are lucky, you can find a (public?) DNS server which doesn't have the old address cached any longer, and use that. If they never queried your site's address before, there won't be any cached value; or maybe their previous cache already went past the TTL expiration.

You can use dig or nslookup to see the remaining TTL until your server will query again and fetch a new value; see Check remaining TTL for nameserver on Server Fault.