DNS questions about 3rd party host (Ionos/1&1)

  • Unknown's avatar
    hipinc · Member ·

    Ok, hopefully someone can help me unravel this plate of spaghetti. My company had a wordpress site buillt for us around 2014, to replace our old one built in 2010. Our webhost is Ionos (formerly 1&1), which has been our host since we put our original site. Over the years, they have added and removed a lot of features, but at one point we paid them for a commercial wordpress package.

    I have some issues going on with our site – porn and fake malware removal ads are popping up all over our front page. I’m trying to take care of it, but when I set filezilla up, I couldn’t find the wordpress installation with my website in it. I then noticed my dns names were listed as follows:
    ns1.wordpress.com
    ns2.wordpress.com
    ns3.wordpress.com

    Does this mean me webhost is just redirecting to wordpress.com, where it is actually hosted? No one from Ionos could give me a straight answer, becasue this apparently is a package that is grandfathered and they don’t support anymore.

    If it is hosted here, how do I go about claiming my account?

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, let’s start with the address of the site you need help with.

    (If the domain is pointing here to WordPressdotcom, which those DNS pointers would indicate, it’s unlikely you’d have porn and fake malware removal ads on your WordPressdotcom site.)

  • Unknown's avatar
    hipinc · Member ·

    Hmm. Ok.

    I wound up removing the wordpress.com DNS pointers and had it redirect back to my host account, and put up a static html placeholder page.

    But to clarify, if my dns was pointing to the wordpress.com name servers, is it accurate that my wordpress is installed @ wordpress.com?

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    In principle, if the DNS pointers were configured as you mentioned above as,
    ns1.wordpress.com
    ns2.wordpress.com
    ns3.wordpress.com
    the site likely was hosted here on WordPressdotcom, but we have no way of confirming that without you giving us the domain address involved.

    Once you do that, feel free to add the MODLOOK tag to the Tags section in the forum thread sidebar for Staff attention and assistance.

  • Unknown's avatar
    hipinc · Member ·

    oh ok. Brain hiccup. The domain is http://www.newhorizonroofs.com

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @hipinc, we actually don’t have any authoritative DNS records on our side for that domain — it’s never officially been mapped here.

    I’d try pointing back to 1and1’s name servers for now. Give that a few hours and, assuming you still have active hosting with them, you should have your site back, even if it does have malware.

    From there, I’d recommend either hardening your own installation (tips here) or consider exporting your content and moving it to our servers.

    Pros and cons of keeping your own copy: more flexibility, more responsibility for keeping everything up to date and secure. The more plugins and themes you have, the more complex maintaining it could be. Free software doesn’t have a support staff, but it does have a friendly community here.

    Pros and cons of hosting here: we take care of security and performance for you, as well as support. If you need outside themes and plugins, that does add complexity for us, too, so we would require our Business plan for that. That plan does come with over-the-top support, too. :)

    We have more info here:

    WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

    But, until do you do have a paid plan and your domain mapped with us, pointing to our name servers will just break your domain, so you’ll want to change that back for now. And as long as you’re using your own installation, the forums over at https://wordpress.org/support/forums/ are best. Hoping that helps!

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Oh! noting too: if you want to host your site here, this document explains how to migrate it to our service:

    https://transferto.wordpress.com/self-hosted-wordpress-org/

    Let us know if you need more help!

  • Unknown's avatar
    hipinc · Member ·

    I really appreciate the help. I’ve sort of have inherited the admin of our site here recently, and have felt in over my head. I will definitely consider hosting with you guys so I do have that support.

    – Tim

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Happens to a lot of people out there when companies change things up. We’re happy to help if we can.

    If you do end up having to self-host anyway though, there are lots of community resources out there to help (WordCamp, Meetup.com meetups, the forums, helpful sites, etc.) Perhaps your company will give you some time to learn through those.

    Let us know if there’s more we can do here. Cheers!

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