In case anyone is curious as to what is going on.
This site uses a service called IronDNS (this is public information before any moderator thinks I'm sharing some sort of secret or confidential information - the terminal commands to determine this are listed at the bottom of the post to prove that fact)
IronDNS is a distributed DNS service - that is, they have servers scattered across the world, and which server is responsible for answering you depends on where you physically are in the world. SOME of those servers are/were having problems, so some users in some parts of the world cannot turn the DNS name
www.gayheaven.org into the IP address of the actual GH server. Browsers need to know the IP to connect to a website, so when the DNS lookup fails, your browser has no choice but to give up and show an error message.
What adds to this is that DNS servers cache the answers they receive - and they cache failure as well as success, so even after the servers are fixed, people may still not be able to see the site for some time because their DNS server had cached the failure.
So, why do VPNs work? A VPN effectively teleports your internet connection to a different physical location on planet earth, so, if you VPN to a part of the world where the IronDNS server for that region is not experiencing an outage, then you can get to the site.
So, in case anyone was wondering why the site has been unavailable to them, now you know
B.
P.s.
The commands to determine who is the DNS provider for GH (or any other website)
Step 1: find the DNS servers for the domain:
Code:
dig +short gayheaven.org NS
This will give you the names of GH's two DNS servers:
Code:
ns1.gayheaven.org.
ns2.gayheaven.org.
Step 2: convert the name of one of the DNS servers to an IP address
Code:
dig +short ns1.gayheaven.org
This will give you: 195.253.65.2
Step 3: figure out who owns that IP
This produces a LOT of output, but in there you'll see details for the owner of all IP addresses between 195.253.65.0 and 195.253.65.255:
Code:
inetnum: 195.253.65.0 - 195.253.65.255
netname: ironDNS-NET2