Is my site no longer pointed to my host?

Since integrating with Ezoic via Ezoic Cloud Integration, you might have noticed that your DNS records online - those you find using a third party tool to tell you what your DNS records are - appear to change.

And while it’s relatively rare for hosts to be confused about this, you may also be informed by your host that your website “no longer points to their servers” and that they are no longer your host. However, the change in DNS does not mean that they are no longer your host.

What’s going on?

Understandably, you may feel alarmed if you suddenly seem to find that your web host has changed without your knowledge - but the change in your DNS records is in fact totally normal. Under Ezoic Cloud Integration, Ezoic works as a reverse proxy - meaning that your publicly accessible DNS records point to Ezoic (or CloudFlare) servers, but that Ezoic in turn pulls your site directly from your host. Lots of other web services operate the same way, such as Fast.ly and CloudFlare.

Under your new setup, your site is still hosted at the same place it was before, but Ezoic now sits in the middle of the interaction between your visitors and your host. Ezoic needs to do this in order to apply features to your site - speeding up your website, showing ads, providing analytics, helping with SEO, giving you free SSL, and so on.

Because Ezoic uses many data centres around the world, we can also cache copies of your site's resources closer to where each individual visitor is located. This caching function also requires the DNS records to point to Ezoic (or CloudFlare), and not directly to your host.

This is also why it’s very important to keep your Ezoic DNS settings up to date, in the event that your host notifies you of any changes. Your Ezoic DNS settings control, amongst other things, the server IP address that your site will ultimately be pulled from. Don’t worry, it’s simple to make changes and you should only need to do so if notified by your host.

So What Should I Tell My Host?

If your host has told you that they no longer host your site, all you need to do is inform them that you’re using a reverse proxy (Ezoic) and that ultimately the site is being taken from the correct server at the same host as before. If you like, you can also screenshot your Ezoic DNS settings to show the IP address the site is ultimately being drawn from, as below.

They will then be able to be reassured that the site is being pulled from their servers.

You can also send them a link to this article for a fuller explanation. Because reverse proxies are common, they should readily understand the situation and then be able to help you resolve the issue you contacted them about.