Banks IP address no longer responding

My browser home page is set to a simple html file which contains links to my favourite sites.

My internet banking link was set to the banks IP address rather than the domain address.

Recently, clicking the link takes me to a page stating

"This domain has been registered, but is not currently being used for any web services."

I originally obtained the IP address by pinging the banks domain address. Pinging the banks address still gives me the same IP address but it doesn't work now.

Does anyone know what has happened to change things?

Thanks.​

 

Can you still get to the bank by typing in the address manually? So, your using the IP address rather than the www? I could try either to see if it works here.

What browser are you using and has it been updated lately since trying the link?

 

Hi innerpeace

Thanks for replying. I can get to the bank using www. The behaviour occurs using firefox or IE.

I am guessing it's a change the bank has made.

Originally I obtained the banks IP by pinging the banks domain address and used this on my home page link. Although pinging now gets the same IP it doesn't work anymore.

If I ping www.google.co.uk, I get reply from 208.69.34.230. If I type that IP into the browser, I'll get to the Google page. (Just tried it and something unexpected, to me, happened).

The replying IP gets me to Google English. Typing google.co.uk gets me to Google UK.

I guess that difference between which Google site I just got to, is the real phenomenon I am trying to understand.

 

I would say that is the problem but I will let someone more qualified answer.

As far as the Google thing goes. I pinged www.google.co.uk and the address I got is http://209.85.165.103/ and when I enter it into FF, I get Google English too. I'm in the US. I also get slightly different addresses every time I ping that address. I guess it's all part of the google block of IPs. Your browser or cookies might have something to do with the domain name working correctly. I will also let someone answer that is more qualified.

I would say that big sites have more than one IP for many reasons. They can make some available in case of maintenance and or ddos attacks. My ISP was under a ddos just today and was able to recover due to reasons that are waaay above my understanding.

 

My bank, which is one of the (possibly the?) largest in Canada, uses maybe 20 or 30 different servers to handle internet log-in, because of the heavy traffic flow. So it would be quite usual to get a different IP each time, which is why I use their URL instead.

And on top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if the servers each had dynamic IP's (if a DNS can handle that, although since routing is from their front page, it shouldn't be much of a problem) to increase security.

 

Thanks for the responses. Perhaps you are right. My bank has changed it's IP address. I notice my bank no longer replys to a ping so I can't find the IP address the way I used to.

Still not sure about the google thing though. If I ping google.co.uk, presumably my DNS tells me the IP address it has for google.co.uk is 208.69.34.230.

So how can typing the IP address or the domain address get me to different sites? If I type google.co.uk into my browser, surely my DNS will tell me to go to 208.69.34.230 so I should get to the same site as if I typed 208.69.34.230 into my browser. But I don't.

 

Thank you very much for that excellent answer.

I really like it when I learn something new.