PSA: If you host domains with Godaddy, and you’re a day or two late in renewing a domain, it will be “parked” – in other words, assigned a different IP address than the previous one.
This is as bad as it sounds, since your site availability and SEO rank will be hurt as various crawlers will cache the random parking pages for varying periods of time, which can last for weeks.
To remove domain parking so that Internet users can see your site again:
- login to your Godaddy account
- pay for your domain renewal if still possible
- find your domain and click on the DNS button
- look for the parking widget form in the bottom right and click on the trash can to disable parking
- next to your A record, the status “Parking” should disappear and the pencil icon should re-appear so you can edit it to the correct IP address again
- do nothing at first for 60 minutes to avoid negative DNS caching. Then try your site, monitor Google search, etc.
- for future reference, print out your DNS zone settings once it is working.
- add application monitoring to your site to detect IP and content changes.
Otherwise, contact Godaddy support ASAP.
If you need quick temporary access for intranet/personal use, just add a hosts entry pointing to the domains and sudbdomains you need and restart your browser. Your site will work perfectly, but just for you.