Main domain not working without vpn but subdomain does

ssl
dns
wordpress
#1

Greetings,

I’ve had a problem for the last 2 days & have been pulling my hair out trying to figure it out. I have a multisite wordpress hosted by godaddy. The subdomain fa.drrashidganji.com works fine in all browsers without a vpn. However, the naked domain drrashidganji.com, does not. If I turn on my vpn, all variations (www, http) always work fine. For the recored I am in Iran. Which led me to try whitelisting the site to the whole country or my IP in firewall, but that didn’t work. This tip was from a guy on fiverr who also said he couldn’t figure it out and suggested I contact cloudflare.

I emailed cloudflare and was told to install mod_cloudflare installed, (the plugin to the best of my knowledge) installed and configured. They also told me to set it to Full Strict mode (I have played with the settings and run them all). They did give some insights as to what they said was going on. Stated in quotes below.

“Flexible SSL Users
Flexible mode works by not encrypting traffic to and from your origin and Cloudflare. Because your origin is forcing https and the request is then redirected to Cloudflare where Cloudflare again tries to send the same http request, an infinite loop is occurring. I was able to confirm your site is indeed enforcing a HTTPS redirect.”

I disabled HTTPS redirect, I tried running Strict, (purging cache each time I changed a setting ) but to no avail. Again, this problem seems to only exist in Iran because gtmetrix, google insights can access the site (although google insights doesn’t give me a mobile score). Also, the site seems to work when using Chrome after I clear all the data and even restart my computer without a vpn. The other browsers time out or don’t work, eg safari, firefox.

I’ve searched google and your forum, but cant seem to find a similar problem. Before I email again, I wanted to get the opinion of others of various settings I could try or something I am missing.

Any help would be so much appreciated.

Regards

#2

I’m in Los Angeles and not using a VPN and http://drrashidganji.com/ works fine for me.

It sounds like if you try a non-VPN connection in Iran it does not work. But a VPN connection does. I find it interesting that the Farsi website works, but the English one does not.

With VPN off, can you try a traceroute to drrashidganji.com? And then a traceroute to fa.drrashidganji.com? Then post screenshots of them here.

#3

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en-traceroute.png1349×756 99.5 KB
fa-traceroute
fa-traceroute.png1387×829 116 KB

Perhaps as you can image it is a bit frustrating on my end. Appreciate you taking a look at this.

#4

Can you show a screenshot of what happens when you try to browse to drrashidganji.com? My suspicion is there’s a web blocker at your ISP that’s not letting this through.

Out of curiosity, where is your VPN’s endpoint? Out of country?

#5

Ive asked local coworkers to test and they have the exact same situation. The vpn is of a commercial type, multiple locations, all of which work.

There really is nothing to see via screenshot, nothing happens. On an iPhone safari states that “the server has stopped responding”

Google Chrome works every time.

Keep in mind the site worked fine for a year until i decided to add a CDN and ssl from cloudflare.

#6

To my dismay, most CDN’s are blocked. Not in the way that other sites deemed inappropriate by the government, it just doesn’t work properly. I checked with this site:

Weird how the subdomains work though, I assume since cdn’s don’t affect wildcards. Hope this helps other newbie Iranians working in web development. In retrospect, if I knew how to read Farsi I would’ve been able to figure this out sooner.

closed #7

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