HostingRails.com offer some very good hosting packages at excellent rates, but unfortunately their technical and support team seems to be challenged by Reverse DNS issues.
Reverse DNS is sometimes used by email servers to verify that an email is being sent from a real address, if the reverse DNS doesn’t match up with the correct domain name / ip address, the server assumes that the email is spam and rejects it.
Reverse DNS Email Error – An Example
www.polandtrips.co.uk is hosted on the HostingRails.com server.
When sending emails from somebody@polandtrips.co.uk, some of the emails bounce and we get the following message from the Mail Deliver System: The message has not yet been delivered to some@emailaddress.com, Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM: : host smtp1a.netintelligence.com [62.128.193.98]: 451 4.1.8 Possibly forged hostname for 74.63.12.156
Why is the Email Rejected?
We aren’t exactly sure and still looking into this issue, but …
polandtrips.co.uk is hosted at 74.63.12.156,
reverse dns ptr for 74.63.12.156 = finney.hostingrails.com
but the DNS A record for finney.hostingrails.com is 74.63.12.189, possibly that’s the source of the problem, the fact that those IP addresses don’t match up.
Response from HostingRails.com
We have sent multiple support tickets regarding this issue. At the beginning of April they wrote, “The reverse dns is not something we can change… In any case we are upgrading/moving everyone to new servers in the next few weeks so this should stop being an issue when that happens.”
22.04 they wrote that a ticket had been submitted to the DNS team to further investigate the matter, but we didn’t hear back from the DNS team.
30.04 the web server was down for a few hours : / apparently they were switching servers.
19.05 they are saying that the VPS (virtual private server) is different from shared hosting and that’s why the reverse DNS isn’t working.
20.05 HostingRails.com have confirmed that they do not offer reverse DNS services on the VPS. However, they have offered us the prospect that it may be working soon, another migration to new VPS software apparently next week! Fingers crossed, watch this space!
Cool DNS Tools
MX and DNS Lookup Tools at www.mxtoolbox.com
Excellent DNS tools and article on how Reverse DNS works available at www.dnsstuff.com
HostingRails.com Ownership Change?
Seems there are further reports of difficulties with HostingRails.com services. See this report,
http://osdir.com/ml/RubyonRailsTalk/2010-05/msg00531.html