General question about DNS and name resolution

[Jailer]

I have a very small (44 members) private forum that I host for a friend from my home. The site has been on line for a little over a year and we've been using a free subdomain from freedns.afraid.org. About 2 months ago we decided to purchase a domain and I got everything set up through namecheap including purchasing an SSL cert from Comodo. It's been runnning fine but in the last month there have been 2 outages where the domain name won't resolve. First time was for 3 days, the second time about a week ago lasted just 1 day. The REALLY odd part is only some members couldn't connect and that included me. A small handful of others had no problem during the outage. I connect locally so I didn't notice the outage until it was brought to my attention. When I tried the url it wouldn't resolve the domain name. I did do a dns check at mxtoolbox.com and it just said that the domain name couldn't be resolved.

I never had any name resolution problems until purchasing the domain name from namecheap. I of course contacted namecheap and they say nope, no problem on our end it's your problem. Oddly enough about 5 minutes after chatting with them the site came back up for me and everyone else.

If this happens again is there something I can do to check on my end to make sure that it's not a problem with my server? I'm positive it's not, I just don't know how to prove it's not. If it is a problem with namecheaps nameservers is there a way I can check that as well?

[LiroyvH]

If multiple online services state the nameservers don't resolve the domain, then its safe to say there's indeed something wrong with the nameservers in question. That some can and some cannot reach it may have something to do with the network paths to the nameservers. (Same IPs, but different locations).

So if you're using namecheaps nameservers, then something does appear to be wrong with it.
Based on what you said here anyway, hard to judge without seeing it for myself.

[青山 素子]

Based on what you said, it does sound like a DNS error. Where it is, your post is too vague to hazard a guess. Perhaps if you provide the domain, someone can look for you.

[Jailer]

mlcnfriends.com is the domain. It's currently working fine so no issues right now.

I'll have to post back when the issue pops up again, if it does. I've got one of the free site monitoring services checking once per hour and it will send me an email alert if the site is down. Like I said I connect locally so I don't notice the problem right away unless someone points it out to me or I navigate to the site via the url and it won't come up.