Network Unreachable - Robots.txt Unreachable

So I just started with a new company running their internet marketing department. It was like an SEOers dream/nightmare (I get 3% of increase in online sales so maybe dream). The site had not been crawled or cashed in over two months. There were a few pages left, but mostly they were just relying on PayPer click. The sad thing was it took me two weeks to solve the problem.

To try and solve the problem I turned to Google's Webmaster Tools. I tried submitting a sitemap and found that they could not pick it up, despite the fact that it was obviously there and there was nothing wrong with the syntax. Futher research into the issue suggested that it could be a DNS error. After two weeks of wrapping my mind around there overly complex setup I finally switched IPs (but not servers) and presto! the sitemap file was readable the next morning.

In my reasearch I noticed there were others having this problem and most of the suggestions were **** like check to see if the file was there or make sure you're xml is encoded properly, blah blah blah, and not really talking the problem seriously, so I wanted to share to those of you who might be having this problem IT IS A DNS ERROR. Bitch to tech support. Get a new IP. Change DNS servers if you have to, but it is a DNS error.

Thats all. Anyone else see this problem?

Incorrect server setup and bad DNS data can happen.

But since most websites are on professionally managed hosting severs that is a rare a problem.

Actually I am a little confused ... your site was visible on the Internet and visitors could view your web pages ... but robots could not access the files?

Something is amiss here ...

Yeah, visible to everyone, but Google and Yahoo were both having problems. And we host with a big hosting company (the plannet). It was hard to find anyone who had had the same problem, but its an issue that has seemed to crop up only within the past few months. Strange right?

DNS converts domain name to IP address and obviously it was doing that or the site would not be accessible.

Where I am having a problem is that content files were visible, but *.txt and *.xml could not be read.

To be honest it sounds more like a server configuration error ... file permissions or htaccess. However, changing the IP address would not solve these problems.

Just be glad someone fixed the issue and you can move on.