Some website will not open while some are!!

Thank you owlwings for your response. And Thank you 3honor. I put off commenting on the response to see if I can understand. I didn't want to sound stupid and well, I was afraid that every one would laugh at me. owlwings, in plain English please...........

When you type an address into the address bar of a browser, you type something like "www.mylot.com", which means a lot more to us simple humans than "69.20.112.85". This number, however, is the way computers find each other. It's something like the difference between a street address and a zip or postal code. As a result, your browser needs to query a database which has a list of all Domain Names and their equivalent IP numbers. This database is held on dedicated computers which are called Domain Name System servers. There are many, many copies of this data held all over the world and each time a change is made to one copy (perhaps because someone opens a new website or changes the server they are using for an existing one), these changes are 'propagated' to all the other ones so that everything SHOULD be up to date all over the world. Sometimes, however, the DNS which you are connected to by your provider goes wrong, which is what I guess has happened to Zralte's connection in Delhi. Normally, large Internet providers have two or more machines dedicated to this important task so if one machine fails, your webpages might take fractionally longer to appear but most people wouldn't notice. When the data is seriously messed up on all the machines you are connected to, your computer will not be able to communicate with some or all of the sites you want to connect to because it can't find the "zip-code" for the names you type in. I hope that's plain enough English for you, 3honor and zralte! What OpenDNS does is to offer an alternative to your local DNS which is not only often faster but can also warn you when it might be dangerous to connect to a site, something that most ISP's servers don't do. You can read what Wikipedia says about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS and the site itself is here: http://www.opendns.com/solutions/household/ They charge commercial concerns but it's free to use for schools and households.

Thank you very much owlwings. Much clearer now. I think I will try that OpenDNS. As you probably guessed, the whole thing went down and I could not even check your responses. It came back up a few minutes ago. Literally 1 minute ago. 3honor, you are not alone. And yet, there are still some people who thinks I know a lot more than they do. And I thought a lot about computers and internet. In a situation like this, it reminded me that I know squat. This is why I love myLot. I am learning new things everyday.

Whew!!! What did I do before internet was there? It's off for a few hours and I feel like I've lost my right arm. It was like I have explained: some sites open and some don't...for about 2 hours and then the thing went completely down for 3 or 4 hours. When it was like the previous one, I could at least browse on myLot and respond to a discussion. When that went down too.....well, you can just imagine.....All's well again now. By the way, I spent the time to do some grocery shopping, so at least that's out of the way. I usually do grocery shopping on Saturday. Hopefully I will have a bit of free time this Saturday.