Forum Moderators: phranque
I've had a problem recently with my site going offline. Generally my web host says it's a problem with my ISP but I'm not sure that's the case. When I do a tracert it times out at HOP 7. My ISP is showing at HOP 5. My web host does have a server located in this city (HOP 7) but they say my site is actually on a server in a different city. The outage usually occurs after I upload changes to my site using FrontPage. My web host can get to my site and I can get to it using an outside web proxy located in another state. Once I was able to get my site to load properly I decided to do a tracert to see what a "normal" one would look like. I found that the results were exactly the same - the tracert times out at HOP 7. With my limited knowledge I'm not able to figure out what's going on. Does anyone know of problems with Frontpage that could cause this? (My web host does have the most current FrontPage extensions installed.) Does this sound like a problem with my ISP?
One other point is that sometimes my site will come up without my background. It seems like my CSS is being ignored! Also, even though I use FrontPage to edit and publish my site, I have manually coded everything instead of using the defaults that FrontPage uses. My site validates HTML 4.01 Transitional.
Thanks for any ideas!
Is this a very new site?
My site has been online since September, 2002. Today I can get to the site but none of my background graphics appear. They "load" but it takes an extremely long time. Normally my sites loads instantly. I tried three different machines from my location and all have the same problem. I'll probably let it go awhile and see if things improve later in the day. Usually when I report it to my web host the problem "corrects itself" so part of me thinks it is their servers and they just don't want to acknowlege it. Also, my host want me to contact my ISP and show them my tracert. Since the problem is past my ISP I think my web host should contact their backbone/ISP to trace it from their end. Thanks for responding.
I have found that ftp'ing in active rather than passive mode, (active communicates a datastream back to your ftp client) can sometimes return malformed tcp packets. Desktop firewalls can interpret these malformed packets as a possible intrusion attempt and block traffic to/from the offending IP address.
HTH
The problem corrected itself (after reporting it to my host) but they again said they did nothing on their end. I decided to try a different utility via terminal services for the tracert and was able to reach my site successfully. Then I did tracert through DOS and had the same timeout at HOP 7. So it appears to not be a connection problem or a problem with the FrontPage Extensions. I'd still like to find out what causes this to happen. I'll have to monitor the frequency and keep good records.
Thanks again.
I've been experiencing a similar situation in that a couple of sites that I have hosted with a particular host just seem to either be extremely slow loading, or just plain not there every so often. I normally only notice it when I'm doing maintenance on the sites, as otherwise I don't normally check up on them that much. Tracerts have been unreliable to date so it's been hard to nail down information on where the problem lies. Like you, the hops get terminated in the same place regardless if my site is accessible or not.
As with everything with this host they claim it's not their fault/problem and that it's a problem at my end - but numerous e-mails, phone calls and much stress later they are at least accepting the problem is nearer their end than mine.
One thing that helped me corner them was that when my site goes down, so do many other websites that I've been able to identify as hosted by this company. The problem is, is that they only go down for traffic routed from certain parts of the globe (I'm on the other side of the planet from the host, but apparently my site works ok locally for them), so their clients are probably not aware of access problem for their international visitors. Stating that I would send an e-mail to their other customers to see if they were experiencing unusual drops in visitors seemed to spur the host into some action for some reason.
If your problem persists see if you can determine if it's happening to other sites as well.
Good luck,
2odd...
