Site not accessible for some

cannot find server

[Doood]

I've got a high traffic site (I guess...30k+ daily) and noticed that in the past few months my hits have gone down quite a bit. Recently I've been receiving emails from people saying that they haven't been able to access my site for months and it just all of a sudden started working again, but there's no problem I can find and it seems to be working fine.

They're getting a "cannot find server" error. Banning IP's would give a 403 error to them so that's not it. They could find my site at google but couldn't view the cache of it. The only way they could access my site was thru an anonymous proxy.

I had one guy check his "HOSTS" file to see if someone had blocked them from my site but it was clear.

One guy said that he and his friends are all on a specific ISP in the UK and none of them could access my site. Would ISP's block sites?

I can't figure out whats going on here.

[jimshu79]

ISP's shouldn't block "sites". The only thing I'm aware of is when they block IP ranges within email to keep known spammers out and ports such as 80 and 21 to prevent people from serving files.

I would have a few other people with different ISP's check to see if they can hit your site, and if they can maybe research the possibility of changing providers.

[txbakers]

Is your site database driven? You might have exceeded the max number of connections during the day.

[Doood]

jimshu79,
I have had attacks on my server from someone sending out tens of thousand of emails to fake email addresses saying they are from me so they'll bounce back and try to overload my box, hopefully isp's wouldn't block my ip for that.

txbakers,
My site is database driven and along time ago I had problems with "too many connections" but I raised the limit and the errors for that went away along time ago and haven't seen them since.

[jimshu79]

i hope not either =)