Issues with customers accessing my website

[SFD]

I have an ecommerce website. Lately a couple of people have told me they have had trouble accessing it - in the last fortnight or so.

Each time when these people have had trouble I have checked & I have been able to access it and have also been able to see that there are other users live on the site through the backend.

I have checked through downforeveryoneorjustme.com, checked myself using 2 different broadband connections and also used browsershots which all worked fine.

I still think there is a problem though.

How do I check for problems?

Can anybody help me?

Please PM me for the website address if you can help or post any suggestions up here.

Cheers

[James1980]

Can you explain what they mean by "had trouble accessing it" - did their browser report an error message? Did their browser load your website, but very very slowly?

Maybe your website be blocked by overly zealous censorship software?



James

[SFD]

The ones I know about has been a google screen saying 'opps, this link appears to be broken!' even though the website has been typed directly into the address bar.

[iboxsecurity]

whats the address - PM me the URL if you prefer.

[SFD]

Cheers, PM sent

[PETTE]

Or you can post the url here.

[SFD]

Or you can post the url here.

I'd prefer not to post it up - will PM it to anyone willing to help. :)

[JackieC]

PM me and I will try.

[Fenland]

The ones I know about has been a google screen saying 'opps, this link appears to be broken!' even though the website has been typed directly into the address bar.

I am having this exact problem fairly consistently when accessing quite a few regular sites.

I have heard it mentioned that there is a slight issue with a version of FireFox (my browser of choice) that might be causing this...

[CreationCoast]

Sometimes the connection can be broken somewhere on the path between the visitor and the server. Whenever we receive a hosting issue ticket from a client that can't see their site, but we can, we ask them check this and email us the results:

1. Open the start menu
2. Vista - type cmd in the search | xp - type cmd in Run | both - open Command Prompt from Programs > Accessories
3. You should have a black window open, that looks like a computer startup screen from 10+ years ago!
4. Type this: tracert domain.com
(changing domain.com to the respective domain being investigated)

This will then trace the path from that PC to the site, listing any issues on the way, such as a broken stage.

For multiple Trace Route testing, you can try from here:

http://www.tracert.com/

Additionally, this could happen if your server IP changes for any reason. Every PC stores a DNS cache of where it first found a site. In order to resolve this for a visitor, ask them to repeat the process as above to open Command Prompt, and have them instead type:

ipconfig /flushdns

This will will delete their resolver cache, cause their system to recheck getting the DNS address for websites it visits.

[Tom McClelland]

This is odd. I've just tried tracert to 12pay.co.uk, because I've been getting odd problems accessing it with firefox.

The route dies inside my ISP's chain of servers.

Yet I can access the site fine at the moment. But intermittently requests to the site from my browser hang indefinitely.

Next time it happens I'm going to see if IE and/or Chrome have any problems.

[CreationCoast]

Tom, yeah I see lots of "Request Timeouts" at the end of the trace. Your nameservers are set to:

ns.mainnameserver.com
ns2.mainnameserver.com

The IP your trace is trying to resolve to is 78.129.213.133 - if I do an RDNS check on this, it doesn't have RDNS set up, which is an issue. However, if I make a lookup to the nameservers, I instead get the IPs:

ns.mainnameserver.com 79.170.40.2
ns2.mainnameserver.com 79.170.43.3

I think you have something screwy in your dns set up causing some issue here. If you have good hosting support they should be able to resolve this. I see who your host is, though it could be perhaps by one of their resellers.

Hopefully they crack it for you, but if you're not satisfied I can offer you a free months trial to try us out if you like!

[Tom McClelland]

Tom, yeah I see lots of "Request Timeouts" at the end of the trace. Your nameservers are set to:

ns.mainnameserver.com
ns2.mainnameserver.com

The IP your trace is trying to resolve to is 78.129.213.133 - if I do an RDNS check on this, it doesn't have RDNS set up, which is an issue. However, if I make a lookup to the nameservers, I instead get the IPs:

ns.mainnameserver.com 79.170.40.2
ns2.mainnameserver.com 79.170.43.3

I think you have something screwy in your dns set up causing some issue here. If you have good hosting support they should be able to resolve this. I see who your host is, though it could be perhaps by one of their resellers.

Hopefully they crack it for you, but if you're not satisfied I can offer you a free months trial to try us out if you like!
Thanks for the info. Curiously, the "real world" problem that I have outside the arcana of tracert appears to be solely with Firefox. Right now I can access the website using IE, but firefox hangs off the wall. Yet I'm still using a different firefox tab to compose and send this message right now.

[Tom McClelland]

My problem looks like a more general firefox one. I'm now noticing some other websites hanging off the wall when I access them. Go "back" and try again a couple of times and everything is fine. Yet I consistently have no problems with IE or Chrome. I think firefox installed a new version of itself in the last couple of days so I'm running with the theory that has damaged something at the moment.

EDIT: For example the "submit" of this very post failed to update my browser, but when I clicked "Back" and "Refresh" I saw that the submit had in fact worked.