website appearing to be offline at some random points

[Aidan Brown]

i have heard from a user that sometimes the website has appeared offline for a period of time. i have looked into this and it appears that for some reason a DNS server seems to assign our website the wrong IP address some of the time. I am not sure if anything can be done to solve this or why this would be happening in the first place, if you do have problems at any point please drop me a pm with the following information:

*edit:if you cant get onto the site no pm lol or e-mail me on [email protected]

the ip address your given for our server, this can be found by going to START>>RUN then typing 'cmd'. then in the window that opens type
'tracert http://www.hardytropicals.co.uk'
without the quotes, then the last line should contain gridserver.com. the ip address is the number on that line that looks something like this 192.168.232.64

also when the problem was e.g. time, date
and if possible your ISP's name (to see if one ISP has a problem and across a mixture)

Aidan

[Aidan Brown]

the above would need to be completed while you cannot get onto the site, as soon as you can get onto the site again tracert will show up everything is ok again.

Aidan

[helen]

I couldn't get onto either the Hardy Tropicals site, the forum site or the chat site for the last 2 days. All I got was 'no response'.

?????

[Dave Brown]

Helen, that does not sound like a problem with the site as Hardytropicals website and forum are hosted by Media temple, however, the chatroom is is on our server.The chances of both being down to you, is remote unless there is a problem nearer to your end. Did you have problems with any other sites.

My personal view is that the internet service provided by ISPs is in meltdown, as they have a finite resourse that they are selling to more and more people. Like water, the the more people they connect the less water there is to share around. Virgin Media have introduced capping, which although you pay for a 2/4/8/20mb line, your actual speed will be dependent on available bandwidth. If the speed slows down enough your attempted connection times out

[Aidan Brown]

this is partially true the databse for the chatroom is hosted on our server, the actual files that access the databse are hosted on media temple with the rest. can you try doing this
click Start then run, then type 'cmd' without the quotes then in the window that opens type 'tracert http://www.hardytropicals.co.uk' again without the quotes. and see if you get a success.

also i have found this resource which tests the connectivity between their server and the site http://visualroute.visualware.com/ this will show if the site is working.

when i tested the link there were 2 points of possible problems in america which is out of our control unfortunatly.

Aidan