Dissapointed

[willow]

Sadly it looks like i will be moving hosts in the next couple of weeks.

Since ive been with H9 every couple of hours my site and those on my server become unavailable for around 5-10 minutes, this includes FTP and email. I can also be in the middle of uploading or downloading from the server when it times out and wont let me back on for a good 10 minutes. These arnt large files, well under a meg and are mainly stylesheets and a few images because im a cubecart designer.

The response from support is there is nothing wrong with the server and it must be my ISP yet oddly when it happens i am still able to view every other website on the the web, just nothing on my H9 account. After many livechat sessions over the last week i spoke to Travis yesterday who again was adament that the fault must be my ISP and was not prepared to entertain the idea that it cant be my ISP if i can view the rest of the world and after pointing this out repeatedly he told me "I guess you werent listening", to which i replied "I guess one of us isnt", before closing the chat.

Yesterday, after posting on WHT, Ben came on and believed he had found the issue and fixed it but after putting it to the test today, trying to backup my files, it happened again so obviously it isnt fixed. I went onto livechat this afternoon (GMT) and got Blake, when i asked him if Ben was available he just ignored me. After a couple of minutes waiting for Blake to respond i said "i guess im talking to myself again!", waited another minute before closing the window. I went back on again and got Dave who told me that Ben doesnt work livechat, i wasnt really suprised as the Director wouldnt be expected to work livechat but it would have been nice for him to ask Ben if he would speak to me but ofcourse that would be too much to ask.

In a last ditch effort ive just gone on livechat again and got Blake, obviously i wasnt overly excited about being ignored again but this time he graced me with some words. I wondered whether perhaps the problem was down to me using the wrong IP addresses for my reseller account so asked Blake to check and i am using the correct ones. So, i give up.

I have a very successfull ecommerce store, my main website and one client on my H9 account (other clients hosted elsewhere), while my client is very easily pleased i do need to be able to access my own website every half hour or so to process orders and obviously receive the email confirmations of those orders. I also need to be able to upload and download from my space for a good 8 hours a day without things keep timing out but it seems this is not possible with H9. I must point out that before anyone starts questioning my FTP software and that being a problem, remember that i have a reseller account with another provider and never receive these problems so there is no doubt whatsoever that this is H9 related.

H9 comes highly recommended by members on WHT so to receive such service is a great dissapointment and means im now looking to move again.

Such a shame

Just as i was reading through this before posting i tried my email and guess what - it cant connect again

Hi,

When you say it can't connect again what do you mean exactly? I thought the issue was you were frequently being disconnected. I was out of the office today due to working on the Holiday yesterday so I'm sorry I was not available earlier today.

[meltingcube]

It is possible that the ISP is having trouble with DNS and it keeps switching the IP addresses for a domain. OR it is your router.. OR it is your computer...

have you tested it from a different computer at a different location?

[McCarthySites]

traceroutes and pings will give some clues also. With net neutrality getting shot down maybe your ISP, or someone in the route between your ISP and HostNine, doesn't like you, or HostNine :-)

Brian

[H9Travis]

Willow,

If you could provide is us with a traceroute during the time you are unable to bring up your site that would help to debug any issues in reaching your account.

During a time of an outage try running this from your windows command shell:

tracert 74.200.197.34

If you can copy and paste that here or to support@hostnine.com we will be able to further investigate the problem.

I just want you to know that we are not trying to dump the problem of you not being able to connect on you because we do not want to deal with it, it is just yours is the only complaint we are aware of where this is happening. We have checked again and there should be no reason you cannot bring up this server certain periods in the day. The fact that it is intermittent for you and not for anyone else that we are aware of would rule out it being the server.

Just because you cannot bring up your site and bring up others does not exclude the fact that it could be your ISP. Have you even contacted your ISP like we have requested?

[willow]

Originally Posted by H9Ben

Hi,

When you say it can't connect again what do you mean exactly? I thought the issue was you were frequently being disconnected. I was out of the office today due to working on the Holiday yesterday so I'm sorry I was not available earlier today.

I have already explained Ben that when i am FTPing i get booted off and once im booted off everything is unavailable for 5-10 minutes. Other times i might not actually be working but go to check the email and find it cant connect so then i try to open my site in a browser and the only message i receive is "Timed Out, the server may be busy please try again later". Then as this is happening i try various other sites to see if it is my ISP but i can still reach all other websites with the exception actually of this forum, i can still reach hostnine.com but the forum times out, again im checking the forum to see if there is a notice or something to explain this.

Originally Posted by meltingcube

It is possible that the ISP is having trouble with DNS and it keeps switching the IP addresses for a domain. OR it is your router.. OR it is your computer...

have you tested it from a different computer at a different location?

I see no reason why my ISP would keep switching the IP or DNS for 10 minutes every couple of hours.

Originally Posted by McCarthySites

traceroutes and pings will give some clues also. With net neutrality getting shot down maybe your ISP, or someone in the route between your ISP and HostNine, doesn't like you, or HostNine :-)

Brian

Originally Posted by H9Travis

Willow,

If you could provide is us with a traceroute during the time you are unable to bring up your site that would help to debug any issues in reaching your account.

During a time of an outage try running this from your windows command shell:

tracert 74.200.197.34

If you can copy and paste that here or to support@hostnine.com we will be able to further investigate the problem.

I just want you to know that we are not trying to dump the problem of you not being able to connect on you because we do not want to deal with it, it is just yours is the only complaint we are aware of where this is happening. We have checked again and there should be no reason you cannot bring up this server certain periods in the day. The fact that it is intermittent for you and not for anyone else that we are aware of would rule out it being the server.

Just because you cannot bring up your site and bring up others does not exclude the fact that it could be your ISP. Have you even contacted your ISP like we have requested?

Yes Travis, of course i have contacted my ISP! Dispite your being rude it was the first thing i did after i ended my converstation with you. Their response is, because i am still able to view the rest of the world and this is only happening with H9 that it cant be them.

The problem now is it is going to be more difficult to test because the main account which i work on all day is now moved to my other provider because i cant have it keep happening so i wont be spending any time FTPing from H9 for the remainder of my time with you, i changed the DNS last night after posting here so that when i got up this morning i could transfer that account out. Two accounts are still with H9 right now and the only way i will know if it happens again is when i try to connect to email for those accounts.

[H9Travis]

Willow,

I apologize if you felt I was being rude, I certainly did not mean to be. Chat has the problem sometimes of being impersonal.

I am wondering if there are any alternative DNS servers you could configure your computer to use that would solve this problem. When you are unable to reach your domain are you able to reach the IP address of the server?

Make sure you clear any and all cache, even an ipconfig /flushdns might help just in case your computer is caching the DNS itself.

[kobra]

Originally Posted by travis

The fact that it is intermittent for you and not for anyone else that we are aware of would rule out it being the server.

These denial of service issues are not just intermittent for willow as I and several of my clients experience the same issues- - be it server, firewall, or?? trace routes submitted end at FS...

So the statement "not for anyone else", is not fully supported, this also appears to be either a H9 or FS issue and at both Cedar Falls or Chicago. An effort to track this down and correct would be a better approach than being blind to the fact that this is happening alot and only being caught and reported a percentage of the time.

[H9Travis]

Kobra,

We are definitly looking into this. I do not mean to imply that it is only happening to willow, if there is an issue contacting your account from the UK please let us know. The more information we can compile about the problem the easier it will be to track down and eliminate.

[quneur]

I know of someone with a similar problem using different host. It's actually some webspace provided by her broadband provider so it's their own datacenter. She used a little known web maker program and tried publishing directly and it would time out. She also tried WS_FTP the pages and still would time out. There's been several of us trying to figure out what's going on including her isp and still the same problem. The funny thing is a few people have tried to upload it and they experienced no problems.

She finally switch to CuteFTP and that seems to work. Try it as if it works, it will only cost you less headaches. If that doesn't work, try calling a friend and seeing if they can view the site when the problem occurs.