let me know when the site is down or slow

[jackulator]

Hi all,

I've been trying to tell the company that hosts this website that there is a constant problem with bandwidth or something, because the site is intermittently either down or very slow. I'm on broadband, and every few days I'll notice that the site either times out or pages take up to 45 seconds to load, depending on which browser I use.

Luckily we now have a shoutbox on the site so all the timeouts and slow times can be more easily documented.

Whenever you notice the site is taking too long or the site times out please write the following in the shoutbox (for slow loads):

SL, then approximately how long the page took to load, and then the time, so SL15-10:23

and for timeouts just TO-10:23

I realize that people are not necessarily going to hang around the site until it starts working normally again, but timing out doesn't usually last that long. I'm more concerned with slow loads.

The definition in my book of a slow load is anytime (if you're on broadband) a page takes more than 3 seconds to load.

A timeout is when you let the browser keep trying to load a page, and eventually a screen comes up saying your browser cannot communicate with the server.

this morning I'd have written this in the shoutbox:

TO-10:23, SL10-10:25, SL15-10:31 SL15-10:39

Anyway, I appreciate your help on this. Thanks everybody,

Jackulator

[Sir? what do ya think?]

Well, it's happened to me like 17 times today, i don't record times, but lets say within the time range of 13:00-13:50 my time.

[jackulator]

yeah, it's becoming quite a travesty

when the host company does something called 'resetting the account' - whatever that may be - it seems to make the site work for 2-10 days - and it only takes a second, so I think from now on when the site is acting up I'll do a tracert first and makes sure it isn't just one of the hops timing out temporarily, and if not I'll call and have them do the reset

it may have something to do with how forums interact with the netfirms system - maybe there's the server equivalent of a temp folder or a cache that needs to be emptied every now and then or it gets bogged down

but resetting the account, while not a permanent solution, seems to consistently work, compared to sending the problem to 'second-level' support, which usually means the site's performance may or may not improve within a few days, and then a few days later I get a copy-paste type automated email saying 'there was a problem we fixed' or 'we couldn't find a problem'

so even though sending it to second-level support is supposed to find a permanent fix, it hasn't in over 20 tries, so I'll just do the temp fix of resetting - but I certainly will look into getting a dedicated server somewhere or at least finding a host that has much better reliability

plus, another thing I don't like about this host company is that even though I have download speeds of 768kbps, I can only download things from the site at like 20-60kbps - and if it's a really big file, I'm ony getting like 5-25kbps, which is just plain ridiculous

I think if I had a dedicated server the download/upload times for ftp would be dependent upon my own internet connection speed rather than some kind of limitation applied at the host's end