taff — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 21:12:59 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by okephoto
Anyways, bottom line is my business is being affected drastically at this point, the cable company has a lousy attitude about this because they have a monopoly and some of my clients are getting upset because they and many customers cannot use their web sites.

If this is a broader problem than just you, then surely the collective data would help to pinpoint the problem? How are these clients and customers connecting to the net?

Unfortunately, my experience with cable providers in general makes me think that you'd have a hard time convincing them even if you DO have a smoking gun

Good luck!

okephoto — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 20:49:32 +0000

Hi Mika,

Thanks for your input. Yes, one of the sites is gulfislandsguide.com. This site takes between 30 and 60 seconds to load here most of the time. Other sites will be a fraction of a second. I also have had a problem with lots of bounced email because of time outs etc.

This is very frustrating and I don't even know where to begin if I have to trace the problems myself. Certainly for me changing servers would be a very time consumming and expensive option.

If I were not in business I maybe wouldn't care but on many of these sites I sell advertising and the people who are advertising are wondering why they can't get on the site. It's getting old having to try and explain to clients that the ones of us on the island's can't see the site but to the best of my knowledge the rest of the world can.

Cheers

yabber — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 20:02:50 +0000

I would definatly say it is the responsibility of the ISP to sort this out, if you can get the addresses of more sites that you know are OK & that you cannot reach because of the same problem this might help your case.
I had a similar problem a little while back where it seemed that the whole internet was available to me except for my sites. After (and it was not easy) speaking to one of the routing engineers he found out the problem was someone blocking a range of the ISP's IP addresses, after that the problem was fixed within 10 minutes.
You are paying your host to make your site accesable via the net and you pay the ISP to get access to sites via the net. Your host is keeping to their part of the deal. Is the site you have problems with http://www.gulfislandsguide.com/ ?? because that loads for me in about 3 seconds and I am on the other side of the atlantic.

Mika

okephoto — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 19:49:24 +0000

We have done probably 30 trace routes by now and these have been sent to the cable supplier. They just feel that it's not their responsibility to deal with it. I think otherwise as I pay them to provide internet access and I don't believe they're coming through on their end.

This discussion with the cable supplier has become a little heated but they maintain that they can't do anything.

"As to what we can do, there is nothing within our own network we can do to solve the problem. We tried tracesroutes from within our system, and several others within BC, and basically found that anyone connecting to the US via ****'s backbone, experienced the same problem, not only in BC, but Western Canada wide. (Note: I've been looking into this and it appears not to be true) What this means is that while this problem may be an inconvenience for you trying to publish sites, it also means that most of Western North America cannot reach this web site (in other words, several million customers will never get to the site either), another important reason for the hosting service to try and solve this problem."

"I would contact my hosting service and get them to solve the problem. If they choose to ignore you, you know that over time, other domains will jump ship like crazy, and eventually they will go out of business. It makes no difference whom you use as an ISP, whether it is ****** or *****, ****, etc. Using another provider may solve your publishing problem, but it still means that large parts of the Internet world will never be able to view your site".

So basically they're trying to pass this off on the host.

yabber — Mon, 21 Jan 2002 19:36:24 +0000

you should 1st trace the route to your site (ms-dos prompt & type "tracert www.yourdomain.com" without the quotes) this will show you where the slowdown is taking place, chances are that your cable supplier has no problems & your host has no problems but the slowdown is somewhere in the middle. If you take this information to your cable provider they "might" look into the routing issue for you.

Mika