A series that runs every Tuesday, where I ask questions unrelated to the environment, fair trade, or local politics that I’ve been wondering about but haven’t been able to google the answers to. Any advice is appreciated.
Sometimes, I have trouble loading and / or editing green LA girl. However, I’ll check the stats on Sustainable Websites, which always says there’s nothing wrong with the servers.
I asked Ivan, who set me up with Sustainable Websites, about this issue. Said he: “Any outage you experienced was a local problem.”
I’m willing to believe that — except I never had any “local problem” before I signed up with Sustainable Websites. Sure, there were times when my site wouldn’t load when I was with Bluehost. But then I’d call, and the Bluehost people would confirm they were having some sort of server issue, and let me know when they expected the issue to be resolved.
Now, with Sustainable Websites, my site’s down less frequently. However, when I can’t access it, I really can’t figure out what’s going wrong, as Sustainable Websites says the problem isn’t on their end.
So — I was wondering — What sorts of outages can happen locally that would prevent me from being able to access my site, even while I can access other websites? Can these outages be prevented on my part?
Moreover, if I’m having trouble accessing my site, does this mean that others are prolly having trouble accessing my site too? Or this accessibility issue one that’s specific to me, locally?
Update, 4/26/07: I can’t, in good conscience, recommend Sustainable Websites, even with its claim to green. Here’s why.
Check out http://www.siteuptime.com/
They monitor your site from multiple locations and alert you if more than one location can’t reach it – i.e. it’s probably a problem at your hosting provider.
The free program checks every 30 (or 60?) minutes, and you can go more frequent if you want to pony up cash
Comment by Robert 'Groby' Blum — March 13, 2007 @ 1:14 pm
Doing some lookups on the Internet (thanks to arin.net), you might want to know that your true provider is nac.net. Not sure exactly how green they are. Most likely, Sustainable Websites is colocating their servers at nac.net’s datacenters. If you read their web site carefully, I think they’re only using green power to promote their business. You should question Ivan about that.
Back to your question, assuming there’s nothing wrong on your end, it could be two things. Something on the server or network.
If your browser status says “waiting…” then generally, its the server. If it says “connecting…”, its the network. The tool to track down where the slow point is traceroute. More details about this at wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute. This tool tells you all the internet hosts that your connection has to pass through to get to your website and the time it takes. Compare the results of when you’re having the problem and not having it.
Comment by jason — March 13, 2007 @ 5:42 pm
I asked my husband, who’s a website designer, and he said that occasionally what can happen is that a server that’s somewhere between you and your webhost, that’s affecting your ability to access them, but may not affect your ability to visit other sites, or other people’s ability to visit your site. One way that you can confirm this is by doing a traceroute. A traceroute does just what the name implies, it traces the route that you take to get between your computer and the host of the website that you’re trying to reach. It shows every server along the way that you go through, so that you can pinpoint where the problem is. (There are instructions at: http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/troubleshooter/traceroute.html). They recommend doing one when your site is up, so that you have something to compare to when your site goes down. This way you can also confirm whether it’s actually your webhost with the problems or someone else along the way. Hope this helps!
Comment by Cameron — March 13, 2007 @ 5:43 pm
Forget what I mentoned on the power. Their service provider doesn’t supply green power, but I just noticed the purchase of offsets on their site.
Comment by jason — March 13, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
Okay — I’ve signed up for SiteUpTime! So far, so good. Thanks for the rec, Groby :)
jason — Regardless of the offset purchases, I think you bring up an important issue. I mean, if the only green thing SustainableWebsites is doing is buying offsets, I could just buy offsets for my own computer use and go with a “regular” host. I’ll email Ivan to find out more.
I have to say the Wikipedia on traceroute was really, really confusing to me. However! Cameron — I successfully followed the directions on mediacollege.com. However, I can’t find a way to save this (either via just save, or via copy and paste) so I have it to compare when something isn’t working! Is there a trick that I’m missing?
Comment by Siel — March 20, 2007 @ 9:21 pm