Comments on: Tuesday questions: Website performance

By: Siel

Siel — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:21:10 +0000

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?

By: jason

jason — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:40:35 +0000

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.

By: Cameron

Cameron — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:43:36 +0000

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!

By: jason

jason — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:42:39 +0000

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.

By: Robert 'Groby' Blum

Robert 'Groby' Blum — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:14:20 +0000

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