Canadutch
Ok so we had contacted the company that hosts my domain and they said they were going to monitor the servers and see what was going on. This is what they sent to my husband the other day:
We were able to resolve your website without any latency. We suggest you to try with other browsers like Flock, Mozilla or even IE, other computer/ ISP for that matter. You may also try by deleting the temporary files and clear cookies of your browser. If this issue persists, please let us know if you experience this issue at specific time of day. We appreciate your patience.
Uhhh, vague much?! Obviously, since I’ve had readers from all over the world experiencing problems, it wasn’t an ISP thing (we had already told them this on the phone) and it wasn’t a browser thing because we tried it in various browsers as well.
This didn’t sit well with my husband, because he has experience in these sort of working environments and knew that because it was not easy to pin down, they were hoping they could blow us off easily instead. So he replied:
I am sorry but I don’t agree with this. A database connection error has nothing to do with the browser. Even the tech we spoke to initially was having intermittent problems with this website while we were in the call. Are you going to tell him to change his browser, too? We’ve tested this with MSIE and Firefox, on multiple computers on various OSes.
On Sept 1 9:03AM CEST we got the following error:
Error Establishing Database ConnectionThis is an intermittent problem and I know they’re a real pain to track down, but the suggestion below isn’t going to fly. We’ve had complaints from readers from other parts of the world as well, so that rules out the ISP theory as well.
What exactly are you monitoring? I am not afraid of technical details and have quite extensive Linux knowledge and data center experience, so please don’t spare me any details.
After receiving his mail we got the following reply:
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. We were experiencing some delay on the database server your website is hosted on, due to some websites consuming abrupt resources on the database server.
However, our systems team were immediately informed and they have taken the appropriate actions to cut down the load on the Database server.
Now the issue has been completely resolved and the database server is functioning seamlessly. We checked the functionality of the database server for your website and it seems to be working fine.
Kindly verify the same at your end.
Gee, amazing how they happened to find the problem after my husband calling ‘bullshit’ on them. It amazes me how companies like this will try to feed you some crap to get you to go away before really putting serious effort into finding the problem. Frustrating…
I can’t even bitch about Dutch customer service on this one, it’s an American company!
It must be even more frustrating for regular Joe Blow without any real technical knowledge who has no choice other than to believe what they say. Thank god I had hubby around to deal with this.
So, please let me know if the site is working better for you now. If not, I’ll have to sick my husband on them again. It seems to be working ok on my end… hopefully it is on yours as well!
I had problems with my server too a month ago and as you said, at one point, they just have to cut the BS. Too bad most of us aren’t that computer/ server savvy!
Zhus last blog post… Chinese Food (中国菜)
Sure looks like they have fixed the problem at least from Canada. Took all of 3 seconds to get onto your site. Congratulations on hubby’s expertise!
It can be hard to find a really good webhost. They almost always deny that they are having a problem, but then suddenly notice a problem and fix it before it caused any outages.
Elizabeth – Thanks for the comment! I think you might have hit the site at one of it’s good moments hehe
Amber – Actually this company doesn’t outsource. The guy who we had on the phone when we called Customer Service sounded about as redneck as they get haha or should I say… as redneck as they GIT!
An American company that…I can assure out outsourced! Why do I know this? Once upon a time, for about 3 years, I managed a customer service project in India for my company. I can spot an Indian email a mile away :)
Good luck getting it fixed! I’ve been able to access much easier this week.
Ambers last blog post… The Euphoric Rain
Just wanted to tell you that I had no problem getting your site today – last week it took about 30 seconds which was unusual, but today it was instant. Am in Canada so don’t know if that makes a difference or not. Keep up the writing as I enjoy your great sense of humour!
Oh bugger! It turns out that we are still getting the database errors as well. The site was down for a good half hour this afternoon (and that’s just when I was watching).
They better get this resolved soon.
Thanks for letting me know, Ed!
Interesting, it took me about 15 minutes to download this page about download speed. Can they please define resolved and translate seamlessly for me :)