I'm got a largish php reseller account.

I have a rather large problem. It appears that the ISP users of BT Broadband and Freeserve are having big problems accessing our sites. 25% of the time they can. The other 75% of the time they can't. The error they get is Gateway timeout or DNS error.

Now, I'm a bit of a newcomer in this area, and your lot's knowledge far supasses my humble own. Any idea what the problem could be?

Their ISP is so overful, they cant access it quick enough prehaps?

Well the thing is Darren, these two ISP's are probably the biggest in the UK- so I can't see why they'd have any problems accessing the sites on terms of power and resources.

Also, maybe that the IP's were blocked by your provider for something illegal?

I emailed the first one - BT Openworld and they found no problems. Unfortunately it was during the 25% period when they could access it.

I can only think, if the IP's had been banned- the customers wouldn't be able to access them that 25% of the time.

I ment your provider as in who you got the reseller through ;)

Try emailing them asking :)

DNS slow?

Sorry- it's early and I'm not with it ;)

I've basically talked to my provider and he hasn't banned the sites. Far from it, he's as puzzled as I am by it. I got another complaint this morning, which hit my stress button and has made me decide to look for a resolution myself by the end of the day. :(

Originally posted by UltimeWWW
DNS slow?

Would this be host side, or ISP side?

Tried getting them to load another site on that server?

If you do, and they still get the errors, its DNS on the host, if not its the ISP

Well basically they get errors on all the sites being hosted (when it is playing up)

Also as it appears to be more than one ISP, it must be host side problems?

BT have often had DNS lookup timeouts.

They have a lot of dns pairs so when I had to problem I just picked fixed my settings to two which have a light load on them... and everything was fast again.

THanks for that. So what does this mean I have to ask my host to do?

Nothing. From what I just read, its the ISP side..

Ok thanks, so what do I tell the ISP's?

Try using "nslookup yourhost isp-dns" and see what it gets.

I've suffered slow DNS lookups on BT for ages... they always tell me they haven't got a problem.

I have my DNS servers on my dsl account set to a set of their name servers which always tend to be fast.