Server is taking too long to respond - What does this mean?

[columbiaseo]

A client has 3 sites that he would like for me to look at.  Whenever I attempt to on my home internet I get this message:

The connection has timed out
The server is taking too long to respond.

When I take my iphone off wifi and use AT&T, the site comes up fine.  What is going on here?

[jesse-landry]

Your internet and/or router is down..? Yeah I'd power-cycle the router and modem and try again. Or contact your cable company.

No offense but this is one of the weirdest Q&A posts I've seen here. I'm having a weird morning though so it totally fits.

[columbiaseo]

My internet is working fine.  I'm on moz.org right now using my internet.  It's only when I attempt to visit those 3 websites.

[jesse-landry]

Wait are you saying this is just for your clients' sites? You can access other sites just fine? That's how you posted this question?

Sorry i'm confused.

[jesse-landry]

that's weird. what are the domains let's see if I can access them?

[columbiaseo]

madhattermagicshop.com
topsmagic.com
world-costume.com

Thanks!

[onlinechester]

They all work for me the topsmagic site takes a while to load though

[jesse-landry]

Yeah they all work for me too.

So this remains one of the weirder topics on here but for different reasons than I first suspected. ..I'm really not sure what to tell you. Sorry.

[CleverPhD]

Check with the IT folks or hosting service for your client.  I think this is an outside chance, but if you have been running spiders from your home computer to check the site, you may have been hitting it too hard and slowed the site down and the server may be blocking your IP as you are seen as a spammer.   That is why you change ISPs you are golden as you are seen as a different "user".

I took down one of our sites once with a spidering tool.  They were pushing new code right when I hit the site.  Also, the number of requests a second I thought were ok, well, it was during peak traffic time. (DOH!)

I adjusted my crawl rate down and everything was ok.   Again, this is just a guess, but worth checking considering your symptoms.

Good luck!

[LesleyPaone]

More than likely it was one 3 things, a DNS issue, a peering issue, or a temp ban.

If you were currently ftp'ing into the site and had too many threads open, usually above 4 or 5 but all depends on the server setting. They can issue a temporary ban on your ip address for the site. Depending on how the server is set up, you can either get an explicit message, which is bad. Or you can just get an error like you, which is good and it means the server is shedding the load.

A DNS issue could be that a name server is down somewhere or having other problems. You generally cannot do anything about this and they are generally fixed quickly because of the amount of sites / information hosted on them is vital.

A peering problem, like a DNS issue is usually spotty. More than likely that is what was happening. A peering issue means you cannot access the "chunk" of internet that the peer directs traffic through. So say you can access 99.9% of everything you want, because it is not going through the peer with the issues.

The best tools you can use to diagnose these problems are TOR, it is a socks proxy that routes your traffic so essentially you will be accessing the site through another isp, who could not be having peering or DNS issues with the hosting isp. Also you can use http://www.whatsmydns.net/  which will let you know what different dns servers around the world are returning. It will let you know if a major DNS server is having an issue. For general checking you can use this as well, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/