Server is taking too long to respond - What does this mean?
-
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?
-
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/
-
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!
-
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.
-
They all work for me the topsmagic site takes a while to load though
-
-
that's weird. what are the domains let's see if I can access them?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
E-commerce: Taking care of expired product pages
Hi, I work for an e-commerce company in the fashion sector. As you probably know/can guess it is very popular for bloggers and other influencers to link to our products. But the problem is that our products often have a lifespan of only 2-3 months before they expire. Is the best solution to do a 301-redirect to the closest category page for expiring product pages? To make sure we don't lose these links to 404-pages. Or are there any other good solutions popular among e-commerce companys? Thanks for taking your time!
Technical SEO | | Mattiasj890 -
Should I Remove Thousands of Bad Links over a Short Time or Long Time?
Hey Moz Community! I've got a website that has hundreds of thousands of old links that don't really offer any great content. They need to be removed. Would it be a better idea to remove them in batches of 5000,10000, or more over a long time... or remove them all at the same time because it doesn't matter? Cheers, Alex
Technical SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
How long does it take to reindex the website
Generally speaking, how long does it take for Google to recrawl/reindex an (ecommerce) website? After changing a number of product subcategories from 'noindex' back to 'index', I regenerated the sitemap and have fetched as Google in WMT. This was a couple of weeks ago and no action yet. Second question: Does Google treat these pages as if they're brand new? I 'noindexed' them back in April, and they were ranking ok then. (I had noindexed them on the back of advice from my SEO, due to concerns about these pages being seen as duplicate content). Help!
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Webmaster Tools Server Error
We recently did a build to our site and after the build the build one of the softwares that we are using changed. This caused our server errors to go into the thousands. right now google webmaster tools gave us a list of top 1,000 pages with errors and we fixed them all is there a way to see the rest of the errors?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Server crashed - What should I do regarding Google SERP´s?
We have several travel websites in Uruguay since 2003. These sites have a very high PR and Trust. The server where all our sites are hosted has crashed and we have been for 2 days now trying to fix all this mess. We hope this problem will be fixed today. Please I really need to know what should I do regarding Google. I mean one of our sites has been ranking in top 1 positions for more than 150 keywords. Will we loose all that? What can we do about it? It´s the first time this has happened to our sites.
Technical SEO | | ceci27100 -
How long does it take for traffic to bounce back from and accidental robots.txt disallow of root?
We accidentally uploaded a robots.txt disallow root for all agents last Tuesday and did not catch the error until yesterday.. so 6 days total of exposure. Organic traffic is down 20%. Google has since indexed the correct version of the robots.txt file. However, we're still seeing awful titles/descriptions in the SERPs and traffic is not coming back. GWT shows that not many pages were actually removed from the index but we're still seeing drastic rankings decreases. Anyone been through this? Any sort of timeline for a recovery? Much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bheard0 -
How long to come back from a server outage?
We changed hosting companies two weeks ago, and we had a number of configuration issues that caused the site to go on and offline over that weekend. We fixed the problem but our traffic took a noticeable hit. I am assuming this is because our rankings dropped due to the site being down. Now that we're stable again, how long will it take for the traffic to return? is there anything I can do to speed up the process?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
Moving a site from one server to another
Does moving a site's files from one server to another, with all URL's remaining the same, affect page rank? I am moving a site from one server to another. Everything will stay exactly the same, including URL's, file structure, etc. Will this affect page rank, domain importance, etc?
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0