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I'm not sure if this question belongs here, or over at serverfault, but I'll start here:

I have several sites hosted on one Hostgator server in their Provo UT datacenter. As an example of my problem, if I visit www.hastogo.com and click to browse through several pages, occasionally and randomly an image or two will fail to display.

I installed FireBug and activated the Net tab.

With it running, I did the above until I found the "broken" images. When I did, I checked them in firebug and it showed they had returned the "200 OK" status. When I mouse over the listing for that image in the firebug panel, the image displays. If I refresh the page or right-click and choose "Reload Image" they are always displayed.

Another user in the office has a Samsung tablet that this happens to even more often than with the PCs in the office. I tried it also on my Ubuntu laptop (12.04 using xfce desktop and Firefox Browser) and got the same result except I did not have firebug running to check status.

Should I be focusing my diagnostic on the server/datacenter, or on our local network? I thought I might have seen a similar issue on other websites, but I was not able to re-create the error except on sites that share our server.

TecBrat
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2 Answers2

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This is a hard problem to answer. With this response I assume that you do not have direct access to your server (hence a shared server).

To me this sounds like somewhere along the line, data packets are getting dropped. Headers without data that also do not show error codes (200 - no error). 

Server ---- Hostgator Internal ---- Your ISP ---- Your internal Network ---- You
      (Issue 1)               (Issue 2)        (Issue 3)             (Issue 4)

Issue 1: The connection between the outside world and your server (the internal workings of Hostgator) could be bad. This can be anything from a bad connection to a bad cord.

Issue 2: Same as Issue 1 but the connection could be bad from anywhere from the server farm to your ISP.

Issue 3: Unlikely because you did not see this issue with any other sites, therefore the connection for your ISP to you is clean.

Issue 4: Same as (3).

My recommendation: I feel most likely this is not your network, but somewhere from your network to your server.

I would attempt to access the sites through some proxy (Tor for example) to see if there is an issue with the ISP - or any way to change your ISP or routes to your server. If you sites work, than the issue is with the ISP. If there are still issues this could be that Hostgator is having issues.

I doubt that there is an issue with your internal network, but to make sure check your switch's logs for any dropped packets and make note of where these packets are going and where they are dropped.

If you do have direct access to the server I would check your logs to make sure your software (particularly the web hosting software) is working correctly and not sending bad (or the lack of) error messages (e.g. HTTP/200).

Tor: https://www.torproject.org/

Mark Lopez
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This is most likely your issue: http://mashable.com/2013/08/02/bluehost-down/

"The outage appears to be related to server maintenance at the Provo, Utah, data center."

"Some customers may continue to experience intermittent access and slowness until services are fully restored. "

Mark Lopez
  • 1,061