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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Best practices for making a very long URL shorter
Hi Moz folks! We are redesigning a website of 30,000+ pages. We are pulling together a spreadsheet for 301 redirects. So basically this: http://www.mywildlifesite.org/site/PageServerpagename=priorities_wildlife_endangered_species_protection#.Ws54SNPwbAw/mexican-spotted-owl Will direct to here, this is the nav architecture:
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane77
https://mywildlifesite.org/wildlife-conservtion/endangered-species-act-protections/endangered-species-list/birds/mexican-spotted-owl My question is, can I and should I truncate that new destination URL to make it easy for Google to see that the page topic is really the owl, like this:
https://mywildlifesite.org/endangered-species-list/mexican-spotted-owl Your input is greatly appreciated! Jane0 -
Please take a look at my keyword usage
Hi All, Traffic to few pages of my site is dipping from last couple of months. When I analyzed one of the web page (http://ow.ly/IEkt307dfNr) in Moz tools, it is warning that the keyword "dance classes" is used excessively in the page (30+ times). But, it is used in genuine manner; because that page is a listing page of "dance class teachers" who provide the service, we added "dance classes" under each of the provider. It helps users to connect with the teach easily. Is this okay or will it fall under keyword stuffing? Should I change something?
Technical SEO | | Avinash_12340 -
Take a good amount of existing landing pages offline because of low traffic, cannibalism and thin content
Hello Guys, I decided to take of about 20% of my existing landing pages offline (of about 50 from 250, which were launched of about 8 months ago). Reasons are: These pages sent no organic traffic at all in this 8 months Often really similiar landing pages exist (just minor keyword targeting difference and I would call it "thin" content) Moreover I had some Panda Issues in Oct, basically I ranked with multiple landing pages for the same keyword in the top ten and in Oct many of these pages dropped out of the top 50.. I also realized that for some keywords the landing page dropped out of the top 50, another landing page climbed from 50 to top 10 in the same week, next week the new landing page dropped to 30, next week out of 50 and the old landing pages comming back to top 20 - but not to top ten...This all happened in October..Did anyone observe such things as well? That are the reasons why I came to the conclustion to take these pages offline and integrating some of the good content on the other similiar pages to target broader with one page instead of two. And I hope to benefit from this with my left landing pages. I hope all agree? Now to the real question: Should I redirect all pages I take offline? Basically they send no traffic at all and non of them should have external links so I will not give away any link juice. Or should I just remove the URL's in the google webmaster tools and take them then offline? Like I said the sites are basically dead and personally I see no reason for these 50 redirects. Cheers, Heiko
Technical SEO | | _Heiko_0 -
Server redirect query
Hi there, due to so much traffic coming through to our e-commerce site our host is going to do an apache re-direct for over flow traffic from www.mywebsite.com to a ww2.mywebsite.com canonical tags will be in, but if there is a re-direct this is surely bad for seo, telling on onccasions the page has moved? Any advice on this and the best way to re-direct users when there is too much traffic please let me know.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Proxy Server & Wordpress - Need Help
I'm looking for some guidance/expert opinions on using a proxy server with Wordpress. When a consumer goes to ourwebsite.com/blog, our IT department would like to set up the request to be “proxied” to the Wordpress Blog site. They would like to add a header to the web request to identify that traffic as coming from through the proper URL. Should someone or a crawler attempt to access the WordPress site directly (blog.ourwebsite.com) they would be client side redirected to the proper URL ourwebsite.com/blog. This is WAY out of my league here, so I figured I would ask the experts. Will this negatively effect our SEO?
Technical SEO | | SavikaTilakhdin0 -
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 -
How do I redirect non www pages to www on a windows server?
As the .htaccess file cannot be worked on, I added this php code 301 redirect if the URL does not contain a www on all the pages (small website - 10 pages) : header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); header( "Location: $location" ); I want to know if this is ok for SEO? Has anyone done this on a windows server? Or if you have any better methods, it would be great if you can share. Please help. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ArjunRajkumar0 -
After entire site is noindex'd, how long to recover?
A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today. Ugh... We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0