Website connection problems only on BT broadband lines?

[q582gmzhi]

Hi,

Can anyone advise, why me and my customers have to periodically reboot our routers to access our websites?

We used to be with Virgin broadband and we would get repeat customers calling us saying they could not access our wesbites to re-order goods, after some time I started collating some data and the customers all had one thing in common they used BT broadband.

We could connect with our office Virgin broadband and 'T-Mobile' mobile accounts when BT custmers could not. Our server is also monitored from several sites across the world in case of server or line drop failures, this service never reported any faults, only when we rebooted the server etc.

We decided to switch from Virgin to BT broadband, to see what our customers where experiencing and we now also peridically suffer from this inablity to connect to our websites. But we are able to connect using our T-Mobile account and the server monitoring service do not report any issues!!!!

The only way to cure the issue is to reboot our router. However its not the router thats at fault because its the same router we had when we used Virgin net and never had a problem, even though BT customers were calling us to tell us they could not access our sites?

I am concerened how many BT customers cannot access our sites and just move on to another site!

Any idea's?

Thanks in advance

Daz.....

[DaveA]

Hi,

When you can't see web pages based on the provider you're on, your two main possibilities are the DNS servers or the host of the website blocking IP addresses for some reason.

The easiest one to test is the DNS.  Could you try changing your DNS servers to non-BT ones (e.g. Google) and see how you get on?

Might also be worth asking the initial question of the host and see what they come back with.

Dave

[q582gmzhi]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. 

I am happy to change my routers DNS to googles DNS but i cant really ask my customers to do this!

I colocated our server is in a local datacentre and I have remote access via RDP. Its using BIND DNS and all the zone records appear to be fine. As i mentioned earlier when the BT broadband does not connect I can access the site from my IPAD via '3' network and T-Mobile broadband dongle, which connect without any issues. Also the server monitoring does not report any sites down.

I assume its a BT DNS issue?

Daz......

[DaveA]

Hi,

Don't know yet tbh.  Can you access the sites by IP address?

Dave

[q582gmzhi]

Hi,

After re-booting the office router we could get access again. But how many BT customers give up and move on to next site.

The reason I brought it up is, earlier today another customer called us saying they could not access the site (we could but we re-booted yesterday or the day before after not been able to connect). They even searched for us on Google to make sure we were still online. They clicked the Google link and that did not work, so they called us to check we were still trading. The first question I asked the lady was are you a BT broadband customer which she confirmed as correct, so I asked her to reboot her router to get access!

Daz.....

[adrianc]

Very hard to diagnose but it sounds like it's either a DNS problem or a routing issue between your data centre and the BT network. Rebooting the router either gets the customer a different pair of DNS servers, or different IP address that doesn't have the issue.

Best suggestion would be to wait until the next time you can't connect to the site on your BT connection, then try a traceroute or ping from your computer. If you get 'unknown host' then it's probably a DNS issue, if you get 'no route to host' (or similar) then it's likely a routing issue.

Adrian