Unavailable, only reachable through proxy server!

[Ylva]

Have you tried doing what Gumball advised a couple of pages back?

Hello lapushka! When your phone does 0 while on your home WiFi, does that mean it has similar connectivity issues and results?

I would be interested in any differences you experience on your home network when accessing:

• longhaircommunity.com
• forums.longhaircommunity.com

I mention them separately as they are two distinct sites with two different IP addresses.

A few things I can think of to try and help troubleshoot, too:

Browser cache:

To rule out issues with a browser cache, using a separate web browser or a private/incognito browser is a good way, though not foolproof, to determine if it's a caching issue.

Browser console:

You can open a developer console in a browser to see if it shows any obvious problems when attempting to navigate to a site. An example is FireFox or Google where you would use Ctrl+Shift+I to open the console, select "Network" from the tabs, and try reloading the site looking for red errors or anything that appears to take a long time to complete.

Ping and Traceroute:

Ping:

If you open a command prompt are you able to ping forums.longhaircommunity.com and get a response?

If you do get a reply, that's good. If not, to be safe check what IP address is being served.

Example: forums.longhaircommunity.com resolves to 104.192.220.152 when I ping it. I do get dropped packets once in a while when performing this test, but not enough to cause access issues for me. If your ping is resolving to a different IP, it's possible that the DNS cache is off so the URL is not resolving to the forum's IP address.

Traceroute

You can also try to tracert forums.longhaircommunity.com. This helps to determine if it's the destination that is the cause of the connectivity problems (server drops) or if it's possible something along the way from your home to the forum. This might be useful to compare on- and off-proxy.

For what it's worth, I get a lot of timeouts tracing to longhaircommunity.com as opposed to forums.longhaircommunity.com, likely meaning their hosting is different and responds differently to the packet transfers.

DNS:

In case it's a DNS issue, a quick way to troubleshoot is to flush your DNS cache by heading back to the command prompt and use ipconfig /flushdns. This will tell your computer to fetch new DNS entries when you resume browsing instead of relying on what your operating system has already cached for itself.

If it turns out to be a DNS issue, you can opt to try using a different DNS provider (Linked instructions) than what is used by your ISP, such as:

• 8.8.8.8 - Google public DNS #1
• 8.8.4.4 - Google public DNS #2
• 1.1.1.1 - Cloudflare public DNS #1 (Of the three, I'd recommend this one. It's my fallback if my personal DNS server has a problem)

Running a simple tracert when you can't access the site would be the single best way to figure out whether it's on your end or the website's.

[GordonMurphella]

Just saw this and don't know if it helps anyone, but years ago I discovered the only way to get here for me was via forums.longhaircommunit.com, I couldn't get in the "front door" so to speak. It does work for me now, but old habits, etc.

Just a thought while I spill my coffee

[lapushka]

I never come through the front door, always straight to the "forums" subdomain.

ETA/ The front door = right there for me, but once I go "forums" I am basically doomed.