On the evening of December 8, I could not reach my own websites ‘bartoll.se’ or ‘ungovernable.se’ from my computer. At that time, I only thought that it was a temporary server issue. But as I could still not reach them on the morning of December 9, I began to investigate. First, I noticed that I could actually reach them by using a VPN-service, at least from most countries. A few VPN connections still gave me the same “connection timed out” message. Of course, this made me worried that some people could not reach the websites, same as me.
So, first, I changed my computer’s DNS to OpenDNS and UncensoredDNS, did the usual “ipconfig /flushdns” and “netsh winsock reset.” And nothing. Then I tried my mobile devices. Same. Connection timed out when using WiFi, but they both loaded when I changed to the mobile data service and used another Internet Service Provider (ISP.)
So, the next logical step was to check if the security plugins of the websites had been updated and perhaps malfunctioned, as in blocking some IP-addresses, including mine. But nothing, and according to my web hosting company, everything seemed to be working fine. So, I then did a traceroute directly from my gateway and internet router device, and it timed out on both of my websites, so, logically the problem should be there, with my current ISP and the routing.
I’ve filed a support ticket with them to investigate. I never encountered a problem like this before, especially since I’ve yet to find any other website that will not load. Only my own.
And while I can visit and work with them through a VPN, although a bit cumbersome, there is also the potential risk that other people are experiencing the same problem. And there’s still the possibility that there is something going on with the web server that is hosting my websites, as they are on the same server cluster and my other parked domain names do not work either. It’s almost like that entire server has been blocked by some of the routing gateways used by my ISP.
So, this has kept me a bit occupied, and likely will until it’s resolved. Still, it will not directly interfere with my client work, only with the websites in question.
