TNSGroup's Hosting Manual
http://www.hostingmanual.net/

Troubleshooting Account Connection Problems

Synopsis

Connecting to your account from your local computer involves your ISP, a series of outbound routers, a series of inbound routers, and our server. Often, as many as 12 - 24 individual computers are involved in the transmission of data between your computer and your account on our servers. Of those 12 - 24 computers, only one is ours. While it's easy to blame us for every problem the internet experiences, in the overwhelming majority of cases the problems do not originate with us, and there's nothing we can do to fix them. The information below describes the process in more detail and may assist you in locating the source of the problem.

NOTE: The Internet is not 100% reliable and it probably never will be. You can increase the reliability of your own access to the Internet by maintaining two or more separate ISP accounts, each of which is preferably connected to the Internet by a different backbone. If you're having trouble connecting with one dial-up account, switch to an alternative and see if the problem improves. That's an expensive solution, but if reliable access is important to you, it may be worth the added cost.

The information below applies to general connectivity issues (browser, FTP, telnet, and e-mail). If your problem is specifically with e-mail only, please see the E-mail Troubleshooter.

Cannot find server or DNS Error

This error occurs when the domain name cannot be resolved to a valid IP number. It can be caused by a number of problems, including the following:

• You've typed the domain name incorrectly
  Make sure that the domain is spelled correctly in your browser's address bar.



• You're not connected to the Internet.
  It's happened to all of us. Make sure you've established a valid connection to your internet service provider.



• Your domain registration has expired and been deactivated by the domain registrar.
  Do a WHOIS Lookup on your domain name and check the expiration date. If your domain name has expired, you need to renew it with the domain registration agency.



• Your domain name is not pointing to our Domain Name Server (DNS)
  Make sure that the DNS information for your domain name is pointing correctly to our nameservers (ns.tintagel.net and ns2.tintagel.net).
  
  
• Your ISP's Domain Name Server (DNS) is not functioning correctly
  Run a traceroute and see if you receive an error message that says something like "Unable to resolve hostname". Send a copy of the traceroute results to our support department for evaluation.



• Our Domain Name Server (DNS) is not functioning correctly
  Run a traceroute and see if you receive an error message that says something like "Unable to resolve hostname". Send a copy of the traceroute results to our support department for evaluation.



• There's a problem with an intermediate router.
  Run a traceroute and see if any of there are any timeouts or failures along the route (indicated by asterisks in the time columns.) Send a copy of the traceroute results to our support department for evaluation.



• Our server has crashed or is down for maintenance
  Run a traceroute and see if you receive an error message that says something like "Unable to resolve hostname". Send a copy of the traceroute results to our support department for evaluation.

Forbidden (You don't have permission to access ...)

This error means that the directory you're attempting to browse is not available for one of the following reasons:

• There's no index page
  You must place an appropriately-named index page in each directory if you want to browse without specifying an exact file name. CLICK HERE for more information.



• Permissions are incorrectly set
  The directory and file permissions must be set to world-readable. Typical permissions for a directory are 775 (rwxrwxr-x); for HTML documents, permissions are usually 664 (rw-rw-r--). See the File Permissions Tutorial for more information.



• Your account has been disabled.
  You will see the Forbidden error if we've disabled your account for a policy violation or non-payment of your hosting fees. We would have attempted to notify you if this were the case. Contact sales to make sure that your account is in good standing.

Internal Server Error

The Internal Server Error is usually associated only with CGI scripts and is covered by the Internal Server Error Troubleshooter. If you're receiving an Internal Server Error when browsing HTML pages, notify support.

Reporting Connection Problems

When reporting a connection problem, please provide as much information as possible: The more information you provide, the faster we can investigate and solve the problem. Questions that we're likely to ask before we can solve the problem for you include the following:

• What's your domain name?
• What connections are affected (browsing, FTP, telnet, e-mail, or everything)?
• What is the exact error message or result you're encountering?
• Can you connect to your account by numeric IP number?
• Do you have access to a different ISP (or another computer connected to a different ISP, or a friend or colleague who's connected to a different ISP ...), and if so does the problem occur with that connection, too?
• Is the problem consistent, or does it work sometimes and sometimes not?
• How long have you been experiencing the problem?
• Is the problem software-specific (e.g., does it work okay with Internet Explorer, but not with Netscape, or vice-versa)?
• What is the username/password for the user account experiencing the problem (we'll need this in some cases to attempt to replicate the problem or error.)
• What are the traceroute results?

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