Domain intermittently unavailable

Hi

I have a problem with websites I'm hosting and it's driving me nuts, hope someone can help. This is what happens:

• Website can't be reached for about 5 minutes every hour or so, then suddenly it's available again
• When I put the url into the browser it won't load, however using an alias for the website supplied by the host does work so I can rule out any website issues
• Pinging the website fails when down - unreachable
• To rule out my network, I try accessing it from a remote server when down, fails also

The domain names are on fasthosts and point to IPs on my web host. This is my 3rd web host, so I'm starting to think the problem might be with fasthosts?

Any advice or things to try appreciated.

If the sites and public DNS records are hosted off-site (i.e., fasthost) then it definitely sounds like an issue on their end. Often times your site is being hosted on a virtual machine that other customers use as well; so it's possible there is a resource issue at hand.

When the site goes down are you able to ping the IP successfully? If you've tried it from two separate networks, then it certainly sounds like a fasthost issue.

This is a bit redundant - and not particularly helpful - but, if you think about it, it almost has to be the DNS server (at fasthost, or, whatever it was called). Believe me, these sorts of outfits have these type of problems... Given the details you've listed, I can't conceive of any other alternative.....

This isn't much help, but, I thought maybe you'd just like a second - or third - opinion. I mean, as you've suggested, what else would cause that.....? I just had a problem, at GoDaddy, with an MX record that would not "go away". They swore it was nothing on their end but, 10 seconds after I called them, the issue was resolved and everything worked. Sounds like you know what you're doing and everything is properly configured.

Good luck.

Thanks for the replies.

I changed nameservers from Fasthosts to my webspace providers and set up the DNS records there. I've been monitoring for a few days, and everything has been working great :-)

So the issue was Fasthosts, I guess I didn't think such a big company would have had this ongoing problem. Their tech support won't even look into the problem taking the stance the user is always wrong.. Hence I'm in the process of changing nameservers on the other domains.