My host company is blocking my users IP's, now members cant access my site.

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Posted by ruven, 06-23-2009, 03:35 AM
For the past couple of weeks i have received complaints from users who cant load my site on their browser. Then when they try going through a proxy they are fine. Or when they switch to dial up, or visit from another location, etc... The hosting company says that users IP's are being blocked on their end. Their techs are not leaving notes as to why, just blocking IP's. This has continued to happen more and more the week and a half to two weeks. Today another batch of people got IP blocked, including myself, the site owner. My site runs vBulletin and usually has a peak user rate of 40-60 members and 20-30 visitors. Since the problems started ive been seeing 15-25 members and 10-20 visitors. Anyone have any idea of what could be happening, and what my posture should be in case my host says "its your fault". I am on a 20$ a month shared hosting plan btw.
Posted by AquariusStorage, 06-23-2009, 03:38 AM
No idea why there firewall would be banning you and your visitors unless for some reason your guys browsers is making a very abnormal amount of concurrent connections. If your hosting provider is refusing to work with you, and your visitors are getting banned you believe for unjust reasons, and your hosting provider is unable to provider you with a valid reason as to why they are being blocked, then you should leave them and fast. If you're paying 20$/per month for shared hosting and they are not willing to work with you, they have a problem. The least they can tell you is why they was blocked. If you're currently using cPanel, the migration to a new provider is made much easier. Best of luck on these issues with your current provider. If you don't mind, knowing which provider you are currently with might be nice too
Posted by ruven, 06-23-2009, 04:55 AM
Thanks for the quick response. The support staff is generally pretty good at answering tickets within 10 to 60 minutes. It depends, most of the time they answer within 10-30. So thats real good. And they are always pretty helpful, so im really not trying to trash their company. Suffice it to say that they are one of the companies that folks around here say has a good track record and reputation. I lurked here for a few days before i picked them. (then again, thats how i picked my first webhost). They do seem to want to figure out the problem and have gone back and forth with me on a couple of tickets... there just doesnt seem to be any resolution coming as of yet. I guess im preparing myself in a way... in case the situation does not improve. I was told to upgrade to a dedicated server a few weeks back when a Forum Stats plugin i installed was causing them to shut down my server. I asked them to put the server back up so i could find out the cause of the problem and fix it. So that was cool. But then this issue started happening shortly thereafter. I dont want them to ask me to move to a dedicated server again when the problem may be something that can be fixed pretty easily, like the previous one. Originally a tech had told me about the concurrent connections. That one of the IP's was clocked at having 225 of them at one time, and that their security protocol views that as an attempted attack of some kind. He then said that it may be my sites code, so he checked my site and said that there was only 22 connections per page load, and that it was not high at all. Later he said that the IP blocks were most likely not cause like he originally thought, and that they had been manually blocked by another one of the techs. He then said... "I will ask him to be aware of settings specific to your shared server that would indicate a larger number of connections." When i pressed him on what that meant, he replied... "That tech evidently felt there was need to block those ips. I have pointed out to them that there is a slight config change on the shared server that inflates the number of connections listed." Then more... "KeepAlive is off, so every load of the page will open a new connection. This results in the connection table on the server seeing a lot of connections in WAIT_TIMEOUT, that are not actually current connections. I have placed a note on the admin account for the shared server so that the monitoring staff will be aware of this quirk and avoid that in the future." As the tech got more technical, i of course started to understand him a bit less. But after that the ticket was moved to another tech who said he would look into it. Since then the only thing that we have done is supply them with IP's of users who email me telling me that the site is "down". They remove the IP from the block list and now that certain user has access... but you know how people are. Im sure the vast majority are going to just go "huh, this site is down... lets go to another one". So it kinda sucks to be in this position... when you dont know how vast the problem is, how many people that were once users of your site are now denied access and simply think that you went out of business or something.
Posted by tim2718281, 06-23-2009, 05:24 AM
Here's a suggestion out of left-field, that doesn't actually address the problem, but may alleviate it: Check your server log to see if you are getting many response codes 304. If you are, have them help you set HTTP header options to enable internet caching, including proxy caching. That should reduce the number of requests made to your server, thus the number of connections. (It will also speed up response times for your users, and reduce load and network traffic on the server.)
Posted by markosolo, 06-23-2009, 10:37 AM
My suggestion: Take a look at the companies TOS and RUP - they must have listed somewhere what their policies are concerning firewall blocks. Then the next time someone gets blocked, make the request to have them unblocked but make sure in the original ticket you demand a reason why the IP was blocked. Many customers I have dealt with wait until the second or third ticket to ask why they were blocked and by that time it's too late to find out because the notes next to the block were erased with the erasing of the block. If I were you, when next communicating with your host just let them know that the reason you want to know why people are being blocked is because you want to work out a strategy to prevent it. if you take this approach then it could make them realize that they too will benefit from you knowing why the blocks are in place because they don't need to dedicate so much manpower to removing blocks all the time. Just some thoughts If they are good in all the other aspects like you have mentioned then stick with them for a while, but make sure that they know that if the blocks continue without reason you will be looking elsewhere.